Agile based methods have been proven successful in commercial companies.  From small startups to large companies, the patterns for Agile methods have been established.  However, can these concepts work in the Federal government?  In a world that revolves around oversight, governance, hierarchy, traditional management, and risk aversion, can Agile work? Should the government try and would it make a difference.

In this talk, we explore Agile efforts in the Federal government.  From the Office of Personnel Management to Department of Defense, new Agencies like Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and established Agencies like Census, we’ll explore:

• Why are Federal agencies trying Agile?
• What are the benefits realized?
• What are the biggest issues and pitfalls?
• How do Federal agencies manage and govern these programs?
• What does the future hold?

At the end of this session, attendees will have a sense of how Agile is changing and could change the way our governments delivers on their missions.

Whether a team is brand-new or seasoned veterans at working together, explicitly defining and/or refining a team working agreement will help the team to align on how they will work together effectively to meet their common goal. In this fast-paced hands-on session, participants will go through the process of building a team working agreement using LEGO Serious Play (LSP).

Creating a team working agreement helps team members set the stage for effective communication and high performance by making assumptions about ‘what really matters to us’ and ‘how we will work together?’ explicit and negotiable.  Great working agreements address some difficult topics - what values do we share? how do we want to deal with conflict when it comes up? how will we handle problems within the team? - which are often challenging to discuss openly and honestly, especially when a team is first assembled.  This session will show you how to use LEGO Serious Play to encourage a frank and fearless discussion in order to kickstart these discussions so that a team can quickly create a powerful set of simple guiding principles for working together.  Participants will learn about the importance of team working agreements in creating team cohesion and common understanding of shared values and operational guidelines, and experience hands-on how to use the LEGO Serious Play cycle of build-share-reflect to have a participatory discussion to identify shared values and build a set of simple guiding principles.

"Who are you?" "What do you want?" and "What are you going to do about it?" Those are the essential questions reporters use for practically any daily news story.

Do they sound familiar? "As a [Who are you?] I want [What do you want?] so that I can [What are you going to do about it?]."

Building software may seem light years away from journalism, yet there are techniques to be shared. How does a reporter blend natural curiosity, information from multiple sources and some basic writing skills to create a meaningful, well-crafted, unbiased story - and deliver it for daily release?

In this interactive session, Sue and Andrew will examine the parallels between interviewing people for news gathering and interviewing users and customers to discover what they need and want from your products. You'll discover how to:

• Identify the best people to talk with - they may not be the usual suspects
• Explore ways make users and subject matter experts excited about talking with you
• Practise techniques for questioning that build trust and elicit information
• Navigate via curiosity - this is not the time to be an expert
• Create a story in which you make meaning from relevant voices and perspectives

You'll leave with tools reporters use to develop their products and be able to apply them to create and use effective user stories that lead to useful and usable products. 

Cette session prendra la forme d’une discussion entre un Scrum Trainer de scrum.org (Eric) et un Scrum Master (Christophe). Cette discussion abordera les différents thèmes inhérents à une transformation Agile ; Christophe expliquera la manière dont il s’y est pris et Eric rebondira sur les différentes approches grâce à une série de questions ou de nouvelles possibilités qui auraient pu être utilisées.

Nous aborderons entre autres: la livraison d’incréments terminés dans un contexte industriel, les spécialités dans une équipe Scrum auto-organisée, le travail distribué, la mise en place du rôle de Product Owner, la transition vers une politique RH de valorisation d’équipe.

We swim in a sea of language but seem to be drowning in misunderstanding. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the efforts we make to change ways of organizing work in organizations.

Making common meaning of the language we use when working together takes conscious effort but we typically go about it unconsciously. In this session we'll examine common patterns of unintended consequences that stem simply from the language we use to describe changes to the way we work.

You'll leave with a new model for thinking about language and using it to better effect. We'll discuss and practice the use of metaphor, mindset and specific practices to create shared understand in and between teams. 

