Have you ever been asked, “Are we agile yet?”

That’s a daunting question to answer as there is no single best way to measure adoption. Chris and Lee, experienced Agile veterans, believe that measuring adoption is not one-size-fits-all, but rather requires strategic planning tailored to the needs of that team.

Over their careers, Chris and Lee have worked with upwards of 70 agile teams. After learning and improving over several years, they have successfully developed a simple yet collaborative approach to measuring agile adoption - all while maneuvering the minefield of executives looking for performance metrics.

Join Chris and Lee as they let you in on their approach to developing an agile adoption strategy, starting with a simple survey. The pair will also share some of the challenges they encountered and how they were able to mitigate them to improve team performance.

“Success is not delivering a feature; Success is learning how to solve a customer’s problem” - Mark Cook, VP Product at Kodak

Too often companies measure project success by comparing estimated completion dates vs actual completion dates and budgeted costs vs actual costs. Multiply this by 30-40 projects a year and they start to lose sight of the real metric that matters: the value provided to the business and their customers.

At Index Exchange, the world’s largest independent ad exchange, we have taken a different approach. By leveraging agile and lean startup principles in our roadmapping process, we can ensure we are consistently working on tasks with the highest priority. In this session, you will learn how to use kanban, experimentation, collaboration, agile forecasting and improvement kata to maximize value and throughput from product and engineering.

“Are we agile yet?”, “Can you get me some metrics on our agile adoption?”, “I want to measure the effectiveness of our agile teams, get me some metrics to do that.”!!!

These are scary questions that can get asked of you from your executives. We’ve all been there. What are you supposed to do? How do you (politely) tell them no, yet still provide your teams with information that will help them? Most importantly, how can we actually help a large set of teams understand their own journey towards adopting agile practices?

Chris and Lee have worked with over 70 agile teams and created an approach that allowed the individual teams to understand where they were on their agile journey while maneuvering through the minefield of executives that wanted performance metrics to hold teams accountable.

This session will be a review of what the challenges were during this process, how they were accepted and mitigated and how the teams were able to get good insight into their agile adoption and performance.

“Are we agile yet?”, “Can you get me some metrics on our agile adoption?”, “I want to measure the effectiveness of our agile teams, get me some metrics to do that.”!!!

These are scary questions that can get asked of you from your executives. We’ve all been there. What are you supposed to do? How do you (politely) tell them no, yet still provide your teams with information that will help them? Most importantly, how can we actually help a large set of teams understand their own journey towards adopting agile practices?

Chris and Lee have worked with over 70 agile teams and created an approach that allowed the individual teams to understand where they were on their agile journey while maneuvering through the minefield of executives that wanted performance metrics to hold teams accountable.

This session will be a review of what the challenges were during this process, how they were accepted and mitigated and how the teams were able to get good insight into their agile adoption and performance.

Five years after the initial adoption of Agile, PointClickCare had grown from 10 development teams to 40, from a single market focus to serving multiple markets each with their own distinct needs, and from a general software platform to a core solution with multiple, market-specific modular variations and add-on modules.  Through rapid growth, teams had been stretched, juggled and supplemented to support the continued need for new products, and the process that worked for 10 teams was showing signs of strain.  To reinvigorate their Agile methodology implementation, and to set the stage for future success, PointClickCare set off to rejuvenate their Agile approach.  

Over the course of two years, PointClickCare gathered input and feedback from teams, management and software industry experts, and worked through various experiments and pilots to rework their development process.  PointClickCare began implementing new and improved practices to promote a process and culture that would carry through further growth. 

This case study will show you where PointClickCare started, the indicators that showed where improvements were needed, the steps taken to research, plan and execute organizational change, and the lessons learned from the experience.

Don’t over-complicate your tests by creating unmaintainable suites that break easily.  Implementing the Page Object pattern is a great start, but building a test harness using TDD and UI-level unit tests can improve development speed and test reliability.  Suites of small, direct tests validating your test harness before you use them makes them more stable for large, complex regression tests.  Using TDD vastly improves your efficiency in creating and maintaining Page Objects. 

Large scale Selenium test portfolios can often become unwieldy and can produce intermittent outcomes due to many changing assumptions and heavy dependencies. Even once dependencies are minimalized, intermittent results can still come into play. In software development, we often rely on smaller tests to isolate problems, and this pattern can equally be applied to a test automation framework. Test your utility functions, test your framework, test your page objects before you test your software. This will help provide more stability and more deterministic results.