Learn how to judge the health of your Agile teams by doing a health check with real customer case study data. We'll look at data on team performance based on various Agile metrics such as Burnups/Burndowns, Cumulative Flow Diagrams, Velocity Chart, SDPI charts, and more. This will help to interpret possible challenges the team is facing and determine prescriptive action items that will influence improvement.  We’ll examine how to mine for internal performance data, evaluate what we can deduce from actions happening outside the boundaries of agile practices and pinpoint areas that will have the most impact on future projects and get them back on track. The goal is to turn work into data, data into insights and insight into action.

Do you have a pressing issue that you would like to run by a seasoned Agile Coach?  Or just interested in hearing what others’ issues are and how an experienced coach would address it?  Then this session is for you.  As you come into the room, write your question or situation on a sticky and post it on the board.  A coach from SolutionsIQ will timebox and address as many of these as possible with the larger audience.

Trying to figure out Agile Release Planning?  We've done it and we've done it well.  Twelve teams - done! Twenty teams - done! Forty teams - done!  If your organiztion needs to tackle the enterprise release planning beast, you should attend this session.  Whether you are struggling with planning a large agile release planning event or simply trying to figure out how to improve your current agile release planning events, this session will provide nuggets of learning from planning teams with hundreds of people spread around the globe.  Many organizations have tried to conduct enterprise agile release planning and gave up because they could not overcome some of the basic obstacles like who to invite, where to hold the event, and how to keep everyone engaged.  

If you are trying to figure out how to coordinate two teams or dozens of teams, this session will provide insights into what works and what doesn't.  You will gain expereince by practicing actual agile release planning exercises to help you prepare for your orgainzations next agile RP event.  The learning expereince starts with a presentation on the key steps to consider as you launch a large agile program.

The USAJOBS program was a highly visible, time sensitive program, with potentially high government dollar value. To effectively execute the project, the USAJOBS program decided on an Agile approach and in this approach, government program managers were identified to be Agile Product Owners. This session features the experiences, thoughts, and challenges facing the Agile Product Owners on USAJOBS. Key thoughts from this session include:

1. The differences between Project Management and Product Management 

2. Shifting from big up front planning to responsible up front planning combined with just in time planning 

3. Managing Product Owner bandwidth expectations 

4. The impact of Agile from a Product Owners view

The session is hosted by the former USAJOBS Product Owner along with an Agile Coach.  The session will explore Product Ownership and Agility on Federal Programs.

Bios:

Alesia Booth grew up in Federal human resources - her first job was with the National Institutes of Health payroll office at 16 years old. Since then, she's managed websites, document libraries, corporate recruitment programs, staffing systems and hiring reform process change management activities. Which is she ended up at USAJOBS. Since then, Alesia moved to Department of the Treasury to be the program manager of the HR Line of Business CareerConnector product for classification and staffing. At Treasury, she continues concentrate on solving multiple agency recruitment challenges to bring the best and brightest talent into the Federal workforce. Additionally, she worked with Treasury Enterprise Business Solutions as a champion of Agile development and recruitment data standardization Government-wide. Alesia is now back at OPM leading OPM's USAStaffing efforts.

Richard Cheng, Principal Consultant at Excella Consulting, provides consulting services to commercial and federal clients in the Washington, DC area. Richard coaches, mentors, and trains clients on understanding and implementing Agile and Scrum. He also leads Excella’s Agile Center of Excellence.  A graduate of Virginia Tech, Richard has authored several publications on project management, presented at Agile and PMI sponsored industry events, is a member of Mensa, and holds certifications including Certified Scrum Training (CST), Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO), Certified Scrum Professional (CSP), PMI Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP) and Project Management Professional (PMP).  Richard is a founder and on the executive committee of the Agile Defense Adoption Proponents Team (ADAPT).

In this introductory talk, Richard Knaster (Principal Contributor to the Scaled Agile Framework) discusses how to “Be Agile”, “Scale Up”, “Stay Lean” and “Have more Fun” with the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe).   SAFe is a publicly–accessible knowledge base of proven Lean and Agile practices for enterprise-class software development. Richard approaches the problem from the perspectives of Lean thinking and principles of product development flow, illustrating how these core principles help deliver business results at scale, while keeping the development system—and the enterprise—lean and able to responsive rapidly to changing market needs. In addition, enterprises applying the framework have been getting better results, and since winning is more fun, Richard will also describe some of the positive changes to corporate culture that occur when an enterprise is experiencing success with Scaled Lean- Agile methods.

Scrum, XP, Kanban and related methods have been proven to provide step changes in productivity and quality for software teams. However, these methods do not have the native constructs necessary to scale to the enterprise. What the Industry needs is a solution that moves from a set of simplistic, disparate, development-centric methods, to a scalable, unified approach that addresses the complex constructs and additional stakeholders in the organization—and enables realization of enterprise-class product or service initiatives via aligned and cooperative solution development.

