Agile 2009 - 180 minutes

Build me the Money, Honey!

mchiovetti — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 23:15:50 +0000

Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the norm for helping IT departments deliver great software… but what about the business? What about the product manager? What about the software itself? What can we do to ensure that we build the RIGHT software with the RIGHT features… the features that will make us the MONEY!
This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure they are building the MONEY (honey.)

Coaching self-organizing teams

jpelrine — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 21:39:23 +0000

Self-organization of human beings is a tricky thing. Agile coaches are constantly challenged with how to motivate/persuade/trick their teams into doing things, without telling them what to do, but there is very little information or training on this topic. Allowing a team to self-organize along the lines of “oh well, they’re all adults, they’ll figure it out” is just as irresponsible as reverting to the command-and control school of management. This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics.

Creating Your Enterprise Adoption Plan: A Seven Layer Framework

mspayd — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 14:21:14 +0000

Leading an Agile adoption? This tutorial will give you guidance, fresh perspectives, and a real deliverable. Distilling 7 years’ experience leading large-scale Agile implementations, we will examine patterns, anti-patterns, techniques and case histories from 7 different perspectives (or layers): Individual, Team, Management, Program, Business, Strategic, and Organizational. Using a template, your class team of 5 will help you create your adoption plan covering selection, sequence, sponsorship, culture, org change, job change, role of customers & management, training, methodology and metrics.

How to identify and fix problems using Value Stream analysis and A3 thinking

gbenefield — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:59:10 +0000

Teams who have been practicing Agile, Lean and Scrum are finding that as they are maturing their practices, they appear to be Agile on the surface but never quite seem to get the benefits promised. This tutorial will teach attendees how to effectively analyze problems to find systemic fixes underlying the symptomatic causes, and grow into learning and problem solving organizations. Examples from many diverse industries will also be presented and discussed and breakout sessions will allow attendees to try their hand at creating a value stream and identifying issues. Tom Poppendieck presenting.

Do I Still Have a Job? Roles and Org Structure in an Agile Transition

alexpukinskis — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:24:19 +0000

As an organization becomes more agile, people often worry about the future of their jobs. If detailed requirements documents aren’t needed anymore, what happens to a business analyst? If people aren’t constantly shuffling from one project to another, what does a program manager do? If testers are part of scrum teams, how can a QA lead increase quality? In this workshop, participants will explore how different roles change during an agile transition, envision new roles for everyone, and discuss strategies for change that help address the fears that often prevent successful agile adoption.

How to make your testing more Groovy

paulk — Mon, 02 Mar 2009 23:03:40 +0000

Testing can be a complex and thankless task. The technologies change so fast that your tools don’t work as they should. Your tests become brittle and are hard to relate to customer requirements. This talk looks at the latest techniques and tools for easing some of these burdens.

Topics include behavior driven development (BDD), domain specific testing languages (DSLs), scripting languages (Groovy) and a range of web, SOAP, and database testing libraries (JUnit, EasyB, WebTest, HtmlUnit, Tellurium, Robot Framework, JBehave, Cucumber, DbUnit, SoapUI, JMeter and more) and testing techniques.

Just Enough Design: Modeling With Agility

Ken Collier — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:38:58 +0000

Instead of a whole new set of modeling techniques, agile development requires a new way of applying good modeling methods like UML, ER, and UCD, in an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary (Agile) manner. This tutorial introduces an agile software modeling process that strikes the right sufficient-up-front and just-in-time balance. Participants are introduced to a blend of domain modeling, usability modeling, data modeling, and architectural design. We will utilize appropriate UML, ER, and UCD methods in an agile fashion to help limit technical debt, and increase design quality.

Applying Systems Thinking for Organizations through Play

jeantabaka — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:53:59 +0000

Agile teams and organizations need to embrace a “See the Whole” mentality as they adopt and adapt Agile practices. Systems thinking is a great guide in how to evaluate this whole from an external perspective. In this tutorial, we will conduct a series of games to help participants understand fundamentals of systems thinking with regard to delayed feedback loops, external pressures, and more, and see how these change our perspective on effective Agile practices. Our goal is to help participants bring guidance back that can improve their cultures.

Agile Leadership: A Developmental and Integrative Approach

howardbudphillips — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:53:12 +0000

In this session, we offer a synthesis of several bodies of thought that address processes, people, technology, change and leadership within the context of a large agile transition. While the competencies of agile development are well developed, the exploration and leveraging of other research on systemic change offers real insight to the complex organizational task of sustaining agile processes. We intend to fuse such research with our own experiences leading substantial agile transformations, to help senior leaders gain powerful new tools for leading their own agile transitions.

A Day in the Life of a User Story

jeantabaka — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:44:03 +0000

Jean Tabaka passionately believes in highly interactive, collaborative conference experiences for helping people new to Agile embrace its practices. This ½ day tutorial drives a quick-paced set of 8 exercises for attendees working in small groups. From unranked backlog items, to fully tasked out stories, each exercise builds on the work of the previous exercise. Through these series of activities, attendees learn to collaborate and create great user stories that turn into tasks, estimates, and commitments. The tutorial ends with a retrospective of how to apply these practices in real life.