Agile 2009 - culture

When Team Culture and Company Culture Does Not Mix: Social Deviance

mglacey — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 20:22:50 +0000

Summary for Event Guide

A high-performing agile team is tight knit. They have worked hard to become a cohesive unit and have developed a bond. This chemistry can be thrown off balance when someone is added to the team in the middle of a project. It does not matter how flexible, capable, or agile savvy the new team member is. If they have not been involved in the care and nurturing of the team’s culture and is not invested in the same way that the other team members are. When the new team member is not flexible, capable or agile savvy, the effect can be devastating.

Learning is key to Agile success: Building a learning culture on your Agile team

dwhelan — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 16:50:34 +0000

“Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” – Chinese Proverb

Agile teams that rapidly learn and apply new-found skills become increasingly adept at embracing change and delivering value. Team members feel more fulfilled, motivated and valued. And they have way more fun!

In this session you will learn about agile learning! Learn to recognize learning moments and put in place effective learning patterns tuned to your team and context. Learn how to build and sustain an effective learning culture on your agile team.

From CMMI and isolation to Scrum, Agile, Lean and collaboration

MadsTH — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 00:00:11 +0000

This is a journey starting in 2005 when establishing a new software company in Bangladesh 7000 km away from Denmark. Hiring 20 people in one week in Bangladesh and start using CMMI processes to integrate development in Denmark and Bangladesh. After some challenging time aborting the CMMI project and switching back to agile and lean techniques to make it work. Experience from implementing global big bang Scrum and building a kaizen culture. From long running projects, technical dept and integration nightmares to small batches, continuous integration and faster delivery of business value.

Telling Your Stories: Why Stories are important for your team

Johannah — Fri, 20 Feb 2009 16:31:49 +0000

This is a highly participative workshop for delegates to learn more about collaborative and organisational storytelling. Personal stories will be told, retold and analysed, to investigate underlying values, through a series of collaborative story-games. Collaborative storytelling will be explored as an activity for team building, coordination and problem-understanding. Attendees will participate in generating ideas for a set of story-cards that could be used to help teams explore their own values, beliefs and concerns through collaborative storytelling around software projects.

Scrum 911! Using Scrum to Overhaul a Support Organization

Bhaven Sheth — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 15:59:41 +0000

This report shares the successful adoption of agile practices in redefining the support group in our IT Organization. The report includes a unique organization of a collaborative, team-based approach to handling support requests, benefits achieved, lessons learned, and the next steps towards continual improvements for the customer experience and excellence in software development & support. We describe how an organization can use an innovative approach to transform the culture and the effectiveness of the support organization from an operational cost center to a value-added thought partner.

Test Driven Development: Ten Years Later

steve.freeman — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:57:35 +0000

Over the last ten years, Test-Driven Development has grown from something exotic, that only a handful of people knew about, to near- commodity. So there’s nothing left to say, right? We don’t think so.

In this talk, we’ll review some of the landmarks in the history of Test-Driven Development and what they tell us about how to develop software; the ideas, techniques, objections, and misunderstandings.

We’ll talk about our experiences of discovering TDD and what we’ve learned about how to do it well, how to adopt it, and how to bring it into existing code.

Overcoming Cultural Differences by Focusing on Similarities

juttaeckstein — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 11:13:17 +0000

One of the challenges global teams are facing, is overcoming cultural differences. Yet, these differences have their origin not only in geography and language, but also in strategies, politics, values and history. A company, no less than the broader society, shapes a culture that influences its employees behavior. A distributed team needs to leverage this and jointly develop a project culture and keep the project history alive for emphasizing the common culture. This session points out techniques that have helped to create a common culture in different global projects I have been working on.

Face culture or face failure

Mike — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 19:32:50 +0000

Are you thinking about trying agile approaches? Do you have an agile transition underway? Is your team or organization trying to become agile, but been less than successful thus far? A foundational implication – and the biggest potential roadblock – of the agile manifesto is culture change.

Therefore, to be successful with agile approaches and especially to scale them, you must go beyond agile technical practices and simultaneously tackle culture changes. This session shows why this is so, introduces a simple culture model, and gives you an opportunity to try out a culture tool.

The Prisoner's Dilemma: Applying Game Theory to Agile Contracting

simonb — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 20:57:40 +0000

I propose that the larger issue with Agile Contracts is not that we don’t know how to write them. After all we know how to deliver Agile projects, so a contract can simply describe that process. The problem is with making Agile Contract commercially competitive; against suppliers who are offering the promise of delivering the perfectly predicted dream - offering the certainty that people crave. This is a prisoners dilemma, with organisations driving themselves towards a sub optimal solution. Through game theory we will explore ways in which to improve the appeal of the agile offering.

Why (so many) Testers (still) hate Agile

Malcolm-Beaton — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 17:37:45 +0000

A good QA is worth their weight in gold, but the reality is that the best QA often have trouble working in an Agile Environment. The shift to a quality centred approach surely must be every QA’s dream but there are underlying issues that prevent this adoption. In this session we delve into the mind of a career tester, probe the pain points & explore strategies to communicate the value of agile testing to the classically trained. We look at personalities & what drives people to want to test & the benefits that QA provide to a project beyond rubber-stamping the ‘done’ column on the task board.