This is a trick question, right? In agile, everyone works on the same items together, at the same time. Yet, the reality is we’re not all interchangeable cogs. Developers and testers each bring their own, unique skills to the table. The key to effective agile is not minimizing our differences, but building upon the strengths each person brings to the team. Join us for this hands-on simulation and retrospective as developers and testers explore how agile teams build quality into their process, how each member contributes to that quality, and how we can avoid traditional testing pitfalls.

Agile development means self-management, collaboration, and working towards shared goals. Agile practices support much of this, but we can still learn more, both to better understand current practices and to develop new ones. This session is an introduction to cultural-historical activity theory, a psychological framework for understand collaborative behaviour. The framework has shown the role of tools in cognition and collaboration, and understanding structural tension between different activity systems: it can also be used to understand and improve agile software development.

Over the last several years, innovative UX practitioners working in agile environments have improvised and invented ways to include effective user experience practice inside agile projects. This short talk describes many common emergent agile-ux practices. Some of these practices are lighter weight versions of traditional techniques, while others are new inventions combining the best of UX rigor with a collaborative and pragmatic twist. As a participant, you’ll leave with a buffet of useful UX techniques to add to or adapt your agile process.

Tim and Tim discuss tools and techniques and observations for remotely pair-programming. Various remote desktop-sharing applications and services are discussed, dissed, and recommended along with pointers and practices for logistics. Learn the downside of distant partners. How do you have a flash architecture meeting? How do you collaborate with the team? When do you take breaks? Is it really just like being there, without the smells?

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.

Group Coherence (.com): Shared state allowing groups to perform tasks in rhythm and harmony with great energy to overcome obstacles. Evokes memories of fun, success, team bonding, desire to work together on future projects and improved group connection.

Group characteristics are invisible and have to be felt. We are not trained to detect them any more than we could detect radio waves without a radio.

We will Practice using group inquiry to: -Share your Agile GC experience -Identify GC ingredients and obstacles -Chart GC -Transform Agile practitioners to a coherent Agile group

We talk about collaborating to get great results from Agile, yet so few teams do it well (if they even try it at all). Sure, they cooperate, but collaborate? That’s a different story. My teams couldn’t collaborate, even when they explicitly tried. This failure led to such an epidemic of mediocrity that I turned to a professional for help. I turned to an actor. Come to this session to learn what I learned from the world of theatre and to practice the exercises that helped my teams build their collaboration muscle so that you can do the same with yours.

One of the core values of the Agile Manifesto is favoring “Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”. Unfortuntely, product companies with thousands (to millions!) of customers can find collaborating with their customers nearly impossible, as few tools exist to explicitly support meaningful customer collaboration. This workshop explores the advantages of including your customers as part of your distributed team and some of the tools that are emerging to enable agilists to better collaborate with their customers. Bring your laptop, as we may be trying out some of these tools.

The Agile Alliance states that “The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice make them, in the opinion of the Award Committee, people others in the field should emulate.” This panel brings together some of the previous winners so that they may share their contributions and help encourage others to participate in building the body of Agile knowledge. For the intermediate practitioner, it should reinforce the notion that as we practice Agile and learn how to adapt for the best outcome, sharing what we learn helps the whole community.

To make lasting changes, we need to visualise the situation, understand the system, know how to improve it and work together. The Theory of Constraints tells us how to do all that.

In this game, we apply the “Five Focusing Steps” process improvement method from ToC. Step by step we use Agile, Lean and Real Options techniques to make our “work” more fun and productive.

After the simulation game, you’ll be able to apply these techniques to your work.

You’ll be able to use the open source “Bottleneck Game” to share these techniques with others.

Max. 60 players