Human relationships are at the center of the Agile manifesto. Anything we do as coaches to allow humanity expression in our teams directly affects the individuals’ ability to live the manifesto more fully. This immediately translates into better, more astonishing, creation-ability in teams, and a greater sense of accomplishment and fulfillment for the team members. In this session, experienced coaches/trainers Lyssa Adkins and Tobias Mayer will introduce ‘Powerful Questions’ and share their personal experiences of coaching teams and individuals towards a more human-centric way of working.

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.

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.

Even teams with good skills, appropriate technologies, and posters of the Agile Manifesto on the wall can have trouble. Giving into temptation is often the cause. Guiding values are what keep us on the straight and narrow path in the face of temptation. Teams that have strong internalized values will stick to or invent good Agile practices while teams without them will drift into the ditch.

In this talk, I’ll present what I think of as the most important guiding values:

• courage
• working software
• ease
• being reactive
• fast feedback
• naiveté
• visibility
• joy