How can new tools and technologies shorten our feedback cycles, and reduce pain and frustration of deployment and maintenance of systems? How do you scale your continuous deployment system to support more developers? This hands-on technical session demonstrates how new containerization technologies like Docker and Concourse CI can be used to build deployment pipelines. Sean and Chris will show how to build a deployment pipeline, configuration-manage it, and deploy software through it. 

No previous technical knowledge of Docker or Containers is needed. 

This will be a 2 part. The first 45 minutes will go into the basics of docker. The second 45 minutes will show how to setup a Concourse.CI continuous delivery pipeline.

Agile coaching is a booming industry -- but what do companies hope to get out of coaching, and what tangible impact does coaching actually have on a team? What happens when you take an agile coach and force them to "eat their own dog food"? This is what happened to me. Join me in my personal journey of transitioning from an enterprise agile coach to a programmer on a team, and what I learned about agile, coaching, and myself in the process. 

Collaboration is the foundation of Agile teams. Then why do we focus so much on the performance of individuals? Want better collaboration? Get rid of your high performer. Chris and Sean will demonstrate through a series of skits how strong personalities can get in the way of team performance, and how collaboration skills can help overcome this.

Language is the medium by which individuals interact. Our language expresses our values -- what we care about (and what we don't). Language defines our relationships with our team. What can our language tell us about whether we are "self-organizing team" or not? In this talk, Sean explores how the subtle ways in which our words influence team dynamics and how we, as team members, can influence team values and collective ownership through deliberate use of language.

The team's use of language is important to ScrumMasters, Agile manager sand leaders as it provides us an insight into the values our team members. By being attentive to the team's the use of language, we can identify where the teams' values align or diverge with Agile principles. More importantly, ScrumMasters and leaders can guide the team towards Agile values and principles by deliberately influencing the team's language. 

 Sean will relate this through common, recognizable speech patterns -- the familiar phases we routinely hear in standups, planning meetings, retrospectives or day-to-day development. These common speech patterns (or anti-patterns).  Through examples of alternative phrasing, Sean will provide tangible tools ScrumMasters can use to challenge the team to think in new ways. 

* Note that slides are early draft that are being adapted from other presentation. There will be a de-emphasis on "structure" and focus more on "language" * 

The #NoEstmates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’."  Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity.  It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration.  In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises.  In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not.  Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile.  In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

In this highly engaging workshop attendees will experience estimating, planning and delivering a new product and product features. The uncertainty in value and costs will be resolved through rolling dice based on the stories that the team selects and prioritizes.   The teams will run through 3 iterations of story cost, value estimation, and product feature delivery. Points will be scored for delivering product features and meeting release and iteration commitments.

Dealing with uncertainty is one of the largest challenges that teams face. The simulation aims to have levels of uncertainty in value and delivery that are commensurate with those found in software development. Some of the key tools for dealing with uncertainty are integrated into the simulation.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the challenges of working with uncertainty in software projects, and will learn some of the tools that are at their disposal for managing this uncertainty.

The role of "Architect" is sometimes frowned upon in the Agile community as a central command-and-control authority who bottlenecks decisions and limits team empowerment. Or at least, that is what we thought. Follow the real-life journey of our teams as we discovered how the role of an architect is compatible with Agile principles. We will explore our failures, and eventual discovery on how the role brings can bring an immense amount of value to the organization and the teams, especially on large, multi-team projects. 

A successful agile transformation is a challenge - so how to ensure that these gains will be resilient and sustain over time? How can one be sure that the agile values and principles will be passed on to future generations? What charactaristics differentiate the agile organization that is successful today and the one that will continue to be successful well into the future? 

This lecture leverages Sean's 13 years of military experience to explore how leaders deliberately build great self-sustaining organizations.  Leaning on first-hand case studies from coaching dozens of agile teams, learn about the leadership behaviours that build self-sustaining cultures, and those which fail to see beyond just the methologies.