People and Teams

Keynotes

K1 The Art of Change: Influence Skills for Leaders

Dale Emery, DHE

Wed, 06/05/2013 - 8:30am

An organization’s ability to make improvement, whether for greater agility or other goals, involves two components—a technical component and a people component. The technical component is generally logical, linear, and relatively straightforward, and the technical change agents are often skilled at implementing the technology. On the other hand, the people component is never straightforward.

K3 Magnificence: Culture Hacking, the Common Platform, and the Coming Golden Era

Jim McCarthy, McCarthy Technologies, Inc.

Thu, 06/06/2013 - 8:30am

A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. The unique challenges of creating software have demanded totally new types of corporate culture. In response, we have created agile, Scrum, and XP. These represent the birth of culture engineering and, although significant, are very primitive compared to what will follow. Jim McCarthy introduces “culture hacking,” a kind of cultural engineering that focuses on protecting personal freedom, extending openness, and embodying rationality.

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

MG What’s Your Leadership IQ?

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

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

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

TC Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams

Bob Galen, RGalen Consulting

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

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could.

TM Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

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

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

Concurrent Sessions

BW5 Turbocharge Your Team’s Productivity: Increase Your Ability to Deliver

Rob Maher, Rob Maher Consulting

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

Many factors impact a team’s productivity. Some are well understood—collocation, size, common purpose. Others are less well known including social capital—the value of social networking. Rob Maher describes techniques that have been successfully used within organizations to enhance team productivity. Even geographically dispersed teams can benefit from techniques that build social capital to enhance productivity and reduce risk.

BT5 Gamification to Solve Real-World Challenges

Ram Srinivasan, inRhythm

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

What can we learn from Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than one billion times? What makes games engaging and fun? What is the secret that motivates players to mastery, even when they fail 80 percent of the time? What if we could reverse-engineer the principles behind a well-designed game and graft them to a real-life business challenge? Based on psychology, design, strategy, and technology, gamification is an emerging and exciting concept. Ram Srinivasan describes the principles behind player engagement, social connectivity, and self-motivation to mastery.

AW5 Agile Redefines Global Economics: What Recent Data Reveals

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

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

Kent Beck, inventor of eXtreme Programming, defined agile success as delivering more useful functionality with fewer defects. Against that definition, early research revealed mixed success. Many organizations did not know how to measure and thus could not have “fact-based” conversations about productivity and cost. Some teams achieved faster delivery, but quality did not improve. Others found both. What factors made the difference? New benchmark analysis by QSM Associates reveals the latest productivity, time-to-market, quality, and cost patterns.

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.

AW9 Building Hyperproductive Agile Teams: Leveraging What Science Knows

Michael DePaoli, cPrime

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

The key impediments that prevent many organizations from ever realizing the promise of agile and lean aren’t rooted in processes or tools. The impediments stem from the organization’s leaders. Sharing an interdisciplinary overview of the most compelling science and research in the aspects of team performance, Michael DePaoli shows that it is largely ignored.

BT2 Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach

Woody Zuill, Hunter Industries

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

Teamwork is an important component of agile software development. We all agree that teamwork must be nurtured and grown in our organizations. But what does it mean to work as a team in the world of software development? How can we encourage our “teams” to truly work “as a team?” Woody Zuill and his team at Hunter Industries have found tremendous benefits following the whole team approach they call Mob Programming. Everyone works together at the same time, in the same space, on the same problem, and at the computer—every day, eight hours a day! How can this possibly work?

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.

AT2 Enterprise Lean-Agile: It’s More Than Scrum

Jeff Marr, Cisco

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

Introducing agile development into a large enterprise is like creating a bubble of sanity in the midst of bedlam. Unless the sanity spreads, the effort is ultimately frustrating, frustrated—and fails. Jeff Marr describes the web of the enterprise ecosystem and presents strategies to build a common agile and lean vocabulary and set of practices within your organization.

AT9 Lean Management: Lessons from the Field

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed

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

Agile development methods such as Scrum, XP, and kanban have achieved notable success in improving speed to value, reducing waste, and raising customer and team satisfaction. Successful practitioners worldwide have cut development times, improved product quality, and reduced development cost. Underlying these agile methods are timeless lean principles—focus on customer value, respect for people, and continuous improvement. Sanjiv Augustine describes how agile teams are implementing lean management.