Agile and Scrum have been wildly successful in many organizations, yet we still see significant failures within those same organizations when attempting to introduce agile to new teams. Some organizations never realize the benefits and improvements that agile offers. When beginning a physical exercise program, we are directed to consult our physician before beginning new physical activity. So, before you attempt your migration from traditional methods to agile and Scrum, you should evaluate your organization for its willingness and ability to adapt to the inevitable organizational changes. Otherwise, your agile deployment may be impossible from the outset. John Holmes and David Nielsen assist those who are embarking on a new transition or those who want to understand why their current deployment is not going as planned. To increase your ability to transition to agile, John and David share a streamlined, reliable, and successful implementation framework that is practical, repeatable, and behavior-based.
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Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule, by choosing from track sessions from both Agile Development Conference West and Better Software Conference West.
Are you sure you are building the right product? Although agile methods help teams build products faster, many teams struggle to validate customer direction or product features. Some teams talk about “grooming the backlog” but still find their stories are not strong. If you’re struggling with bad backlogs or weak stories, this session is for you. Drawing on his years of experience helping teams improve their product learning skills, David Hussman presents techniques―personas, example-driven story mapping, customer journeys, and lean UX tools—for initial and continuous product discovery and validation. Beyond the tools, David shares ideas for creating whole, product development teams and communities which augment and extend simpler ideas like Scrum teams. The session is a combination of presentation and interactive participation so please come ready to engage, learn, and challenge the status quo. Feel free to bring—and ask—your most challenging questions.
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The Lean Startup® methodology has taken the business world by storm and is revolutionizing product development through the application of a Build-Measure-Learn cycle, and the systematic application of techniques such as Customer Discovery, Customer Development, and Pirate Metrics. With agile teams in place, how can organizations drive lean product innovation on their agile teams? How can we bootstrap product development with product roadmaps and business requirements that are truly aligned with end-user needs? Sanjiv Augustine shares how to drive lean innovation on your agile teams by setting up clear, short-term experiments using the popular Lean Canvas tool; structuring direct customer interaction through systematic customer interviews; conducting release planning informed by actionable metrics; and creating a “dual-track” of no- and low-cost UX prototyping in conjunction with agile delivery to reduce the cost of iteration while validating ideas and features. Learn how to extend your agile delivery knowledge into the product space to deliver products that customers love.
The Lean Startup® is a registered trademark of Eric Ries.
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Use cases are a powerful tool for modeling how a system delivers value by telling stories about how actors interact with it. User stories are an excellent tool for delivering a flow of value. Together, they offer an excellent strategy for modeling and delivering value. However, writing good use cases, like good user stories, is difficult. Steve Adolph presents pattern that can help use case writers and reviewers know what makes a good use case and judge their quality. Patterns such as Clear Cast of Characters and User Valued Transactions help evaluate the scope and size of a use case. Scenario Plus Fragments helps judge the structure of the use case, and Leveled Steps helps with the appropriate level of precision in use case descriptions. Use of the Adornments pattern avoids cluttering use case descriptions with non-functional issues. Finally Steve applies the Ever Unfolding Story to integrate use cases with user stories to detect any logical gaps.
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According to recent studies, CEOs want more open and collaborative organizational cultures in which employees are empowered, connected, and learning. However this remains out of reach for most. Cultural inertia—in the form of policies, procedures, and hierarchical reporting structures—is the most significant barrier to increased agile adoption. More than 50 percent of organizations are unsuccessful in embedding, growing, and sustaining real agility. Pete Behrens explains how identifying organizational values and classifying organizational cultures can guide leaders in becoming more agile. Through three case studies of different organizational cultures, Pete explores how leaders in each organization aligned its culture toward agility to drive sustained organizational success. He demonstrates the agile leadership competencies required to develop more open and collaborative cultures to improve organizational success in a rapidly changing world. Begin your efforts toward sustained organizational agility by learning how to visualize organizational culture, align the organization, and lead it through change that sticks.
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Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices, first described in Extreme Programming, and now adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the “Scrum Developer Practices.” They're difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―lean's value-stream mapping and the theory of constraints' five focusing steps. Rob describes the most common agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment including their costs, and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. He draws extensively from his hands-on experience with these practices and shares data from well-established sources. After briefly discussing TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration, Rob evaluates practices that the delegates choose.
