Agile Development

Keynotes

K2 Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile Development

Dean Leffingwell, Leffingwell, LLC

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 12:45pm

Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more.

K4 Lean Software Delivery: Synchronizing Cadence with Context

Mik Kersten, Tasktop

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 12:45pm

Daily, we are told that adopting agile, PaaS, DevOps, crowdsourced testing, or any of the myriad of current buzzwords will help us deliver better software faster. However, for the majority of software development organizations, naïve agile transformations that don’t look beyond the needs of developers will fail to produce the promised results.

Tutorials

MF SOLD OUT! Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

MH Tuning and Improving Your Agility

David Hussman, DevJam

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Are you using agile practices but struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others, and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, roadmapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings.

MK Agile Model-Driven Development

Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

In this interactive session, Scott Ambler explores a vitally important, nitty-gritty, down-in-the-weeds aspect of agile—how to take an agile model-driven development (AMDD) approach to enhance and scale your software delivery capabilities. Correctly applied, AMDD enhances your modeling and documentation efforts, streamlines agile development, and reduces false starts and rework.

MN SOLD OUT! Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow

Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

While first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors.

TI Eight Steps to Kanban

Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives

Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Alan Shalloway shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

TL Essential Test-Driven Development

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

Test-driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

TQ SOLD OUT! Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond

David Hussman, DevJam

Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate.

Concurrent Sessions

BW11 Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com

Seng Lin Shee, Ancestry.com

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

Continuous delivery is a practice that enables teams to release code at any time, based on changing business requirements. However, continuous delivery requires a substantial investment in infrastructure and possibly fundamental architectural changes to support the process. Anti-patterns that would render a continuous delivery pipeline a burden rather than a beneficial tool for continuous delivery must be avoided.

AW4 Agile Testing: It’s a Team Sport

Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan, LeanDog

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Who is responsible for testing on agile teams? The answer is “Everybody”—and yet this is rarely the case. Often the testers write their test cases in isolation and execute them after development is finished. Developers write their code without talking to the testers except to understand how to reproduce the latest discovered defect. Product owners elaborate requirements in isolation and then hand them off to the team only to check back at the end of the sprint. Business analysts spend their time working on documents that have questionable usefulness.

AW7 Behavior-Driven Design in Practice

Nir Szilagyi, eBay, Inc.

Janarthanan Eindhal, eBay, Inc.

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

One of software development’s greatest challenges is combining business needs with technical abilities to build products that customers want. Many development methodologies attempt to achieve this, but Nir Szilagyi and Janarthanan Eindhal think that few connect the dots as well as behavior-driven development (BDD), an agile development methodology derived from test-driven development (TDD) and other agile practices. Unlike TDD, which focuses on code design, BDD focuses on the customer.

AW10 The Evolution of Agile: Dealing with the Growing Pains

Jonathan Thorpe, Serena Software

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

Agile development has evolved into a lifecycle that not only affects the IT department but the overall business as well. Forward-thinking enterprises recognize this and benefit from the software efficiency that agile development delivers. Through real-world examples, Jonathan Thorpe explains how enterprises can improve their agile success. Discover how successful global enterprises are applying the principles of agile development beyond just software development to a level where it affects entire business groups.

AT1 The Five Facets of an Agile Organization

George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

Is agile—or lean, kanban, lean startup, etc.—starting to follow the path of other management buzzwords in your organization? Is it losing steam, now resembling only a minor change from the old ways? Have you compromised to "make agile work in our organization?” As organizations introduce new paradigms, they often run into roadblocks of inertia. When these are not overcome, the initial excitement and the potential benefits drain away. Treating changes such as agile as merely a software delivery approach typically means disregarding four other key facets of the agile organization.

AT3 Agile Development in a Regulated Environment

Chris Ampenberger, PHT Corporation

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

There is no doubt that agile is an accepted development methodology. However, if you work in a regulated industry like health care where you have to comply with its standard operating procedures, heaps of paperwork, and frequent audits, don’t these conflict with agile’s core tenets? Chris Ampenberger describes his operating environment and the applicable regulations that define the constraints for the software development process he can use. He shares how they overcame the incongruity between agile and regulatory requirements.

