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Agile Development Concurrent Sessions

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 track sessions from DevOps Conference West, Better Software Conference West & Agile Development Conference West.

Agile Development Conference West Concurrent Sessions              Better Software Conference West Concurrent Sessions              Check out the DevOps Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent Sessions
AW1 Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption
Steve Adolph, Blue Agility
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

“Can we do agile?” is a question individuals often ask as they look at the impressive results reported by other organizations that have adopted agile practices. Their usual concerns are about the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture, tooling; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Many organizations with these challenges do agile very well despite these perceived barriers. Others wonder why, even with their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile. What they’re not seeing are the social barriers that impede fast decisions and ultimately doom many agile adoption programs. Steve Adolph explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, introduces a fast decision cycle model to resolve issues, and provides a configuration guide to help you identify and evaluate social impediments. Using a case study of a “high ceremony” organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve your company’s impediments to doing agile.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Steve Adolph.
AW2 Leanban: The Next Generation of Agile
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Al Shalloway introduces Leanban, the next major agile approach following Scrum, XP, and Kanban—and the first explicitly based on lean software development principles. While each of these earlier approaches is a manifestation of selected Lean principles, none of them were fully Lean. The result is that each approach, while valuable, is incomplete and useful in only certain situations. Al explains how Leanban is an explicit manifestation of Lean principles while incorporating what we’ve learned from previous agile methods. It encompasses culture, Lean flow, how people learn, the importance of systems thinking, technical practices, and management, providing a consistent set of principles and core set of practices. Al presents Leanban's well-defined starting points and then discusses Leanban's well-defined migration path from one practice to another as teams learn or their situation changes. Al concludes by discussing how teams currently doing XP, Scrum or Kanban can extend their current practices with Leanban.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Al Shalloway.
AW3 Forging a Path to Paradise: Replace Retrospectives with PRO-spectives
Jay Packlick, Improving Enterprises
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

A cornerstone principle of the Agile Manifesto is periodic reflection on how to be more effective. So it's a bit ironic that retrospectives, widely practiced as a way to improve performance, are so ineffective. Teams often produce few, if any, significant improvements. Why is this? What can teams do instead to produce better results? Jay Packlick suggests that “Journey to Paradise Island” is a powerful exercise that introduces the practice of PRO-spectives―a forward-facing approach to continuous improvement that helps teams create and focus on achieving a compelling vision of their own creation. Unlike retrospectives which tend to be backward facing and reactive, producing  superficial responses to transient problems, PRO-spectives begin with the end in mind. They incorporate the goal-focused power of the Toyota Kata model of improvement. Join Jay to learn how your teams can create their own Paradise Island, discover just how far they are from it, and determine the best course to get there.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jay Packlick.
AW4 Holistic User Experience Design in an Agile Environment
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Garren DiPasquale says that holistic design strategy in an iterative agile environment is difficult. So how does design thinking deliver awesome applications and features for your customers? Why should your agile team care? How do you develop a macro understanding while developing micro solutions? Can you get designers and developers on the same page? As the market continues to move forward, our customers are expecting polished, delightful, and easy-to-use software. To deliver software that matches these expectations, we must adjust our product design practices to move as fast as our development counterparts. Garren introduces a model for getting designers and developers to work together―breaking problems down, and aligning both design and agile methodologies to form one cohesive team. Discover the objections designers have to agile, eliminate handoff problems, and deliver better software with a practical design framework that can be implemented on agile teams large and small.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Garren DiPasquale.
AW5 Great Sprint Reviews: Patterns for Success
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Whether you’re new to agile or Scrum or an experienced practitioner, everyone has had a bad sprint review here and there. But do you consistently miss the mark? Have limited attendance, engagement, and feedback? Feel you might be developing the wrong products and simply going through the motions? Your demos should be lively, powerful, insightful, and valuable. In this energized session, join Bob Galen as he shares stories of common patterns he’s seen again and again that increase the value and vibrancy of sprint reviews. Bob discusses agenda setting, marketing, customer focus, why planning is crucial, and execution principles for your sprint reviews. He explores how to gather feedback, measure success, and take further action. Finally, Bob discusses how to demo non-functional and other types of work so your stakeholders “get” the value proposition. In the end, take away strategies and techniques that will change your reviews forever.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Bob Galen.
AW6 Extreme Agile: Managing Fully-Distributed Teams
Alan Bennett, Linaro
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

