You often hear technical debt described as a personal failing. Why didn't you code with greater rigor? By creating technical debt, how could you have made life harder on people working in the code? More often than not, technical debt is the result of bigger, systemic problems.
Chances are, you're not a bad person. You didn't want this to happen. It's the system, not you, that's chiefly responsible.
In this talk, we will present some of the conclusions from the Agile Alliance's technical debt working group, which has looked into the systemic causes and consequences of technical debt. While marginal amounts of technical debt will always accrue, that does not explain why substantial technical debt is a widespread phenomenon. The organization in which software development teams work is the much bigger culprit. Many systemic causes, such as deadline pressures, under-investment in skills, and even the unwillingness to measure technical debt, conspire to create a growing burden on software professionals, who would otherwise choose not to create this problem if given the opportunity.
Just as technical debt has systemic causes, the real cost of technical debt lies at the system level. The increasing drag on software innovation has effects not just on individual and team productivity, but on the software value stream, the portfolio, and the organization as a whole. Sometimes, the cost is obvious, such as the valuation of a start-up company's code; other times, the consequences are far more subtle and insidious.
During this session, we will use the language and methods of systems theory to better come to grips with the causes and consequences of technical debt. Don't worry if systems thinking is unfamiliar — we will cover the basics during the talk. We will also do an exercise in which you will create a simple systems model of your own challenges with technical debt, and discuss how this model should help you shape a plan of action for dealing with technical debt.
Ultimately, the goal of this session is to give you the tools to better deal with technical debt. Rather than blaming individual developers, you will be able to show the systemic sources of technical debt, and assess the relative value of addressing each of them. Rather than depending on technical measures to convey the costs of technical debt, we will help you to put the costs of technical debt in stark business terms.

Agile helps you to deliver what’s valuable to the customer faster. You can capture, prioritize, communicate, and deliver that value with good user stories. In our experience, a major impediment to writing good user stories in the real word is a lack of example stories. We have created a set of games that incorporate 80 examples of good and bad user stories. The games are easy to learn, play, and teach so that you can experience good user stories in just a few minutes. Come play the games and then share them with your friends and co-workers!

A face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team. So states the sixth principle of the Agile Manifesto.

Reality comes with a big "however." Work-at-home, outsourcing and inter-company partnerships mean that, more and more, we find ourselves n meetings where other participants are not in the same room. They may be around the corner or around the world. Some organizations invest in powerful tools to make this arrangement work well - or, sometimes, not so well. Others make do with audio only. Are we fooling ourselves when we call these events "meetings?" Maybe. Yet they're part of our world, so why not make the most of them?

In this lively session, you'll examine a proven pattern for facilitation, discover ways to overcome the challenges of virtual meetings and learn techniques that encourage meaningful participation. Most of these require more focus and ingenuity than expense.

Sue will share some of the techniques she learned as a teleworking pioneer in the '90s and a trainer of coaches, via distance, since 2003. Join us to explore ways you can bring your meetings with remote participants to life and respect everyone's time - including your own.

Effective interactions, between product owners and designers and team members who develop and make those products real, are key to team, product and organizational success. It's reflected in the first value of the Agile Manifesto.

Still, one of the chief complaints, from both the product side and the dev side, is poor communication. The list of irritants includes: lack of clarity, lack of understanding, lack of time, lack of access, too many meetings, too much jargon, too many badly written user stories and too many people involved.

Communication isn''t the only obstacle, but it’s a big one - and it can be overcome with no cost or organizational disruption.

Regardless of the role we play on the team, part of everyone’s job is to create shared understanding. In this session, Marilyn, an experienced product owner and product manager, and Sue, a communication specialist and coach, will share their research about communication gaps in the product-development relationship and approaches that can close the gap.
Join them to explore tips and ideas to improve communication flow and help teams move from concept to cash.