AT6 Agile Requirements Is Not an Oxymoron

Paul Reed, EBG Consulting

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

Misconceptions abound about the way requirements fit—or don’t fit—into agile projects. Is “agile requirements” an oxymoron—two contradictory terms joined together? How is it possible for requirements to be agile? Do agile projects even need requirements? In reality, requirements are the basis for planning, analyzing, developing, and delivering agile projects. Paul Reed shares the value of requirements analysis on agile projects, the ways requirements form the basis for agile planning, and explains how effective agile teams collaborate to develop requirements.

AT7 Building a Team Backlog: The Power of Retrospectives

Kanchan Khera, McKinsey & Company

Bhuwan Lodha, McKinsey & Company

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

“Inspect and adapt” is one of the basic tenets of continuous improvement, and agility in general. Holding retrospectives is one of the core processes that allows teams to look back and reflect on their progress. However, over time, teams may focus only on the product work and lose interest in their own improvement as a team.

AT10 The Business Analyst’s Critical Role in Agile Projects

Mark Layton, Platinum Edge, Inc.

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Are you a business analyst, wondering how you fit into agile projects? Are you a ScrumMaster who wants to work with business analysts for a stronger project team? Are you a product owner who needs to supercharge your product backlog? Mark Layton introduces you to the critical role of the business analyst on agile projects. Get the essential information business analysts need to know to be successful members of an agile project team. Learn how business analysts can use their product knowledge and requirements translation skills to support product owners and stakeholders.

AT11 The Next Frontier of Agile: Journey to Continuous Delivery

Nicole Sweeney, Intuit

Martin Franklin, Intuit

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Organizations are under pressure to release faster with higher quality, while business and technology environments are increasingly becoming more and more complex. How can you deploy great products quickly in such a challenging environment? Intuit, maker of TurboTax, is solving this problem with continuous delivery practices. Continuous delivery is the next stage of agile, allowing organizations to achieve greater velocity, repeatability, and sustainability through a continuous build, test, and deploy process.

BT6 Trends in Big Data Testing

Stefano Rizzo, Polarion Software

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

The Big Data has three unique characteristics—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Today’s big data applications are growing dramatically. We must process data ever more quickly so we can respond to events as they happen, and that data is arriving from an ever wider array of channels, sensors, and formats. Stefano Rizzo explains that the main challenges of testing big data by little agile teams, beside the apparent contradiction, are related to testing individual components vs. testing the big product, traceability, and organizing massive amounts of test data vs.

Pre-Conference Training

Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3-day)

David Bulkin, LitheSpeed

Sun, 06/02/2013 - 8:30am

This three-day ScrumMaster certification course provides everything you need to begin leading or participating in a Scrum team. You will learn the essential concepts and tools of Scrum, differences between agile processes and traditional "waterfall" methodologies, and how to build a roadmap for adopting agile at your organization. Participants will learn how to lead development teams towards agile operations by: managing product backlogs, planning releases and sprints, tracking and reporting progress, and conducting retrospectives. Successful attendees receive Scrum training materials, a 12-month membership in the ScrumAlliance, and are eligible to take an exam, which will qualify them as Certified ScrumMasters (CSMs) upon successful completion.

Product Owner Certification (2-day)

Arlen Bankston, LitheSpeed

Sun, 06/02/2013 - 8:30am

This two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner certification course provides the jumping off point for you to take on the hardest role in Scrum, being a Product Owner. Being an effective Product Owner is difficult, but, if executed well, it can be incredibly rewarding as speed to market and value will grow substantially. On completion of the course you are registered as a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) with a two-year membership in the Scrum Alliance (www.scrumalliance.org) where valuable materials and information are available exclusively to CSPOs.

Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-day)

Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Sun, 06/02/2013 - 8:30am

Fundamentals of Agile Certification will present a roadmap for how to get started with agile along with practical advice. It will introduce you to agile software development concepts and teach you how to make them work. You will learn what agile is all about, why agile works, and how to effectively plan and develop software using agile principles. A running case study allows you to apply the techniques you are learning as you go through the course.