The key objectives of organizations is to provide / derive value from the products / services they offer. To achieve this, they need to be able to deliver their offerings in the quickest time possible, and of good quality!

In order for these organizations to to understand the quality / health of their products at a quick glance, typically a team of people scramble to collate and collect the information manually needed to get a sense of quality about the products they support. All this is done manually.

So in the fast moving environment, where CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Delivery) are now a necessity and not a luxury, how can teams take decisions if the product is ready to be deployed to the next environment or not?

Test Automation across all layers of the Test Pyramid is one of the first building blocks to ensure the team gets quick feedback into the health of the product-under-test.

The next set of questions are:
    •    How can you collate this information in a meaningful fashion to determine - yes, my code is ready to be promoted from one environment to the next?
    •    How can you know if the product is ready to go 'live'?
    •    What is the health of you product portfolio at any point in time?
    •    Can you identify patterns and do quick analysis of the test results to help in root-cause-analysis for issues that have happened over a period of time in making better decisions to better the quality of your product(s)?

The current set of tools are limited and fail to give the holistic picture of quality and health, across the life-cycle of the products.

The solution - TTA - Test Trend Analyzer

TTA is an open source product that becomes the source of information to give you real-time and visual insights into the health of the product portfolio using the Test Automation results, in form of Trends, Comparative Analysis, Failure Analysis and Functional Performance Benchmarking. This allows teams to take decisions on the product deployment to the next level using actual data points, instead of 'gut-feel' based decisions.

In my experience, Agile adoption started in some of the organizations with lot of hype and inflated expectations. And in such cases, if Agile transformation is not handled properly, it can result in multiple challenges rather than providing the expected benefits.

This practical experience sharing session would cover some such problems I faced while applying Agile in different environments. The audience practicing Agile can relate some of these challenges with their own environment as well. The attendees who are on their path to Agile transformation can learn from the lessons and mistakes shared by the speaker.

The session would cover challenges observed due to nature of the project, customer-vendor engagement model, application of processes, attitude of people rolling out agile, unrealistic expectations, conflict in roles and responsibilities. It would also highlight challenges introduced to some of the roles (like Project/QA Manager/Manual Tester etc.) in Agile environment and impact on billing / project contracts / SOW etc.

Do you fancy playing the first Scrum Master of a startup?

Do you want to live the challenges faced by the first Scrum Master of a startup?  Do you feel that your organization is dramatically different from the 'ideal' organizations, which the Agile workshops project as a basic requirement for doing Agile development?  Do you wish to deliver predictable results while your management is on-the-way to make your organization 'Agile-ready'?  This tutorial is just what you want.

In this tutorial, you will experience the life of a first Scrum Master of a twenty member startup, which has expansion plans.  Each of the audience will put themselves in the Scrum Master's shoes and try to solve the challenges posed by the ever-changing environment, while the company's management is putting its best efforts to make the organization 'Agile-ready'.  In this interactive tutorial, a gripping story-line will drag you into the world of uncertainties where you would be challenged to take life-changing decisions regarding your product team's daily work.

Even if you are not in a startup, this tutorial would benefit you because everyone still comes across ad-hoc situations which go against the ideal expectations of Agile world.

With business agility the new watchword in senior management circles, more and more enterprises are looking for ways to adopt ‘agile’ into their technology practices. However, such an initiative needs to go beyond the mere adoption of agile in a few projects. To successfully implement enterprise IT agility, organizations need to understand the impact of agile across functions and groups, develop frameworks to sustain agile, empower teams across the board to work in an agile fashion, and invest in the right infrastructure. A strategic roadmap based on these considerations can help organizations infuse agile into their practices, processes and systems, thereby achieving true benefits of agile – faster returns, better quality and quicker time-to-market.

This session  discusses the critical factors for an effective roadmap to implementing enterprise IT agility. It also outlines how these factors contribute to a successful enterprise IT agility strategy.

Talks about partial successes with Agile implementations. We have become iterative for sure and there is a definite sense of cadence. But concept to cash lead times are still quite high. A sense of dogma has crept in the rituals, they happen, but there is little soul.Team members are still quite stressed out; We have avoided the famous waterfall death march for sure but it is still a very tiring and painful long march.  Organisations doesn't feel that they have reaped all the benefits which were promised. There is just a handful of companies who seem to be living the values and are  really nimble in the market place. What went wrong?

Our focus on people, value, flow and quality instead of process,tools, cost, schedule and scope, got the attention but did not get internalised by all. So while we are adopting “Agile” methods we have not become “agile” yet.

There is a need to get back to first principles. There is a need to explain knowledge workers on the ground “Why” the principles work. Leaders need to do more than just support the change, they need to know, behave and do the right things. Lastly people do need to learn and love their craft. Yes, it is about money but is it also about autonomy, mastery and purpose.

The session takes through key concepts around people, business value, product development flow and quality via fast feedback, and invokes people to understand and let their team understand the basic principles  first to lay a strong foundation, before building an Agile enterprise on top of it. It is only then the “real transformation” happens and the products get in front of the end users faster.

The objective of sharing this experience report is to showcase how disruptive changes in the market place have driven the execution strategy for transforming a traditional waterfall organization to Agile. 

It also contains a narration of our transformation journey so far and challenges we faced to understand the Key word "Value" across the business value chain.

However for embedded systems & solutions many believe that Agile is not going to work, "our product is so complicated and distributed" (Is this supposed to be a quote?), their nature of business is so unique etc.. and if you ask about scaling then "Forget it".

Hence my session is going to share the practical challenges we encounter and interesting stories of the transformation journey.

