This hands-on session will cover a number of low cost, yet powerful research methods, like the “burrito lunch” to help you make better data-driven design decisions. We’ll provide a number of techniques for recruiting research participants, creating better research questions, and what to do with your data once you’ve conducted your research.

We’ll provide hands-on demonstrations for how to conduct field research and interview participants. We’ll even provide participants, yes, real people, for you to interview during the session.

Persona put the user back into your user stories.

While we understand that our users are important we may lack language for talking about them. If you already know about persona you may find your approach for performing research and representing user data as a user persona to be time consuming and, what’s more, the persona you create simply aren’t being used. In this short tutorial you’ll learn to create simple relevant persona for your agile project, how to communicate them to the team, and how to use them generate valuable feature ideas, and design imperatives for your product.

Selenium is the 800lb gorilla of open source web application testing. For four years it has been steadily gaining a following and making a difference for corporations large and small. Such tools have always been a trap for adept Agile teams though. Too often teams rely on functional testing and skimp on the much more effective ‘small’ unit tests. Now with JBehave steering Selenium, we’re seeing test scripts emerge that engage formerly perplexed management and business folks. The time has come for this type of tool pairing to be valued for its role in validating Agile in the enterprise

JavaScript has earned a special, dark place in most programmer’s hearts as it is a necessary evil for making the web experience dynamic. You are test-driving your JavaScript, aren’t you? If not, why not? If the reason is that you don’t know how, or haven’t taken the time to learn the various testing frameworks, then this session is for you. We will briefly explore the various testing frameworks, build our own lightweight framework, and then test-drive a small bit of functionality using it.

This tutorial focuses on the detailed specifics that will make distributed agile meetings effective. We will demonstrate several key agile meetings, run in a distributed fashion, so teams can immediately improve their projects. To do so, I will highlight specific tools available in the market place to facilitate each of these different kinds of discussions (retrospectives, planning meetings, stand ups). I’ll demonstrate the processes to enable more effective communication between remote locations and describe the key roles required on a project to encourage the best exchange of information.

Fear of decision making often leads teams to exhibit one or more of the dysfunctional symptoms of Agile ADHD. This tutorial will help agile practitioners overcome the fear of decision making by first embracing that there are no right or wrong decisions. Agile development is ultimately driven by a series of decisions, all of which are made in the face of uncertainty. Tutorial participants will take away principles and practices that enable their team to embrace uncertainty and be proactive in making better decisions at the most responsible moment.

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.)

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.

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.

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.