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About half of all agile projects either have team members who are dispersed or are part of large programs where the teams are remote from each other. That makes agile, with its real-time communications rituals, quite difficult. How do you build effective collaborative and autonomous feature teams when they are geographically separated and have different cultural beliefs? Johanna Rothman shares tips on building respect across time zones, how project charters can help create team norms, when to have—and not have—real-time rituals, and how to share data across time zones. Johanna Rothman discusses how to know when a yes means yes, no, or maybe, regardless of whether you are a north-south team, or an east-west team, or both. Because this is an interactive session, you can share practices you’ve found to be effective. Let’s learn from each other and build our knowledge of how to make geographically distributed agile teams work.
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As companies introduce agile practices, the business analyst (BA) role is often left by the wayside. The BA title doesn’t exist in Scrum and other agile implementations, leaving many BAs wondering where—or if—they fit in. But fear not! The skills of a good BA are even more valuable in an agile environment. Diane Zajac-Woodie tells the tale of a new and struggling agile team, with no formal training, a resistant corporate culture, and unwilling team members. Diane shares how this team benefited from the communication, collaboration, and facilitation skills of an experienced BA. She highlights some specific shifts—using story maps and writing executable requirements, just in time—that BAs can make to help their team’s transition. Embracing their new roles, BAs can encourage team members to cross role boundaries. This leads to new skill acquisition and a more cohesive team, which ultimately lead to higher quality software.
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The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a popular process for enterprise-wide agile adoption. It is a pre-built framework that describes the individual roles, teams, activities, and artifacts necessary to scale agile from team to enterprise level while providing a cadence for teams to follow. Jared Richardson, an agile coach at a large insurance company in the midst of a SAFe adoption, brings practical lessons from that work to this session. After an overview of the SAFe framework, Jared describes how the work flows from executives to team members, and then relates that workflow to other agile processes. Learn SAFe anti-patterns and a cautionary message for anyone looking for the silver bullet solution to software challenges. Jared discusses the areas you’ll want to change or monitor to ensure your own efforts succeed. Leave with an understanding of SAFe and an awareness of potential problems—so you can avoid them.
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When measuring software quality, we first need to understand its meaning, then its definition. Then we can begin to measure whether or not we’ve attained it. And this is where metrics come in. Unfortunately, many organizations collect and publish all sorts of metrics without considering if measuring and obtaining the data will actually lead to better software quality. The result is that many of those painstakingly collected and calculated measurements ultimately measure the wrong thing, end up on spreadsheets in someone’s unread email, and most importantly, lead to no useful action or results. Philip Lew describes how to develop a software quality metrics framework that connects software quality metrics with actionable objectives related to different phases of your product’s development. With a metrics framework in place, you can develop metrics that can evaluate each part of the product’s development with clear objectives—and thus improve the product from start to finish.
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IT and software engineering organizations are embracing agile methods to take advantage of the benefits of incremental and iterative delivery. While more software developers are living in an agile world, many businesses continue to live under the waterfall. Large corporations and the Federal Government are increasingly directing software developers to “be agile,” but their business practices related to marketing, procurement, project management, and systems definition are anything but. Jeff Dalton shares how agile resiliency can make the critical difference. Agile resiliency is about strengthening and reinforcing agile values, methods, and techniques so that agile can scale and thrive in this conflicted environment by integrating with the architectural strengths of the Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI), a proven and widely adopted framework used to deploy a continuous improvement infrastructure. Jeff shows how to use the CMMI’s Generic Practices to scale and strengthen agile values, methods, and techniques.
CMMI® is registered in the US Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University.
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Too many organizations focus on maximizing output and often miss delivering the right product. Studies show more than 60 percent of system features are rarely—or never—used. You may deliver a pile of features, but if they aren’t being used, does it really matter how well or fast you do it? To deliver the right outcomes, you need to discover your customers’ real needs and validate your assumptions as early as possible. This means completing an early version of your product so you can begin testing, validating, and improving. David Hawks introduces you to concepts from Lean Startup including the techniques of Lean Canvas and User Story Mapping. Learn how to apply these techniques to determine where to start product development, and how to learn early and often. By defining the right Minimum Viable Product (MVP), you can quickly validate that you’re building the right product.