It is challenging—if not impossible—to find local experts in low-level Linux or specific open-source software projects. However, this isn’t a challenge with a fully-distributed organization which has this talent worldwide. So the challenge becomes how to effectively manage, motivate, and retain this talent. At Linaro, Alan Bennett is responsible for producing many of their open source products. Having successfully worked with Kanban and Scrum in the past, Alan was surprised how difficult implementing agile practices was when the workdays of most team members overlapped only an hour or less. Realizing that their sprint planning and retrospectives were not going to be sustainable, the team knew they would have to make some changes. Alan shows you how his teams effectively manage their workload, combine agile with open source software processes, and create a system that survives and thrives even with the extreme communication latencies of a fully-distributed team.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Alan Bennett.
AW7 Scaling Agile: In Theory and Practice
Bob Payne, LitheSpeed
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Heated debate swirls around agile methods and how to scale them. Most of this energy is created by the perception that there exists but one true way to do agile. Einstein once said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they never are.” And the topic of agile at scale is the same. Bob Payne pragmatically approaches the discussion of how and when to scale agile. Not surprisingly, the theories about scaling agile methods exhibit similar properties and patterns despite all the dogma. So, why do certain patterns prevail, and how do those patterns change when confronted by the realities of practice? Tradeoffs are inevitable with the choice of how to scale agile practices. Explore the pros and cons of interlinked planning, teams of small teams, transparency, and continuous cross team integration. Let's bust some dogma and at the end of the session discuss specific scaling techniques.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Bob Payne.
AW8 Be Fast on Your Feet: Kick Back and WATCH the Board
Steve Dempsen, Capital Group
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Have limited time monitoring complex projects? Need to be fast on your feet during your teams’ standups? It’s a daunting task to keep track of the current work in flight. Steve Dempsen shares a mnemonic technique―WATCH—to help you think of and articulate critical questions to ask on the fly. For story cards remember W―Where is the card? Where should it be? A―What is the average time for a story this size? Are we on schedule? T―What is the status of testing? Test coverage and complexity? C―Is the story complete? consistent? And H―Is help needed? Who should we turn to? With limited time and complex subjects, ScrumMasters can use each letter in WATCH to quickly help their teams remain aware of the key aspects of development and remain focused on delivering effective solutions.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Steve Dempsen.
AW9 Comcast XFINITY Home: An Agile Case Study
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Today's mobile application development is a complex endeavor made more difficult by teams often working at cross purposes. Separation of roles and responsibilities leads to intricate technological and personnel dependencies that makes projects challenging. Mark Hashimoto shares personal insights and lessons learned during the agile development effort of Comcast XFINITY Home iOS and Android mobile apps. Mark suggests that defining system interfaces first allows client, server, and test teams to develop in parallel; limiting mobile UX reviews to objective matters rather than subjective opinions builds trust and respect; creating binary acceptance criteria removes sprint completion ambiguity; and adhering to disciplined meeting goals reduces wasted time. However, not all lessons learned were of a technical or procedural nature. Mark describes the human dynamics involved and the most common frustrations facing your team—too many meetings, rework caused by ambiguous mobile requirements, missed deadlines, and problems that arise from a lack of time.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Mark Hashimoto.
AW10 SAFe Integration Patterns: Scaling with Continuous Collaboration
Jeff Downs, Tasktop Technologies
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

“Going agile” at a fifty-person startup is easy; at a 5,000 person ISV it’s impressive; and in a Fortune 500 company it’s often a nightmare. At large scale, the sheer number of legacy systems, stakeholder specific tools, and governance processes can turn even a simple agile deployment into a water-scrum-fall abomination. The ability to scale agile is critical for any size organization aspiring to remain competitive in a software-driven economy. Jeff Downs leads a discussion about being agile by keeping the focus on people—rather than processes and tools—through integration. Jeff introduces several tool-agnostic integration patterns, including defect unification, agile orchestration, and supply chain integration, which are critical to any organization trying to succeed with large scale agile. Learn how these integration patterns lead to an integrated agile tool suite that breaks down the barriers between teams, puts your people in a position to continuously collaborate, and enables a scaled agile initiative.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jeff Downs.
AW11 Agile in Government and Highly Regulated Settings
Suzanne Miller, Software Engineering Institute
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Since 2009, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has been researching the adoption and application of agile and lean methods and principles in US government and other highly regulated settings (e.g., finance, healthcare) with regulatory constraints on their development lifecycles. At first, there were few of these organizations practicing agile; six years later the interest level in agile approaches to software (and systems, in some cases) development has increased tremendously. Suzanne Miller shares how agile affects areas such as management and governance, contracting, security, measurement, testing, and systems engineering. Suzanne provides insights into the constraints government organizations and regulated industries typically face when adopting agile principles, notes how changes in the regulatory environment are affecting those adopting agile, and shares both adoption risks and some of the strategies organizations are employing to address them.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Suzanne Miller.
AW12 How Agile Can We Go? Lessons Learned Moving from Waterfall
Max McGregor, Venafi
Wednesday, June 10, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

