This talk will present two exercises in a form of games designed to help new teams accept Agile basics and gel quicker. These exercises target the essential goal of self-organization from two different fronts. The first exercise demonstrates that self-organization is possible with any heterogeneous group of people. The second is designed to allow any group of people to self-coalesce into stable Agile - Scrum (sized) teams under small set of predefined restrictions.

During the talk both exercises will be described and the audience will take part in a simulation of each one, active participation will be expected from all attending.

Companies adopt Agile/Scrum along with approaches like BDD (Behavior Driven Development) for consistent delivery and higher-quality software products. In many cases, these fail to improve things.

We believe the reason is that they focus on the symptoms instead of focusing on the cure. Our instrument to deliver the cure into our projects is Xtreme BDD.

Xtreme BDD is an approach to obtaining high quality and timely product delivery. We do this by making BDD a part of the product and implementing a BDD framework that has a stricter process and coding standards than the actual product.

While most development teams focus on the problems of the software product (symptoms), we focus on prevention which corrects the source of the problems.

We show that following this approach will successfully address both consistency and quality issues. In many cases it will dictate the difference between having a working or a failing Agile/Scrum implementation.

This experience talk will explain how we used Xtreme BDD to take a a very large, [formerly] legacy, enterprise product from good to great in 12 months.

Getting to Agile is not easy, doing so with remote teams is more so. As a trainer you need to convince, often sceptical, audience of the soundness and viability of Agile postulates. In particular you need to show that self-organizing is not just a sound bite but rather an achievable goal. This workshop will present an original approach to doing so when training a distributed team.

The counting game is designed to be played over the phone, or an audio/video bridge, with or without any additional collaboration tools. It is simple to understand and difficult to get right at first. To solve the problem the teams will need to organize into roles, iterate over approaches and come up with a working algorithm. The winning teams will organize themselves in 3-5 iterations into efficient counting machines able to accurately process greater and greater inputs.