Using tools like TDD and ATDD, Agile provides the means to be confident that your brand new software is well tested-- even for life critical situations such as criminal justice software.  But hold on a minute!  It is a rare mission critical system that is built completely from scratch.  There are always legacy components your team didn't build or doesn't control.  Maybe the previous contractor built it-- but now they are gone and it is your problem.  How can you be certain that everything functions properly in such a situation?  How much testing is enough?  How can you know whether a system has been tested?  These are the questions that standards such as CMMI and PMBOK seek to answer with traceability.

The debate about traceability has been raging for a long time, with passionate advocates on both sides of the argument.   Projects following traditional waterfall methods, and projects that conform to PMBOK or CMMI standards often create and maintain a requirements traceability matrix, or RTM, a document that traces “shall” requirements to functional capabilities and testcases.  Some Agilists argue that the RTM is rarely consulted in practice, so the significant efforts required to maintain such a document are “waste.”  Others point out that agile practices such as TDD provide all the traceability that may be needed. This talk will explore the underlying reasons why traceability may be important and worthwhile in many Federal government contexts, and review exciting new technologies that may provide an “agile answer” to this conundrum.

Great systems require active, capable Product Owners.  Functional innovation is not possible without their commitment and involvement in the project.  Too often in government contracting, the Product Owner is an Absentee Owner.  Agile Development teams often seek out tools and techniques to create great systems, however too frequently what is holding them back is the lack of an engaged Product Owner. Teams in this situation must face the elephant in the room if they desire to build a system that brings positive change in efficiency, productivity, quality, usefulness, and adoption.  This talk shares solutions I have used for challenges I see again and again on government contracts.

The talk begins with some introductory material on the problem, its causes, what I mean by functional innovation, and why this is required to build great systems.  I describe four challenges with Product Owner engagement that are not unique to government contracting, but that I see recurring on projects: committing staff, procurement practices, role ambiguity, and absentee ownership.

Why metric reporting doesn't work and what you need to do about it.

So what does Collaboration really mean?  It's just ensuring people understand what each other is doing right?

The Power of 13 Collaboration Game illustrates what true collaboration means.  We'll do work by rolling dice over a 3 week Sprint. We'll then explore the results and start our next Sprint. In each Sprint, we're going to increase the participation across players and see what the effect is on productivity.  Prepare to be surprised!

Should there be enough time remaining in the hour; we'll then specifically apply true collaboration to better understand the effects of pair programming by playing Pair Poetry.  This simulates the power of pair programming and demonstrates why the one screen, one keyboard concept works.

Project success =  f (listening, feedback, intentionality, practices) 

To make your agile practices and processes come to fruition, you need to cultivate an environment that promotes listening, learning, inquisitiveness, intentionality and top notch feedback that everyone is comfortable with. 

Agile projects succeed when there are frequent high-quality reinforcing feedback loops. I will share communication models based on Clean Language questions of David Grove and the Systemic Modelling techniques of Caitlin Walker that can greatly increase clarity, sense of purpose and listening skills within your team and collaborative endeavors.  These include: Clean Questions, Clean Feedback, and Clean Setup.

This is a hands-on, try it out, concrete practice session.

Do you want to have a high functioning Agile team? If so, this session is for you! We're going beyond the rules of agile frameworks and learning to apply those principles to improve our teams and companies! The 12 principles of the Agile Manifesto capture the reasons we are able to deliver better software. This is the "why" for some of the rules behind Scrum and Kanban. The principles ought guide our decisions about practices, scaling, and solving tricky problems!

In this session, we will use the 12 Principles of the Agile Manifesto as our foundation. Then, we will  apply techniques such as Force Field Analysis to apply the principles to your challenges at work. Lastly, we will use principles of change management to make the change more likely to stick.

The outline for the session is:

1. Explore the principles; which ones are present or absent in your environment?
2. Introduce Force Field Analysis
3. Use Force Field Analysis to explore what drives a specific behavior
4. Use the Agile Principles to generate new options for tackling your team's challenges
5. Explore effective change management techniques

With these five activities, you will leave with a framework for change to apply when you return to work and continue on your agile journey.

Testing sprints? Hardening sprints? Why do so many of us have these and other ways to get around completing all our required testing inside our defined timeboxes? Isn’t our goal to produce deployable features at the end of every Sprint?

During our session, we will examine why it’s so hard to accomplish all necessary testing inside the iteration and show how to complete these tests within your timebox. Through interactive discussion and real world examples, we will provide insights on foreseeing, overcoming, and avoiding your hurdles and send you home with both long term methods and short term actions that will yield tangible results in achieving your goal.