How agile are you? Once you jump off the waterfall and drink from the agile pool, there will probably be varying opinions as to the state of the organization’s agility. Some will be concerned that they are not agile enough; others will think they are agile while still adhering to old waterfall principles. Adapting to agile requires process changes that can cause friction within and between teams. Max McGregor’s organization Venafi has several teams working on multiple projects, spread worldwide. Even after a number of software releases using agile methods, teams still have challenges. Max provides insight into one mid-sized organization’s evolution through this process—where it’s working well, what the biggest challenges are, and what’s being done to increase its success with agile. Join Max to determine how agile you can or should become, and take back new ideas and methods to your teams to help them succeed.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Max McGregor.
AT1 The Joy of Work: People Performance and Innovation in Agile Development
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your agile team rewarded for finding better ways to work and innovating? Even though many organizations have adopted agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with agile values or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition. With a new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the annual review and recognize its limitations, and the damage it causes to individual morale and team productivity. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to agile principles but also actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how de-link merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Sanjiv Augustine.
AT2 The Business Analyst Role on Agile Projects
Brian Watson, VersionOne
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Agile—a single word that sparked unprecedented confusion in the technology world. When it went agile, did your organization throw out your business analyst team? Have they banned all requirements documentation? Are teams struggling to see the big picture? Brian Watson has encountered each of these scenarios. Brian reveals the facts and busts the myths about requirements, documentation, teamwork, and the role of the business analyst in an agile environment. The relationship between the product owner and the team often develops through the activities normally associated with business analysts. Learn how this relationship grows through identifying and building a minimum viable product, see which Agile Manifesto principles are critical to business analysts, uncover the truth behind the cost of extensive documentation, determine how to use just enough documentation to be successful, and find out how to harness your business analysis skills to navigate the stormy waters of an agile transformation.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Brian Watson.
AT3 The Tester Role in the Agile Release Train
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

In a classical agile team, testers and developers work together on feature teams to produce functioning software in each sprint. As enterprises scale up their agile adoption, the agile feature teams must work in concert with many other teams, such as component teams and system teams. They may find that they need to interact with a number of technical experts and domain experts—DBAs, architects, user experience experts, business analysts, and others—who form part of the supporting cast. Together, these teams and individuals make up the “team of teams,” often known as the release train. Testers play a key role in each of these teams along the way. Malcolm Isaacs explores each of these teams, their functions, and their interactions with the rest of the enterprise from the perspective of the tester. He discusses testing tools and techniques that testers in each of these enterprise teams can leverage to increase overall quality.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Malcolm Isaacs.
AT4 Let’s Talk Agile: Crucial Conversations with Executives
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Does speaking to your company’s management or executives about agile scare you half to death? If so, you aren’t alone. Bob Hartman explains the most common scenarios that trigger these fears. An interactive exercise using these scenarios gives you a baseline of insights into the causes of the fear or anxiety we experience in these situations. Bob uses these insights to help you understand the basic skills necessary to effectively communicate with people in positions of authority. He explores the importance of having empathy, understanding motivation, and using basic negotiation skills in the context of having meaningful conversations. In addition, he shares several common communication methods that fall flat when speaking to executives. Bob concludes with an exercise to ensure everyone leaves with the critical understanding of both the positive techniques to use and the negative techniques to avoid during these difficult conversations.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Bob Hartman.
AT5 The Art of Storytelling: User Story Smells and Anti-Patterns
Fadi Stephan, Excella Consulting
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Agilists employ user stories to capture requirements and drive the planning process for iterative and incremental delivery of software. Traditionalists with experience in “big requirements up front” often struggle with the brevity of user stories and how to best communicate requirements. Fadi Stephan explains the basic concepts of user stories, explores the benefits of employing user stories to represent customer requirements, and discusses the attributes of a good user story. He takes a deep dive into common anti-patterns and mistakes that teams make when writing user stories so you can learn to identify and avoid these mistakes. Along the way, determine the right size for a user story, learn how to properly split a user story, and discover different boundaries for prioritizing stories. Understand when a story is ready for development—and how to decompose a story that is not ready. Leave with new insights on how to write effective user stories.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Fadi Stephan.
AT7 Leadership Styles for a Successful Agile Transformation
Chris Sims, Agile Learning Labs
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Transforming an organization to become more agile requires leadership. But what kind of leadership? Who does the leading? When? How? Chris Sims guides you through the process of mapping the styles of leadership needed at various points in your company’s agile transformation. Chris explores the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman described in his Harvard Business Review Study Leadership That Gets Results and learn when each style is effective. He mixes in the Satir Change Model that describes how people and organizations process their way through change. Work in small groups to synthesize these two models, creating a map for applying different leadership styles at points along the change curve of an agile adoption. There is no one correct answer. Each group creates a map based on their experiences and their organizations. Chris facilitates a final review of the maps created to share insights and create deeper understanding.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Chris Sims.
AT8 User Stories: From Fuzzy to Razor Sharp
Phil Ricci, Agile-Now
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

