Do your developers pair? If you can answer yes, then you are among the fortunate ones who have a trusting environment where people feel confident in their work.

Unfortunately there are a large number of development shops that don’t practice pairing in any form.

Pair programming was documented in Kent Beck’s book eXtreme Programming Explained and published in 1999.

So why is it that 17 years later many developers do not practice this simple yet effective programming technique?

This session will address many of the reasons that developers don’t pair. Drawing on experiences in over a handful of organizations and hundreds of teams, an examination of the factors contributing to a general lack of pairing.

Considerations include: environmental concerns, organizational barriers, personal style and experiences all contribute to whether or not people practice pair programming. You will get an opportunity to examine the many benefits of pairing and the variety of methods for pairing.

This session will include a short activity where everyone will get an opportunity to pair using Lego’s.

You would most likely agree that communication is one of the key success factors in any project, regardless of their size and complexity. This highly-interactive talk shows typical communication patterns, stress the behaviors we keep repeating without even noticing and provides eye-opening insights into the ways communication can be improved. At the end of the session you will understand the most common communication issues and will be able to break those patterns and effective communication will not be just a buzzword without real meaning to you.

Traditional Performance Management systems are antiquated and in deep crises. It is time to move to a successful iterative performance flow.

--

Traditional Performance Management systems are in deep crises. Their industrial era approach is unable to meet the demands and thinking of 21st century people and organizations.

Join this interactive workshop to discuss how Lean | Agile enterprises can push the reset button and move from an administrative Performance Management process to a successful iterative performance flow.

This is a highly participative open space session and we will cover questions like:

– Why is there a need to push the reset button on Performance Management?

– How do we approach goal settings in an agile environment? What is the best balance between collective vs. individual goals? Can you align individual    goals with agile thinking?

– Why is there a trend to eliminate employee appraisals? Are 360-feedbacks the new employee appraisals? Can we still promote people without appraisals and less/no hierarchical structure?

– How valid are traditional bonus models or are there better ways for remuneration and acknowledgement?

The ongoing challenges of creating the magical bond between team members in small and big endeavors can be elusive. What’s more, in the last few decades, this has become increasingly challenging. This presentation provides you with the much needed practical advice on how to create an effective collaborative team environment.
.
The presentation follows the Nine must haves of team of leaders as appear in Michael’s book.
The Must-Haves of a High Performance Team
Must-have #1: Develop clear goals and plans
Must-have #2: Effective communication

Must-have #3: Improve and maintain positive relationships among member
Must-have #4: Clarify roles and responsibilities
Must-have #5: Enhance mutual trust
Must-have #6: Solve problems and make effective decisions
Must-have #7: Value and promote diversity
Must-have #8: Successfully manage conflict
Must-have #9: Provide development opportunities and recognition

There’s quite a bit of guidance and literature for Teams to know what to do in order to adopt and execute Scrum. Nowadays, it’s even more commonplace for Executives to be offered similar workshops, so they have an idea how to support the Teams. But what about the Managers?

From experiences in the field, Managers are often forgotten, or just lumped in with the teams. With confusing phrases such as self-organization and Servant Leadership bumping up against traditional management beliefs and demands from non-trained Executives in Scrum, it’s no wonder Managers can feel a bit like they’ve entered into the Land of the Lost.

In this interactive session, come learn an exercise you can perform back at your organization to help clarify roles and responsibilities of the management layer. Your managers will gain clarity on what they should be doing and what they should be passing on to help not only their teams perform better, but the organization as well. Equip your managers with the knowledge to help them no longer be lost.

As a bonus, the great thing about this Roles exercise, is that it can be used beyond the Managers as well. It’s been applied at both the Team and Executive layers. But, seems to resonate best with Management.

Leo Tolstoy’s book Anna Karenina begins: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” We can refer to it as “Anna Karenina principle” which is fully applicable to implementing Agile at scale. Imagine, you rolled out Agile in your organization successfully and your energized teams are delivering software on cadence and with high quality. What do you hear next from the management? Let’s scale. Let’s have more of those. So you coach more, establish repeatable practices, coach the teams, and all of a sudden, it all falls apart. Unmanaged dependencies, overlapping product backlogs, conflicting roadmaps bring quality issues, delays in delivery, frustrated teams, and unhappy stakeholders.

In this attempt to apply the "Anna Karenina Principle" to Agile, we will explore relationship between Scrum and DevOps, ATDD and Waterfall, value and cost, "happy" Scrum and Scrumfall. This conversation will make you think and laugh, agree and disagree, talk and listen, but most importantly, it will introduce some patterns in Agile and Scrum that will help you assess what all "happy" Agile implementations have in common from technical and non-technical perspective.

The presentation includes a group exercise to validate the principle.

DevOps is certainly a very popular buzzword of recent, everyone is talking about DevOps, everyone is selling DevOps packages with promises of having your organization be ‘DevOps’ enabled. However - DevOps isn’t something you can purchase, it isn’t a specific tool that you can grab off the shelf and say that your organization now has DevOps. DevOps describes a foundational series of actions and behaviors that allow for the organization to move bigger, better, faster when delivering products, software and hardware into customer facing production environments. DevOps describes the Standard Work required in order for delivery of finished product to be packaged and delivered. Builds, Deploys, Configuration management are all items that with some minor variation can b automated away - allowing the humans to start to focus on deeper and one of problems in the environment. Performance issues, certain one time failures and other forms of variance can be dealt with when the delivery pipeline defined by DevOps is working.

