We’ve spent the past year writing a book about Agile Coaching and that’s given us a great opportunity to reflect on what we do as agile coaches. In this talk, we’ll present our top ten tips for agile coaches. We’ll present this like those TV shows that do a countdown to the Number One tip and illustrate the tips with some personal coaching stories.

We also want to hear from people in the audience what their coaching tips are.

The study of Group Relations is important to the development of Agile practice. Software development is performed by groups of individuals. When individuals become a members of a group, behavior changes. The group becomes focal & the individuals become background. The group behaves as a system and exhibits system-level behavior. Groups as a system exhibit very primitive emotional behaviors that can derail the group from its stated primary task.

Group relations theory says that a group behaves as a system, and that the primary task of the group is……

Clear definitions of Role, Task and Authority are essential when people assemble to do work.

Unclear definitions of these items leads to all sorts of waste.

Scrum’s very clear Roles and associated Tasks and Authority are a big part of what makes actually Scrum ‘tick’.

A Boundaries ‘collection’ is an attribute of the Role, Task and Authority ‘objects’. This session deconstructs Role, Task & Authority in terms of associated Boundaries. Note that boundaries can come in many forms, including: boundaries of time, boundaries in terms of access to resources, etc.

Deploying to servers has replaced shrinkwrapping CDs for delivering software. In the internet enabled era, the application is the infrastructure.

The basis of all Agile engineering practices is reproducibly building from source code. If software is delivered on servers, and those servers can’t be reproducibly deployed from bare metal to working services, how Agile can you be?

Continuous Integration is great, but what about Continuous Delivery! What are you waiting for?

This talk will outline innovations in tools, process, planning and culture emerging at the front lines.

As more development teams adopt agile, product managers must change the way they work to keep up with faster development cycles and shorter customer feedback loops. Product managers new to agile soon realize that agile processes require more involvement from their group. Given that most product managers are already overworked, how can they manage these new activities to derive more value from software projects and products? I will share my experience transitioning to Agile, pitfalls to avoid and propose solutions to the new challenges that arise.

Agile adoption initiatives succeed and fail. There is no agreement on why they do so. The current focus for scaling Agile seems to be on modifying existing Agile practices, adding new ones, and getting the right toolset installed. I’ve come to believe that the main reason for the success of any Agile adoption effort are the individuals, their skills and their personalities. All other aspects of Agile are of secondary importance.

In this talk I will share several individual skills and mental models that are necessary for successful scaling.

Want to improve your team? Take a drama class! Want to measure how your agile adoption is going, take a business course!! This session explores the often overlooked practices in other industries for inspiration on improving agile practice in software development. From waste management and lean manufacturing to understanding motivational and sustainable development with NLP, I want to help people begin to look at things differently and perhaps find their own fixes from the rich variety of disciplines in everyday life that they can apply to agile software development.

Transitioning 25,000 developers to agile development processes is a challenge on its own—and making the transition during a global recession is even more ambitious. Join Sue McKinney as she discusses her experiences leading the move to agile at IBM, how their agile teams often struggled, and ways leaders provided support and understanding at many levels. As the global recession set in, Sue looked for tools leaders could use to increase productivity—even after cost cutting—and unleash the talent and innovation agile teams need to continue succeeding.

This tutorial focuses on lessons learned from our experiences in implementing Agile in teams across different time zones in large companies. We will share the pleasure and the pain, ideas that worked as well as ideas that didn’t. We will share what we feel are the critical success factors in making program level implementations successful and sustaining. This is more than an experience report - we share templates, pictures, lessons learned for leveraging technology, managing multiple time zones, recommendations for metrics and reporting, and ideas for future program level success.

Changing methodology in the midst of the high-risk project is a risky proposition. At the University of Michigan we had several options: spoon feed and implement as you go, make immediate and drastic changes, plan carefully to implement confidently and thoroughly.