Sponsors of development projects generally want to know what they are going to get, when they are going to get it, and how much it will cost *before* they make the commitment to "purchase". In many businesses, while the software development process may be Agile, the reality is that other functions in the business - Documentation, Training, Marketing, Sales, Finance, Business Planning - need to know what's coming well in advance. When starting an Agile project these stakeholder needs must be met if the team is to get off on the right track, and be allowed to proceed without undue outside interference.

Centred on the use of the "Inception Deck", participants will learn techniques to kick off an Agile project that will help them to:

1. Create a shared understanding around the project’s goals.

2. Identify and understand risk on the project.

3. Build a high level plan for the project and setting the ground rules for change on the project.

4. Get agreement on a set of “project bounds” for scope/content, schedule/delivery, and resources/cost, to allow the project team to proceed independently and make their own decisions as the project progresses.

This session co-presented and pair-facilitated by Bill Bourne and Caroline Sauve

In this interactive and engaging workshop, you will learn the concepts behind, and the value of, several Agile Engineering Practices. Without requiring programming or other technical knowledge, these concepts can be explained through the use of play and understanding the importance of failure in individual and team growth.

Ever find yourself coaching a team to be more agile and catch yourself ignoring the testers? Why do you do that? Because you don't know the lingo? Unsure of what advice to offer? Don't know any good Testing or QA models or approaches that specifically speak to that development role?

You're in luck! Paul is here to give you a crash course in models, methods, jargon and techniques specific to Software Testing and QA to help you enrich your Agile Coaching practice. Come prepared to interact and learn as you build a cheat sheet that will help guide you when working with Testers who don't know where to start with the transition to Agile.

As a Coach and a Team Member, I sometimes come across teams that don't seem to be able to achieve high performance, and the reasons why aren't apparent. This can be frustrating for everyone when this happens, so I wanted to explore this deeper and understand the science of what happens inside Agile/Scrum Teams.

Some of the leading research[1] suggests that a key requirement for high performance teams is Cohesion. Cohesion is a measure of the strengths of the relationships between individual team members.

In this session we will use this research to discover:

• Simple communication patterns we can monitor to spot the health of the team.
• Simple tools we can use to measure and track those patterns.
• What effect the location of the Watercooler has? What effect Lunch Tables play?
• Can Cohesive Teams get you into trouble? .....
• The importance of Dissent and Diversity within teams.
• Bonuses - The negative effects of individual bonuses are well understood by the Agile Community. However we’re left with the question - are there good bonuses?

[1] Sandy Pentland - The New Science of Building Great Teams - http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams Ben Waber - People Analytics: http://www.amazon.ca/People-Analytics-Technology-Transform-Business/dp/0133158314

The core of the session will a be a game that we play successive round of. After each round I will reveal the factors that affected play in that round. Perhaps making easier to decide what to do in the next round.

In addition to the game the details of the research will be part of the session handout so attendees can focus on the play and not the details.

Many organizations are introducing test automation only to find out it is more difficult than they thought it would be. Good test automation requires good coding practices. Good test automation requires good design. To do anything else will lead to spaghetti code that is hard to maintain or update. If you’re new to coding or new to automation it is difficult to know where to start. Join Cheezy as he talks about and demonstrates lessons he has learned while helping numerous organization adopt test automation. He will show you the patterns he uses to keep automation code simple and clean. He will also demonstrate techniques that you can use to make your automation code more maintainable. Finally, he will write code to implement these patterns taking them from theory to implementation.

Le rôle de Scrum Master, centrale à l’approche Scrum, est de plus en plus présent dans nos organisations. Pour certains il s’agit d’un rôle qui est confié à un membre de l’équipe. Pour d’autres il s’agit d’un métier à part entière qui apparaît sur leur carte d’affaires.  Parfois le Scrum Master est un analyste. D’autres fois il occupe aussi des fonctions de gestion de projet et dans certains cas le Scrum Master est un véritable agent de changement qui contribue à faire rayonner l’agilité dans l’organisation. On retrouve même des "Scrum Masters" qui ne font pas de Scrum!