DevOps aims to provide enablers for delivery of finished product to teams in your organization allowing them to self service, and deliver SAFELY!

So, lets take a look at the basics of what DevOps Foundations and Standard Work are and how they enable DevOps to become a reality for your organization. Lets get things repeatable and automated, so that humans can move on to solving hard problems - and fun stuff.

Although it's not easy, as an agile community we "know" how to do agile in teams.
One of the next challenges is scaling agile to the programm- or portfolio level.
In this game you will experience all kinds of manmade scaling issues.
Do you have an idea that will make scaling easier? Try your idea in the simulation and get instant feedback.

The scaling game is based on a very popular agile game, that has been around for almost 10 years. 
This version has been presented at Agile Lille, XP-Days, and the Agile Games Lab Belgium.

During the game you will experience scaling issues that occur when multiple teams work on the same product. Multiple Teams will look for solutions to scaling issues and experiment in an iterative way with their ideas on solving them..

It was co-created by Markus Wissekal & Yves Hanoulle.

Test Driven Development (TDD) is an agile development technique in which developers write automated unit test cases before implementing product code and perform continuous refactoring until all the tests pass and meet coding standards. Over the past decade, several researchers have performed case studies [1, 2] which showed improvements in metrics such as code complexity and defect density when using Test driven approach. However the adoption of TDD approach has been rather sporadic in corporate world.

Possible reasons could be business driven crunch and strict project deadlines restricts engineering teams from adopting the TDD technique since practicing TDD increases the actual implementation time by 15 - 35% [2]. Another reason could be lack of education among development teams on how to adopt this technique for their teams. Software developers often have the question on how different is TDD from writing unit tests. This paper presents a real world case study to address the above mentioned concerns.

The paper highlights the positive experiences of using TDD in a software integration project I worked on at Groupon. The project involved integrating Groupon’s existing web application with that of OrderUps’ to add new functionalities to Groupon’s application. The paper highlights how the TDD approach helped the engineering team navigate through the various unknowns in this project and helped them deliver a quality product. It also highlights how practices such as multiple iterations, continuous refactoring and building large suite of tests resulted in quicker turn around time in test engineering and deployment cycles.

The paper also talks about how a software testers role aids in identifying functional test cases when the team practices TDD and how other dimensions of testing opens up for testers. This is followed by a brief discussion on case studies done in companies such as Microsoft, IBM to understand the impact of practicing TDD in real world projects.

We find that as enterprises drive business agility using lean agile methods, it faces friction and quickly hits against wall of rigid traditional budgeting methods and project based cost accounting.

Traditional cost accounting believes in long horizon planning, it values plan accuracy with frequent variance analysis against original estimates rather than accept uncertainty, respond quickly to market trends. We notice frequent delays on re-approvals of changing budgets; a big WASTE. How can we transform finance functions to enable lean agile software and systems development?

We can address this conflict with new Lean-Agile budgeting models that cater to the need of both the worlds: allowing empowered lean agile development programs for rapid decision making that are responsive to market, align with professional accountable management of dollar spends.

Traditional cost center based investment planning is based on deliverables, but the content of such deliverables are changing rapidly that require flexible resourcing across projects.

We all agree that agile portfolios need to execute and deliver value within an approved operating budget which is an outcome of strategic planning process at enterprise level. This paper describes the nuts and bolts around how to establish, administer and govern agile portfolio budgets.

Culture existed before Agile. Culture also existed before what is now known as "organizational" or "corporate culture". Outside of the world of global enterprises and systems, culture within a society helps define what it means to be human. Within a societal culture, individuals and interactions really are valued over processes and tools.

Alas, much of the conversation about "culture" for agile teams focuses on how to design or change organizational culture to make it support agile practices. From this perspective, if you have the wrong culture, agile won't thrive.  To have the "right" culture, many organizations adopt scaling or adoption frameworks that create rules around communication and collaboration that ignore how people live and communicate with each other naturally.

What if traditions of a local culture are forces that actually help support communication within a global program that uses agile? What if people bringing traditions from their own culture can create something global and distributed that's more valuable than if they worked on their own?

This talk will explore how the simple principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto create a space where people local living in local cultures can contribute greatly to global agility. 

"There is only one boss. The customer. And he can fire everybody in the company from the chairman on down, simply by spending his money somewhere else." – Sam Walton.

Empiricism is the theory that all knowledge is derived from sense-experience. The modern era of technology innovations have consciously embraced empirical approaches to model cutting edge products for customers across the globe. An organization’s ability to balance focus between ‘Building the product right’ and ‘Building the right product’ is often the difference between its creativity and failure. So, in today’s fiercely competitive landscape of product design, how would one choose a toolset to develop innovative products in a cost-effective manner?