For teams developing & maintaining mobile apps for both Android & iOS platforms, functional testing is a huge challenge. With the advent of Agile practices, behavior driven testing has gained more popularity. The current process of updating apps over the air is very easy, raising users’ expectations of new features delivered sooner.

Appium has made it easier for teams to test their apps for multiple platforms. However, it alone cannot solve the challenges around implementing behavior driven development & frequent UI/functionality updates. So we created a robust Test Framework combining the best features of Appium, Cucumber-jvm & Page Objects.

Cucumber-jvm is a key tool in implementing BDD. Page Objects is a framework design approach for maintaining & accessing components & controls spread across test scenarios. Appium provides a JSON bridge that allows test cases to be written once, and run for multiple mobile platforms. Integrating the powerful features of these 3 tools, we can create a powerful framework that is easy to setup, use, scale and maintain.

Agile Product development with Scrum is based on completing a set of User Stories within a time-box called a sprint. Stories describing user functionality. Conversatin with customer is the means of elaborating requirement. looks simple, right?

Only User Stories are enough for product development? If not, what all other documents are necessary and how these are progressively elaborated? 

What's required before agile team start sprinting? What are the challenges while transitioning from waterfall to agile related to product requirement?

What's the role of Business Analyst in agile? BA moving into an agile team, moving to Product Owner? Can Business Analyst and Product Owner co-exist?

When it comes to software quality, everybody wants good quality software only. However when it comes to define, measure and achieve it objectively, confusion prevails. Different people and different perceptions.

So how to define software code quality, how to measure it and build a culture towards great code quality software, take proactive steps instead of reporting based reactive steps? These are some important aspects this session will touch-base.

On top of that, we all have heard about Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery and Continuous Deployment, but what's this Continuous Inspection all about? What all is involved to achieve that and how to achieve that with Jenkins and with other Continuous Integration servers? Along with answers of all these questions, a hand-on demo will be given as part of the session.

This is a workshop to introduce the concept of Value and cost based prioritization. The speaker will facilitate a short game for participants to learn how to prioritize the backlong using value and cost. 

This talk is about using Agile principles -- specifically focussed on 'agile contracting' and how this is key to financial health and ongoing project delivery success of small-mid sized IT firms in India.

Agile for embedded and firmware product development can be very complex and challenging than traditional software development. For example, how do we coordinate hardware design and development with embedded and firmware work, how do we map extensive verification and validation like lab testing to the Agile framework, or how do we even ensure we have enough time in the Agile process to design out the features for implementation before a Sprint. These are just a few examples of difficult challenges we have. This presentation will discuss agile approaches based on the Scaled Agile Framework to address these challenges for embedded and firmware development.

Having worked with multiple Agile teams, I realize that most problems the teams have to deal with are often related to issues that are beyond the scope of any Agile framework. These issues are often related to people and the surrounding eco-system. The success of any Agile implementation is largely dependent on this H(uman)-factor which is intrinsic to any team/organization. This H-factor has always been a pandora's box, that we would like to avoid owing to  the amount of complexity and the uncertainty involved.

Here is my humble effort to try and identify few common traits that I have observed with people across Agile teams and organizations. The idea here is not to stereotype people, but to present an approach/strategy to accommodate different kinds of people in an Agile eco-system.

The objective of the session is to have some scientific vigour to our people processes and be aware of our current status quo.

We are engineers and we know how to write code.

We are QA engineers and we know how to test an application or product.

There are so many roles and so many perspective about the product / application team is building. Everybody is right in their perspective. Then the question is....are we/they missing something?

This session is going to explore the perspective beyond the perspective of an individual in team. We will try to move from individual perspective to a common perspective which is so much critical for each individual. We will talk about the user perspective and how it is important to get the 'out of box' picuture over a 'in side box' picture.

Kanban Pizza Game (www.agile42.com) which has been customized to include different workflows, and computation of Lead time and Cycle Time.

In this session, we discuss about the few facilitation techniques that a servant leader need to have to promote self-organization.

We also focus on Evolution of an Agile team, the traits of an agile leader and various of pit falls that do not lead to self organization.

How do you really make a team being controlled by a manager to become self- coordinating team?

We also look at key behaviours that helps changes stick.

Entrepreneurship in product development is all about raising agile concepts to entrepreneurial level in a way that would clinch success by innovation, autonomy, proactiveness, risk-taking and other characteristics associated with entrepreneurship. 

The present paper describes briefly how to make a Agile product development approach as entrepreneurial. An entrepreneur has high level of personal ownership and this is due to the fact that an entrepreneur understands that failure is not an option, so this approach of personal ownership sets performance standard high. Similarly entrepreneurial project manager understand that if the project fails then the organization fails. This paper also talks about three main aspects of entrepreneurial project management which are entrepreneurial orientation, entrepreneurial management and entrepreneurship strategy.

The simplicity of agile frameworks makes many of us believe that agile is simple. However, it’s actually extremely hard to make it working in a non-agile environment. By non-agile environment, I mean organizations which are fundamentally driven by heavy controls and governance; systems which are legacy large, complex & tightly coupled; multiple stakeholders with conflicting priorities and list goes on.  

This paper is share my experiences of one such journey of implementing agile in such non-agile world. It was quite a bumpy ride but in the end, we got a recipe with perfect blend of scrum, XP and Kanban practices – something which was generating visible value and truly in line with agile principles.

What came first - Lean or Agile? It's a chicken-and-egg question for many. And then, there are beliefs that these two are separated twins.

If you think that Lean software development and Agile are the same, think again!

There are both difference and similarities in the Lean and Agile principles and practices.

During this talk, we will discuss on how Agile and Lean are related or different. Or are they two different names of the same thing? how the principles of Lean and Agile can be leveraged in order to create complex software solutions at enterprise level.