Sometimes, a good debate is what’s needed. Conventional wisdom is boring. Agile is old enough now to inject some alternative thoughts. This session seeks to use the idea of the French Salon. A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. The intent is to combine learning, good manners, and conversational skill. Salonnières provided a place to gather, a topic, a structure or starting point for the gathering, and ensured that there would be a good mix of opinions among the guest list. “Salonnières therefore had to perform a difficult balancing act, cultivating individual merit without letting one guest overshadow the others.” Therefore, the goal is to facilitate the topic of Long Term Planning in Agile and whether there are any responsible ways to perform and execute it. Participants will bring their ideas along with an open mind to developing new possibilities.

Agile Adoptions and maintaining Agility often requires coaching at different levels within an organization. Some organizations begin their transformation with a single team launching off to explore Agility and what it will mean to be Agile where there never has been any. Some teams start or eventually get to Agile with multiple teams, while others begin at the Executive level. No matter the starting point, as Agile continues to permeate the organization, coaching at some level is employed, yet there are different skills and techniques more conducive to each. Let’s explore the needs of individuals and groups at each level of the organization along with skills every good coach will need to be effective in getting the organization to raise its level of Agile to build the best products. In this workshop, we will define different levels of the coaching experience based upon the size of an organization. For each level of the organization, we will define specific and appropriate coaching techniques

Agile Adoptions and maintaining Agility often requires coaching at different levels within an organization.  Some organizations begin their transformation with a single team launching off to explore Agility and what it will mean to be Agile where there never has been any.  Some teams start or eventually get to Agile with multiple teams, while others begin at the Executive level.  No matter the starting point, as Agile continues to permeate the organization, coaching at some level is employed, yet there are different skills and techniques more conducive to each.  Let’s explore the needs of individuals and groups at each level of the organization  along with skills every good coach will need to be effective in getting the organization to raise it’s level of Agile to build the best products.  

User Stories are a fantastic way of bringing together someone who is requesting a need and someone(s) who will transform that need into a working increment. Inevitably, we encounter needs that are large in nature, too big for a sprint. What do we do about those things? What if we are working in a multi-sprint release? How do we break those large things into smaller sprint size chunks and maintain the concept of potentially shippable increments?  Let’s explore that world with a few techniques. 

The government is seeing the merit of using agile practices to develop software.  However, the fallacy that you can’t estimate projects using agile in the government still exist.  The result is that many projects that want to use Agile begin in a very waterfall way developing the initial plan and are forced to stick to that plan throughout the project despite using sprints throughout the ‘development phase’.  Many falsely believe they are stuck in the tradition of estimating everything in the beginning.  During this presentation, through lecture and based upon real experiences, we will demonstrate techniques for developing a project plan and estimating techniques to satisfy the typical government compliance requirements using Agile practices and principles.  In essence, we will together learn how to build the bridge from the traditional government practices to a brave new world where we can plan, estimate and still inject agility.

Most software professionals have read and internalized the Gang of Four Book on Design Patterns.  Every team and it's individual members have experienced the cycle of team development described through the Tuckman Model.  This session combines those two concepts by describing typical patterns of behavior during the team development phases of forming, storming, norming and performing.  Moreover, we will describe techniques to help teams overcome the pains of forming and storming and techniques to thrive while norming and performing.

There are so many challenges that organizations face. Healthy organizations continuously tool and re-tool themselves to go from good to great. This session will describe the road taken to transform a major government organization using Agile, Lean and Scrum principles, practices and techniques. From the contracting process to initiating, executing and closing projects, to redesigning the physical workspaces, and moving from a matrix to a team centric structure, this organization completely re-tooled how it did business, for the better.