NOTE TO TAC TEAM
Because we are doing some original research on this topic, I would like to include a co-presenter, Marilyn Powers, PEng, who, at the time of posting, is not yet on confengine. Info about her is available at https://www.linkedin.com/in/marilynpowers

Here is more biographical info about Marilyn:
Marilyn has more than 10 years experience bringing products and services to market as a Product Manager. As a licensed professional engineer, she has experience working in a variety of fields, from manufacturing to operations to simulation to SAAS software. Currently, Marilyn is a Product Manager at D2L, a leading Ed-tech company, where she works closely with Product Owners, Dev teams, Designers, Senior Leaders and many other stakeholders to deliver quality software tools to educational institutions and corporations who value learning and development. Her expertise is creating shared understanding between diverse groups, be it external customer advisory groups or internal stakeholders.

Previous presentations or workshops
Marilyn has presented at a variety of conferences over the past 20 years, the career highlight of which was a live demo on the main stage keynote at the D2L Fusion 2016 conference. Other conference presentations included Online Learning Conference ( New Orleans, LA 2017), Fusion (2015, 2016), Learning Impact Leadership Institute (San Antonio, TX 2016), Industrial Engineering Student Conference (Kitchener, 2016), ModSim World Canada (Montreal, 2010), Montreal Neurological Institute Day (Montreal, 2009), McGill University invited speaker on Haptics (Montreal, 2006). Prior to these presentations, Marilyn was an Instructor of Engineering at Mount Royal University in Calgary, AB.

Although self-organizing teams are crucial to carrying out a successful Agile transformation, organizations that implement Agile at scale invariably realize that the introduction of such teams forces the organization to re-engineer numerous aspects of its operating philosophy. In particular, various management layers are often removed. The individuals in these layers are routinely re-purposed or laid off.

This talk highlights the approaches I used as an Agilist in various organizations to help people in different roles on their journey of transitioning into the world of Agile. Specifically, the talk will focus on 5 key roles: Project Managers, Product Managers, BA Managers, Development Managers, and QA Managers. It will provide insight into how managers can effectively transition to some of the new Agile roles, or redefine their existing role to effectively fit in an Agile world.

The emphasis in this talk is on pragmatic strategies for managers that are struggling to find their place in this new Agile world. Armed with these strategies, participants will be able to effectively adapt to the Agile transformation, as well as discover potential new career paths for themselves and for the individuals reporting to them.

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes.   This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It briefly examines the state of mainstream agile software development and argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. We then explore what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level. We then work through what it means to strategically scale across your IT organization as a whole and discover what a Disciplined DevOps strategy looks like in practice. Your Disciplined Agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise. The talk ends with advice for how to make this challenging organizational transition.

Does your business struggle to catch up and understand the technical deliverables from your Sprint Reviews? Is there unnecessary re-work and scope creep because requirements are not properly described by the business? ADP has sought to address these issues by incorporating business Agile practices to keep up with technology. The result? Clearer requirements, strong engagement during Sprint Reviews and a collaborative solution with business readiness aligning with technical deliverables. Join our session to find out more!!

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

What if your team could share new ideas and make unanimous decisions in minutes?

Agile teams need to create and agree on many things such as a definition of done, a sprint plan, and what changes they’ll try in the next sprint based on the most recent retrospective.

How often have you participated in a meetings where few decisions were made? Or where the the loudest person in the room made most of the suggestions and dominated your team’s decision making?

In this interactive workshop, we will practice coming up with new ideas using everybody’s suggestions and making decisions that the whole team agrees on.

Learn and practice techniques such as Fist-of-Five, Decider Protocol and Resolution Protocol and Shared Visioning with Lego.

Make group decisions faster, more aligned with the whole team, and more likely to result in follow-through.

More asking, less telling. As an agile leader, adopt the approach of humble enquiry to build relationships, increase trust and collaboration, and deal with the challenges of organizational transformations.

"Humble enquiry is the fine art of drawing someone out, of asking questions to which you do not already know the answer, of building a relationship based on curiosity and interest in the other person." - Edgar H. Schein

Working in an agile way asks us to rethink how we relate to each other as we tackle complex problems and challenge the traditional structures of our organizations. Humble enquiry - the art of asking instead of telling - is a critical skill for agilists who seek to improve collaboration and address difficult problems head on. Inspired by Edgar H. Schein's book 'Humble Enquiry, this workshop will teach you the fundamentals of how to do more asking and less telling. Through mini-lectures and interactive exercises, we'll discuss the different types of questioning, consider the forces around and within us that inhibit our ability to ask instead of tell, and examine how this powerful technique can improve collaboration within agile teams as well as help to address some of the challenges of agile transformations.