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Many agile teams focus solely on velocity as their measure of progress. They draw burn-up charts to track it over time and make it the focus of much of their discussion during sprint planning and retrospectives. Is the strong focus on this metric truly in line with the principles of agile software development? Cheezy and Ardita Karaj lead a workshop to explore this question. Discover how focusing first on value, rather than velocity, changes the team approach to the work. Through a series of structured activities, work with a story map for a fictitious project and assign value to the discovered stories. Cheezy and Ardita discuss the practices and skills necessary to track earned value on your project. Learn the valuable lesson of discovering what not to build. Take back a set of new skills you can immediately apply to your development planning efforts. This session will be fun and educational. It is one you don’t want to miss.
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There is more to agile metrics than velocity graphs and burn-down charts. However, most agile teams focus just on the velocity of implementing story points which leads to management’s misusing the metrics and to teams’ gaming the numbers. Additional metrics can provide a more holistic view of the project's overall health. Fadi Stephan shares the agile dashboard, which collects such metrics and acts as an information radiator to give real-time project updates on value, performance, schedule, scope, cost, quality, and team spirit. Learn what to measure and for how long. Discover project warning signs and what corrective actions you need to take. Learn to setup your own agile dashboard to arm yourself with the right information to make careful and constant adjustments, ensuring forward and safe progress toward your final deliverable.
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Financial services are not about high fives, flashy suits, and Maseratis. Behind the scenes, the technology that powers these companies walks a delicate line, balancing regulatory risk and the need for rapid technology response to continually changing market conditions. DevOps is the perfect fit, a natural for these organizations. Getting it right, however, is quite another story. Mike Baukes describes two recent experiences of wide-scale organizational change in establishing DevOps capabilities in a trading firm and a commercial banking operation. Mike shares his experiences with straightforward accounts of wrestling large-scale technical debt, enterprise cultural change, and a constant stream of pipeline changes going to production. Whatever your level of understanding of DevOps is, you will leave with penetrating insights and pointed anecdotes of what success and failure look like—from someone who has been there as a consultant and an employee.
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Many projects implicitly use some kind of risk-based approach for prioritizing testing activities. However, critical testing decisions should be based on a product risk assessment process using key business drivers as its foundation. For agile projects, this assessment should be both thorough and lightweight. Erik van Veenendaal discusses PRISMA (PRoduct RISk MAnagement), a highly practical method for performing systematic product risk assessments. Learn how to employ PRISMA techniques in agile projects using Risk Poker. Carry out risk identification and analysis, see how to use the outcome to select the best test approach, and learn how to transform the result into an agile one-page sprint test plan. Erik shares practical experiences and results achieved by employing product risk assessments. Learn how to optimize your test effort by including product risk assessment in your agile testing practices.
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As the technology industry increasingly shifts to agile development, we’re faced with the challenge of maintaining our mainframe technologies and legacy systems. We must face the challenges of employee engagement and the problems of fitting procedural/linear technologies into the fluid world of agile, but successfully navigating these issues will allow IT leaders to breathe new life into the development of aging technologies. Together, Jay McFarling and Danielle Roecker share their experiences of the past two years as they successfully moved the waterfall development activities of their mainframe legacy systems into the new world of agile. Now Jay and Danielle are not just delivering applications but finding ways to modernize their development practices. This interactive session provides a glimpse into the top five blockers they faced―agile mindset, tools, sizing, communication, and team improvements―and provides a venue for you to explore your issues. Leave with real world examples and the motivation to tackle your biggest agile challenges.
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One of the most exciting aspects of agile development is the emphasis on creating and delivering business value. But someone has to figure out what that value is—and that someone might be you. What is business value? It turns out that it is a complex concept that includes not only revenue but also risk mitigation, knowledge acquisition, alignment with long-term strategy, and more. It’s multidimensional! Chris Sims provides a hands-on experience using surprisingly simple techniques to create meaningful business value estimates. With these techniques, you’ll create a single numeric estimate of each story’s value. But you won’t create these numbers alone; you’ll do it in collaboration with your stakeholders using The Business Value Game to help facilitate the conversation. The result is a value estimate—and a much more engaged stakeholder community. This is an interactive workshop without a slide deck. Show up, dive in, and learn by doing.