User stories are the basis for products built using agile development. User stories are relatively short, comprised of enough information to start the development process, and designed to initiate further conversation about details. Short doesn’t necessarily mean useful. Ambiguous stories are “mysteries wrapped in an enigma”—potentially leading us to develop the wrong product. Phil Ricci explores ways to turn fuzzy user stories into sharply focused stories from their inception. That involves addressing questions of Are we talking with the right people? and Are we asking the right questions? Phil shares a four-step process—Review Description, Clarify User Role, Check for Discrepancies, Critically Review Acceptance Criteria—that sharpens the stories. Setting up a story maintenance schedule sponsored by the Product Owner with guidance from the ScrumMaster ensures that stories remain useful throughout their lifetime.

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Learn more about Phil Ricci.
AT9 Integrate V&V within Scrum: How Does That Work?
Kathryn Aragon, Sandia National Laboratories
Julie Bouchard, Sandia National Laboratories
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for delivering business value. It is not a Verification and Validation (V&V) approach. So how do we merge Scrum and V&V when a product must be subjected to formal V&V activities? How do we plan V&V work, incorporating it into a Scrum roadmap and backlog? How do we execute the V&V plan while performing development activities? Julie Bouchard and Kathy Aragon briefly describe what V&V is—and what it isn’t. They introduce V&V Navigator, a Government-developed, web-based tool to aid in identifying candidate V&V activities. Julie and Kathy demonstrate the use of Navigator to plan activities and artifacts for V&V, show how to map V&V activities into a Scrum backlog, and explore how to bake V&V into epics and stories “done” criteria. Learn ways to integrate V&V within the Scrum development process—the same as we do testing activities.

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Learn more about Kathryn Aragon and Julie Bouchard.
AT10 Teaching Pointy-Haired Bosses to be Agile Enablers
Ryan Ripley, AgileAnswerMan.com
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Ryan Ripley says that Scrum failures can often be traced back to management not understanding their role in an agile world. What gets managed during an agile project? How is success measured? Will I keep my job in the transition? Managers have all these questions and more during an agile transformation. Unfortunately, these fears are not covered during the two-day certification courses. Agile coaches need a plan for how to talk with managers and teach them the best ways to contribute to agile projects. To better understand managers’ concerns, Ryan introduces the concept of personas, representing different managers. He explores ways to “coach up” management and help them get past their concerns and issues. Ryan shares his insights on where managers can improve agile projects, how they can add value in a newly transformed organization, and help pave the way for agile teams to succeed.

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Learn more about Ryan Ripley.
AT11 Building Agile Teams in a Global Environment
Betsy Kauffman, Agile Pi
Oscar Rodriquez, Agile Pi
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Many organizations use teams spread worldwide to develop valuable business applications. These organizations expect the teams to work as one harmonious unit without missing a beat—or should we say, a story point. A few organizations do it well; many not so well. Betsy Kauffman and Oscar Rodriquez share their experiences in working with globally distributed teams, discussing team models implemented in many organizations. They discuss how to transition from a model that may not be optimal (developers onshore and testing offshore) to a model where teams work together to deliver high quality working software regardless of their location. Along the way, explore “non-negotiables” and sustainable software engineering practices, i.e., DevOps and managing/maintaining solid team health, needed for building strong teams. Leave with a set of guiding principles you can implement day one that encompass agile leadership qualities, common sprint cadences, and “rules” to build strong successful teams.

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Learn more about Betsy Kauffman and Oscar Rodriquez.
AT12 Test Automation in Agile: A Successful Implementation
Melissa Tondi, Denver Automation and Quality Engineering
Thursday, June 11, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Many agile teams have experienced big problems when implementing test automation. For example, they may discover that a purchased tool is often seen as a “silver bullet” and feel forced to use it even though better options may exist. Melissa Tondi discusses who is affected by automation, where it belongs in the development lifecycle, and when it should start. In addition, Melissa thoughtfully presents common pitfalls—unattainable metrics, tooling missteps, and transitioning a manual test team—that get in the way of a successful implementation and shares recommendations on how to address each of these pitfalls. Find out ways to quickly move up the learning curve from manual testing to automation and take back guidelines on what to automate and when. Don’t throw in the towel on test automation—it’s a critical and required part of all successful agile implementations.

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Learn more about Melissa Tondi.