Au fil des années j'ai pu constater qu'effectivement il existe toute sorte de façon de jouer le rôle de Scrum Master et donc, souvent les attentes des dirigeants envers les Scrum Masters divergent d'un endroit à l'autre. Et vous, quels sont vos attentes envers les Scrum Masters ?

Maintaining a backlog of user focussed stories, breaking large stories down into smaller ones and turning small batches of the highest priority ones into working software on a regular basis is a cornerstone of a solid approach to agile software development. 

However, a flat backlog and a near term viewpoint can result in losing the context of the small sprint level user stories in the larger product picture. A user story map arranges users stories from the linear/flat backlog model into a two dimensional model keeping everyone focussed on users and their experience - it tells the story of the product.  

Many other benefits follow related to product discovery and planning to facilitating day to day conversations and shared understanding, ultimately leading to a better product.  

In this hands on exercise facilitated by Phil Green, we'll learn about the model and technique by creating a simple user story map. 

IMMEDIATE OPENINGS FOR SIX WILLING WORKERS, QA SPECIALISTS, AND DATA ANALYSTS
The White Bead Corporation, Gatineau-Ottawa

The White Bead Corporation is a leading provider of quality white beads to consumers in high-tech and energy industry verticals with over thirty years' experience. We have recently been contracted by the Provincial Ministry of Energy and Infrastructure to provide our products on an increased production scale and require new workers and specialists to join our dynamic team to meet this demand.

We will be conducting our first round of hiring for above-average employees at the upcoming Agile Tour Montreal 2014 Conference with successful applicants immediately joining us in production.

We offer competitive salaries, employee recognition programs, a pay-for-performance program and industry-leading career development opportunities. We thank all applicants for their interest in applying to The White Bead Corporation, however we will only be able to hire above-average, willing workers at this time.

At the end of 2012 engineering at Wind River began its agile journey. We started with a consultant and 2 pilot projects. By March 2013, we began to move all of our projects to Agile. That's 100s of people and many sites around the world all trying to implement agile and scrum simultaneously! Mayhem ensued. This is a story of how engineering at Wind River survived the chaos and where we are today. Drawing from this experience, there are lessons learned and learning to share.

Let's face it, when organizations want to "go Agile", they really want help solving a problem they can't quite put their finger on. Some of the time they may buy a tool and call themselves Agile. Other times, they'll implement a few practices but not much more. There are no shortage of tools, methods and techniques for installing Agile and there are an equal number of failure stories. At the end of day, Agile is simply a trigger for an organizational change.

In this session you'll learn 3 techniques that will help you navigate through complex change by working on a real problem with your peers. After all, a consultant or coach is only going to take you so far!

Abstract:
Design Thinking refers to the methods and processes to investigate complex problems in highly uncertain systems. This workshop is about how to use this iterative process of observation, ideation and implementation to better understand organisation's culture and create reasons for people in the organisation to embrace Agile.

Summary:
This workshop is about how to use a design thinking process an techniques to better understand organisation's culture and minimize resistance to change in the creation of an Agile culture. The strategy is to combine empathy for the context, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context. This solutions are aimed to create reasons for people in the organisation to embrace Agile. 
You'll also learn some useful design thinking techniques that you can use in your retrospectives!! 

Description:
Design Thinking refers to the methods and processes to investigate complex problems in highly uncertain systems, acquiring information, analysing knowledge, and positing solutions. This workshop is about the usage of this process to better understand organisation's culture and minimise resistance to change in the creation of an Agile culture. The strategy is to combine empathy for the context, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyse and fit solutions to the context. This solutions are aimed to create reasons for people in the organisation to embrace Agile.
This iterative process of observation, ideation and implementation can be integrated within your retrospectives and also applied outside IT to create a continuous improvement engine for organisational culture in organisations.