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The ability to quickly and reliably deliver new, high-quality features to customers has become a standard business requirement across industries. Development, IT, and DevOps organizations are looking to Continuous Delivery (CD) to meet this need. However, introducing CD into an existing enterprise poses a number of challenges. The vision and principles of CD are well known and articulated, but practical guidance and concrete recommendations based on actual experience are difficult to find. Andrew Phillips shares five important prerequisites and recommendations for enterprise CD implementations, including complete delivery artifacts, scalable capacity, “side effect” overview, integration with release control, and more. Leave with a number of practical action items—such as a pipeline stage checklist and automation catalog—for your own preparation and implementation. Take back ideas to help you build your own CD Maturity Model to track and measure your implementation’s success.
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How is testing different for successful agile projects? How can agile development teams employ testers’ skills and experience for maximum project value? Janet Gregory describes key factors she has identified for agile teams to succeed and explains the whole-team approach of agile development that enables testers to do the most effective job. Then, Janet explores the “agile testing mindset” that contributes to a tester’s success. She describes the different kinds of information that testers on an agile team need to obtain, create, and provide for the team and product owner. Learn test automation’s role in the fast-paced development of agile projects, including regression and acceptance tests. By adhering to core agile practices while keeping the bigger picture in mind, testers add significant value to and help ensure the success of agile projects.
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The success of agile development methods has had a detrimental effect on product management. Agile methods’ intense focus on product development has ignored the business and marketing roles of product management. Product management activities extend beyond development to shepherding the product through the entire process—from idea to creation to delivery to customers. Furthermore, many product managers are overwhelmed—with too many responsibilities that require too many areas of expertise. Steve Johnson describes four types of product management skills—technical, business, marketing, and domain expertise―and clarifies the different expectations of the product manager and product owner roles. Now that we’ve optimized development, it’s time to get product management refocused on the business. You need a vision, a roadmap, and clarity of team roles to succeed.
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Agile methods help development teams create good quality code and ensure this with early testing. Test-driven development (TDD) is the preferred approach to accomplish this. First, you write the tests; then, you write the code so the tests pass. Sound simple? It is—when done correctly. And this is often where the trouble starts. Thorsten Werle and Carsten Czeczine explain the basic steps of TDD. You’ll see how to write tests for non-existing code using the compiler as your first testing tool. You’ll learn that TDD does not start with unit testing but with an integration test. Carsten and Thorsten explain the significance of “mocking” and unit testing in TDD. Finally, you’ll experience the combination of TDD and pair programming by playing the “TDD Game.” To make TDD more fun and vivid, Thorsten and Carsten illustrate it by programming a LEGO Mindstorms robot. Come and learn how to use TDD in a fun, interesting, and effective way.
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Adopting continuous delivery can yield a substantial competitive advantage. However, if we turn off our brains and just perform the process without thinking, we won’t realize all of its benefits. Continuous delivery creates challenges―What to automate and how to deliver safely without risking breaks across teams, operations, and customers? How fast can we deliver versus how fast should we deliver? Joel Tosi describes how to investigate your current delivery process by asking: Are we doing the right thing? How do we know? Why are we investing here? Are we learning? Instead of rushing to automate and virtualize, Joel wants you to first question what could go wrong. What is causing us the most difficulty and how can we alleviate that pressure? Leave this session with skills and questions you can use to investigate a meaningful improvement of your delivery process—on your first day back at work.
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One of the challenges associated with testing agile projects is selecting test techniques that “fit” the dynamic nature of agile practices. How much functional and non-functional testing should you do? What is the appropriate mix of unit, integration, regression, and system testing? How do you balance these decisions in an environment that fosters continuous change and shifting priorities? Bob Galen has discovered that session-based exploratory testing (SBET) thrives in agile projects and supports risk-based testing throughout development. SBET excels at handling dynamic change while finding the more significant technical—and business value—defects. Join in and learn how to leverage SBET for test design and as an all-purpose agile testing technique. Bob explores the whole-team execution view that SBET fosters and demonstrates techniques for rolling out this technique across large-scale projects and teams.
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