From actual field experience helping organizations with adopting Lean-Agile at scale, I have observed some patterns of success and anti-patterns that I would like to share. These patterns have to do with how Leadership and the Lean-Agile Center of excellence contribute successfully or unsuccessfully for success at scaling. We discuss how they both need to exhibit some fundamental areas of leadership that are referenced directly from the book The Leadership Challenge, by Kouzes and Posner. In the session, we will discuss the areas of leadership referenced in the book and how they come to life successfully and sometimes unsuccessfully in the organization. The examples that are given the session in tandem with the book can be used as a clear guide on scaling success in the large enterprise.

What happens if we build it and they don’t come?

Building features no one cares about is not only bad because the feature isn’t getting used, but is also a wasted opportunity that could have been used to build something truly valuable for your customers.

But how would we know?

In many companies, features get prioritized by the HiPPO principle (Highest Paid Person’s Opinion). As it turns out, this is often not the most effective way to prioritize your backlog.

But if not this, then what?

In this workshop we explore what value is, how to talk about it, and how we might measure the value we have achieved.

Sorry to say it guys, but Agile has gone limp over the last few years.  As we get more and more coaches into the mix, both external as well as internal, organizations somehow have forgotten that it’s software that we’re trying to produce.  Not great stand-ups.

Technical practices matter.  In fact, if we could dispense with ALL process and still create the valuable quality software that is needed, we should do that.  From a Lean perspective, process adds no customer facing value.  But getting rid of all process is crazy talk.  Even Fred George, who promoted “Programmer Anarchy” several years ago never got away from all process.  In reality, his movement was premised on driving business decision making directly into technical decision making, and completely empowering teams to “be” the company.  He premised the concept of “Programmer Anarchy” on using the best and brightest developers out there, and trusting that if they could do something as difficult as create great code that they could do the business decision making as well.

But perhaps we don’t have the absolute best talent out there.  Perhaps it’s hard to lure people away from Google and Facebook because of the money and the chance to get great work environment and unbelievable work challenges (change the world, anyone?)  Does that mean that we have to go back into the Fredrick Winslow Taylor world view of “The One Best Way”?  With that way becoming making a choice between Scrum, SAFe, Lean/Kanban, and other development processes?

I’d like to convince you that what’s going to work for your organization and your employees is something in the middle.  I, of course, lean into the “better technical practices will yield better outcomes” frame of mind.  You may as well.  But when Garrison Keillor said, on “A Prairie Home Companion” (a long running radio show on National Public Radio in the States), “Well, that's the news from Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average”, that was satire!  And the same is true of your organization.  It can logically be true that all organizations’ developers are all above average.  But we can hold people to an acceptable level of technical practices that will yield in writing better code than merely having a process that talks about writing better code. 

This session will speak to the specifics of the whats and whys.

In spite of all of the nuanced discussions, debates and frequent diatribes, scaling agile is about one thing: getting large groups of teams to deliver value in an organized fashion while maintaining empathy, rapport, trust, safety, and ownership across the enterprise. During this session, we will explore the case study of the Value Steam Container, looking at organization design, challenges and success. Focusing in on topics ranging from

• Organization designs used by WL Gore, The Dunbar number

• Delivery Triads - Product, Delivery, Technical Excellence

• Venture capital style funding

• Focusing on business value

The second half of the session is a workshop focused on creating a Value Stream Container and resource based on team funding 

Description:

I see that a lot of organizations use metrics in inappropriate ways to measure teams. At the heart of these metrics, nine times out of ten, are velocity and story points. These metrics lead to a lot of mistrust, fear, and bad technical practices. This talk will focus on shifting the focus to diagnostic metrics.

 Before shifting focus to diagnostic metrics, we need to understand what inappropriate metrics are. When questioning teams about why their velocity was lower from one sprint to another, teams are more likely to inflate their estimates to avoid questions in the future. This is one of my scenarios. We will explore this case and my other top-ten based on the 165 teams I have interacted with. Focusing on one metric does not provide a balanced view of the team.