Our session will:
• Illustrate the value of completing all of your testing inside your timebox
• Identify the challenges in completing all these tests in such as seemingly short period of time
• Discuss ideas and options to successfully overcome these challenges
• Explore how to enable your organization and environment for efficient, rapid testing
• Discuss real world examples of enablement and how we navigated the pain points of enabling testing processes that allow complete testing within an iteration
• Explore DevOpsSec and how achieving testing within your timebox is a precursor to DevOpsSec
• Provide short term tactics and actions to immediately improve your ability to complete your testing
• Allow you to voice your concerns and challenges and discuss potential solutions to these impediments

Most of us implement agile to reduce the time to deliver valuable working software and to increase the frequency of delivery with high quality through increased and earlier collaboration, shorter feedback loops, and reduced risk. While you can show improvement over Waterfall by performing typical agile methods, you cannot really live the dream without optimizing your agile execution.

You will leave this session armed with the right knowledge to improve delivery on your current project or start your new projects properly so that you or your clients can reap the benefits of efficient process and high-quality software capable of achieving continuous deployment of fully-tested code at the end of each iteration.

Spend Less Time on Your Estimates

Most teams would rather work to deliver value to customers than spend time estimating stories.  In order to spend less time estimating and more time delivering value to the customer, many teams have adopted “Affinity Estimation”.  Using “Affinity Estimation” many teams have significantly reduced the time required to estimate and I have personally been involved in sessions that used to take 60 minutes and are now taking 15 minutes.  By using “Affinity Estimation” to compare new stories to real stories that were recently completed, teams are able to quickly and confidently provide an estimate without lengthy discussions and worries of the unknown. 

What to Expect

The session will begin with a brief presentation highlighting everyday problems that coaches deal with when estimating stories.  Then, using volunteers from the audience, we will work through a series of exercises/games demonstrating the value of "Affinity Estimation" while teaching the audience and the volunteers how to coach these exercises for their own teams.

All Teams are Not Created Equally

This session will provide you with exercises that you can use for existing teams, as well as, new teams. 

Many large engineering programs and product development efforts are adopting Scrum and other agile practices at the team level, but struggle finding solutions that scale beyond the team. This presentation describes how to apply lean practices to complex systems development using the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe). 

SAFe for Lean Systems Engineering (LSE) is an extension of the popular SAFe method with additions for engineering practices, customer/program management collaboration, and compliance.  SAFe LSE leverages the lean principles in SAFe and extends the framework to support program concepts including program milestones, release management, system specification and design, systems and other engineering disciplines, and systems I&V to name a few.  SAFe LSE targets large engineering programs and product development and provides an alternative method to the waterfall, phased-gate approach commonly seen in contracting situations.  Come learn how SAFe LSE can improve your program and engineering development.

With TDD (Test Driven Development) a coder writes a small test, and then just enough code to make the test pass, cleaning up the code along the way.  Imagine applying the same concepts to the business case.  Now stop imagining and use HDD (Hypothesis Driven Development) to test your business case and refactor it for success.

Our hands on session will cover the basics of ATDD (Acceptance Test Driven Development) and BDD (Behavior Driven Development) to specify by example, so all stakeholders get on the same conceptual page, developers build what the business really wants, and testers can prove it. 

But building what we want it not enough, so we will go further and use HDD to validate, or invalidate, business outcomes, focusing us on value instead of on adherence to specification.

This is a hands on session, so come with pen, paper and a readiness to learn by doing!

Have you ever been on a great team? I hope so. If not, have you ever witnessed a great team? How did it feel? Did you ever wonder if great teams can be encouraged? Are there methods for helping teams gel more quickly? Why should you care? Well it turns out the "secret sauce" of delivering great products is a great team. There is nothing like the productivity, energy, and innovation of such a team. Many studies show that a great team will deliver even in the most challenging circumstances.

For teams to truly form from a group of individuals, they need to establish trust, learn how to work together, and share a common goal. This session will show you how to help teams form through a collection of of activities and games that enable team members to learn about themselves, to learn about the work, and to learn about the process framework being adopted. Your teams will gel more quickly, produce value faster, and energize the team members.

In this session you will participate in various games and activities that help teams form. This will give you a feel for how the games are played and how to facilitate them. Give your teams the best chance to move from forming through performing as quickly as possible.

The White House recently created a new Government Digital Services group to deliver “customer-focused government through smarter IT.” As part of this announcement the Office of Management and Budget released the “Digital Services Playbook” and an accompanying “TechFAR Handbook for Procuring Digital Services Using Agile Processes” to make it easier for agencies to procure and implement agile.

In this session, we’ll review the TechFAR handbook objectives, key components and recommendations for getting agile adopted in your agency.

With security being a historically waterfall process, how do we address the security of our system or application as an agile team?

Through the lens of Scrum team members, we will examine the roles and responsibilities of individual team members to enable producing a secure product.

Developers, testers and systems engineers all have specific obligations regarding the security of their product, but must bring those to bear in a collaborative fashion.  We will take each of these roles individually and focus on how their individual skillsets coalesce together to build a secure system.