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.

Why is testing so slow? Why is testing taking so long? We’ve done lots of things to speed up testing, but we still face this time crunch when we get to the end of the iteration; then we find out from the field that there are problems that we didn’t anticipate. In this workshop, we’ll gather familiar patterns that slow down testing, and discover a few more in the process—and maybe we’ll find that the slowest parts of testing have nothing to do with testing at all. If you have problems that you’d like to solve or solutions that you’d like to offer, come along.

Successful software products deliver a set of features your customers’ value and will pay for. To determine the correct priority and presentation of features, it’s important to understand the different behaviors and attitudes that exist in the audience for your product. Ethnographic field research is very valuable, yet can be expensive, time consuming and require skilled researchers. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to use collaborative play with customers to discover how they think and what they value, and use this intelligence effectively with your agile teams.

How well are we served by our current metrics? Do metrics such as developer and tester productivity, ROI, and on-time / on-budget help us improve results? Or, do such metrics drive us towards negative behaviors? In this workshop, we describe the foundation for meaningful metrics. Workshop participants, via a series of exercises, translate this foundation into metrics that they can immediately use. This workshop results from the response I received during my Agile 2008 presentation on the CIO and agile teams. There was a great deal of interest on the topic of aligned, meaningful metrics.

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.

Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don’t want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? And what do you do to not stifle the team’s creativity, ownership, integrity, and problem solving ability? Come away with tools to both motivate and guide teams and organizations effectively.

In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments with incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? This session explores ways that leaders create cultures of trust that fosters the free flow of ideas. While we can’t make people trust each other, a culture of trust gives empowerment and provides a safe place to explore and discover new and innovative solutions and new ways of implementing and reaching results. It also encourages healthy risk taking to fail early and correct faster.

In “The Fifth Discipline”, his pioneering work on the learning organization, Peter Senge writes that the practice of dialogue is a key skill for team learning. Dialogue is commonly confused with discussion, but as defined by Senge it is distinctly different. As a result of this confusion, the skills that enable effective dialogue are often underdeveloped or misunderstood by teams. In this session we’ll use a specific dialogue format called World Café to explore the many factors that influence dialogue quality, and how to accelerate agile team learning through the use of dialogue.

So much of moving traditional test teams towards agile methods & testing is focused towards the individual tester and testing techniques. As often is the case in agility—directors, managers, team leaders and test-centric project managers are sort of marginalized. But not in this session! Here we want to focus on agile testing from the perspective of the Test Leader. We’ll pair off into groups and examine some of the greatest challenges when it comes to leading a testing team from traditional towards agile testing and emerge real-world strategies for surviving and thriving in agile testing.

As the internet proliferates beyond the PC to myriad devices - from iPhone to smart-phone - anyone delivering digital products deals with complexity: varying form factors, cultural differences and contexts of use. In this workshop we explore the implications of this complexity, discover through collaborative experience where the pain points lie, and identify strategies for dealing with them. We conclude that the unique challenges faced in the design and development of mobile applications benefit from agile software development and its ability to cope with such complexity.