For balance, I promote five metrics. The combination of metrics balances each other. These five metrics are lead time, quality, happiness, agile maturity, and business value. Focusing on these five metric areas can be used as a diagnostic tool to help teams grow and support coaching. During the session, we will use my Excel-based tool and visual model to simulate this balance.

When you push shorter lead times (how fast) on a team with a lower agile maturity, the first thing to change is quality, followed by happiness and then the delivery of value. Conversely, if a team focuses on TDD, the first thing to change is quality, followed by agile maturity, reduction in lead time, and increased delivery of value.  

Teaching teams to harness data in a positive way will help them to flourish.

Does your company do performance review?

Since the goal of all for-profit companies is to make profit, how effect is performance review in actually contributing to your business goal?

In this session, we will go through some activities to explore the hidden side of performance appraisal process, along with some story-telling and discussions on our perspectives.

Last but not least, there will be some suggestions on things that we can do in place of the traditional performance review.

If you want to unmask the mystery behind performance review
If the current performance appraisal process is one of your pain points, or
If you have experience and stories to share with us regarding performance evaluation, then come to this session and let's have a conversation

Increasingly Agile adoption has focused on how to operate larger enterprises with agility, and run larger and larger initiatives, at scale.

In many cases, organizations have turned to explicit agile scaling frameworks to address their needs to coordinate increasingly larger efforts to deliver value in a way of that does not sacrifice feedback and self organization . Often these frameworks attempt to address the complexity that comes with large scale by adding extra process and procedure. Prescriptive advice is prescribed in the form of additional roles, stages, gates, and methods. This approach to scaling bears more than a little similarity to the heavy weight methods of the past, but in this case merging agile terminology with much of the same framework bloat and bureaucracy we have seen in the past.

As a a result adoptees struggle to understand how to fit these frameworks to their context, and seasoned coaches struggle to wrestle out the good bits.

During this session I will discuss a different approach to scaling agile, one that places an emphasis on both mindset and practice. I'll pay particular attention to the topic of leadership, organizational design, and the role management has to play in designing a system of work that allows larger efforts to work with an agile mindset without being forced into a one size fits all process framework.

A key part of the discussion will be to showcase how core agile methods and techniques can be extended and expanded to successfully manage coordinated agile deployments that range from hundreds to thousands of FTEs. I'll present these techniques by using real examples of agile deployments I have been a part of during my work with ScotiaBank's agile journey.

Key Scaling Practices covered will include:
- The design components required to structure your organization based on demand
- How to continuously de-scale your organization
- "Get Out Of the Boardroom" style governance and leadership
- Operational cadences and Impediment Escalation Flow
- Managing the flow of value at the Business Technology Asset level
- Moving the conversation from stories to domains
- Streamlining finance and budgeting to align to the agile mindset

I hope to illustrate ways that both management and knowledge workers can select techniques that allow them to scale agile as needed to support ever larger initiatives without succumbing to a one size fits all framework that does not adapt constant change.

When Agile first came on the scene it was premised around putting the customer first. But, over the years its focus has evolved and the general perception of Agile today is that it’s mostly a tool for delivering software. Agile’s original focus was mainly on developers and testers, but it never really contemplated design thinking as a discipline. Design thinking, which has been around for decades but is only recently having its ‘moment in the sun’, compliments agile beautifully in that it focuses on trying to solve the right problems for the right people. Design thinking allows us to iterate and test assumptions before too much coding and production-readiness is done, which helps ensure the team is investing in the right things at every stage. It really provides a focus on innovating rather than simply burning down a backlog. In this talk we will discuss different ways to incorporate design thinking into the agile process. You will learn how to yield benefits from bringing these two practices together – most importantly how to best serve the users of the product or service you are delivering. At Scotiabank, we’ve been using these fantastic tools in combination for over a year. It is a journey, and although we haven’t completely solved everything yet, there are a lot of lessons we have learned that can be applied elsewhere.

According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.

Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!

We constantly talk about the value of communication but seldom in terms to which technical teams tend to relate. This session will use the object model, messages and the RESTful architectural style to examine how a development team might interact successfully (or not) with other elements in its system.

We'll discuss systems thinking, message-based communication, software development as a service. To illustrate these ideas we'll map REST actions to team practices.