Behold the ‘Zorro Circles’ of Product Prototyping as a comprehensive framework to blueprint a plan that affords you an opportunity to choose from a gamut of techniques with origins from Lean Startup and Rapid Prototyping. This approach shall showcase a holistic path to model complex products by unraveling the multi-layered circles of customer identification. Attend this session to discover several strategies and tactics to identify your customers, empathize with their pain and bridge their perception with reality in order to create products that market themselves.

Managers: Is your company sinking time and  money into Agile coaching without seeing the long term results you’re craving?

Coaches: are your teams excited to adopt new practices while working with you, only to slip back into old habits once your attention is elsewhere?

Companies are sinking millions of dollars and countless hours into agile transformation, often with great short-term success. But if the change doesn’t stick with a team over the long term the investment is wasted.

In this workshop, you’ll learn the surprising reasons why most people avoid change, even when it is in their best interest. You’ll also gain tools to expose hidden blocks to adopting new ideas and learn how the best coaches employ neuroscience to make change sticky. 

The workshop will include practice sessions so you know exactly how to implement these ideas when you’re back in the office.

Let's put aside the "bubblegum and unicorns" of the Spotify Engineering Culture videos and talk about what doesn't quite work at Spotify and how we're trying to solve it.

This is a failure / learning report intended for change agents who need encouragement that it's always hard AND it's always possible to improve.

How many stories can your team estimate in an hour? Which estimation technique is the best one currently in use in your organization? When was the last time you tried something new? Our teams embrace the idea of innovation and experimentation, two concepts that should be in the hearts of every agile thinker, but which I see lacking in many of my clients. They are afraid to innovate, they are told not to deviate, and often, their agile leaders want consistency over productivity! Insane!

Our teams use “measured innovation” which encourages everyone to start saying YES to new ideas, and our fast estimation technique is one of the results of this approach. If you join us in this session you will learn four cool things: 1. How to estimate faster, 2. How to use Measured Innovation to prove an idea is a good one, 3. How estimation technique changes over time, 4. How to estimate for stories, release and entire projects. And we’ll even explain why relative estimation works and why people use Fibonacci numbers.

In Hugo’s workshop, participants will create a best practice board in teams of 5-6 people. The teams go through each block of ‘The Bridge Canvas’. The goal is to share best practices, ideas and experiences. Per block, each team selects the ‘best best practice’. At the end of the workshop, each team will present the best best practices for each block.

At the start of the workshop, Hugo shares a few best practices (personal ones + from other distributed agile experts). Each person gets a handout with clear instructions. This includes some questions to stimulate thinking within the team + some best practice examples per block.

You will be surprised to learn that Improv Teams and Software Teams have many similarities; The same techniques Improv Teams use to turn a group of random individuals into Great Team Players can be used by Software Teams to improve Collaboration, Creativity, Communication & Trust.

This unique workshop will have attendees out of their seats and on their feet actively practicing the concepts Improv Teams use to develop Great Team Players. Practicing the four essential qualities of a Great Team Player: Collaboration, Creativity, Communication and Trust, not only shows attendees how they can become a Great Team Player, but also how to train others within their organization. This hands on workshop provides actionable material for participants to use immediately upon returning to work.  A flier with the top 20 games is included for every participant.

After hiking towards a glacier in Denali National Park Alaska, we were making camp near a small lake. Suddenly I heard my friend saying “Michael there’s a bear here, it is on this side of the lake”. And there he was, a ‘young’ 200 Pound Grizzly no more than 10 feet away… Influencing a bear in the Alaskan outback is quite similar to handling the bears or rather stakeholders of the modern organization – both have their own agenda, and will have you for lunch if they think it serves their interests and appetites.

In this presentation we learn best practices for leading and influencing without authority, including the three essentials model: stakeholder leadership, team orientation and individual adjustment. Do you have the proper toolset to influence the bears when you lack the authority?

A hands on workshop facilitating a hands on retrospective team game that aims to help you achieve that feeling of Smooth Sailing.

Attendees will be introduced to this game, play the game, and feedback to the room, with case examples and tips for facilitating the game themselves.

Smooth Sailing is a game you can play as a development team, or, with clients and customers to help understand the product you are building better and, how the journey to its creation is fairing.

This game will give you a new and fun way to run a retrospective to help to gain your barrings, identify what's putting the wind in your sails, the anchors holding you back, and discover your buried treasure. Then you'll plot your course and map a way forward that raises those anchors and catches the tide and a fair wind.

Merchants, Pirates and Cruisers welcome, bring your captain, crew and guests! Join us for some constructive fun, and feel free to bring an idea for a topic you'd like to reflect on.

Teams attending the workshop as a group can work on their own current journeys. Individuals can join groups reflecting on a common shared topic. All puns intended, see you onboard!

People are the heart & soul of Agile. Let’s turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations to boost your enterprise agility.

--

Inspired, empowered, and engaged people are the heart and soul of Agile – and HR.

Transforming your organization into an agile enterprise is no small deed. And it does not matter where you are on your way towards embracing agility on all levels. There will be a time when you need to align your people solutions with the mindset and demands of agile people and organizations.

We will talk about how to turn your Human Resources into Agile People Operations and boost your agility.