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Conference Schedule

Sunday, November 10

Lunch - 12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

 

 

From Practitioner to Published Author: A Workshop About Writing About Software (Complimentary Session)
Beth Romanik & Jonathan Vanian, Software Quality Engineering
Sunday, November 10 • 12:30pm–4:30pm

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Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3-days)
David Bulkin

Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days)
Dale Perry

Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-days)
Jeff Payne

Agile Tester Certification - ICAgile (2-days)
Rob Sabourin

Product Owner Certification (2-days)
Arlen Bankston

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Monday, November 11

Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3-days)
David Bulkin

Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days)
Dawn Haynes

Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-days)
Jeff Payne

Agile Tester Certification - ICAgile (2-days)
Rob Sabourin

Product Owner Certification (2-days)
Arlen Bankston

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Tutorials MB: Requirements Engineering: A Practicum
Erik van Veenendaal, Improve IT Services BV
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

Identifying, documenting, and communicating software requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are “How do we discover the real requirements?”, “How do we document requirements?”, and “How do user stories fit into requirements?” Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions.

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Tutorials MC: Agile Program Management: Networks, Not Hierarchies NEW
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

When you think of program management, do you think of big lumbering organizational beasts that add little value, and people demanding “When will you be done?” or “Can we add this feature before the desired release date?” Agile program management encourages small-world networks of collaborative teams that can solve problems and deliver features fast. That requires the entire program be agile and lean—using small batch sizes, integrating continuously, having short iterations, and tracking cycle time so you can coordinate across the organization.

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Tutorials MD: Dealing with Estimation, Uncertainty, Risk, and Commitment
Todd Little, Landmark Graphics Corporation
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Software projects are known to have challenges with estimation, uncertainty, risk, and commitment—and the most valuable projects often carry the most risk. Other industries also encounter risk and generate value by understanding and managing that risk effectively. Todd Little explores techniques used in a number of risky businesses—product development, oil and gas exploration, investment banking, medicine, weather forecasting, and gambling—and shares what those industries have done to manage uncertainty.

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Tutorials ME: Twelve Heuristics for Solving Tough Problems—Faster and Better
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

As infants, we begin our lives as problem solving machines, learning to navigate a strange and complex world in which others communicate in ways we don’t understand. Initially, we hone our problem solving talents; then many of us find our explorations thwarted and eventually stop using and then begin losing our natural problem solving ability. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Psychologists tell us that people can regain lost skills and learn new ones to become better problem solvers. Payson Hall shares techniques and skills that apply to situations in real life.

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Tutorials MF: Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

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.

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Tutorials MG: What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

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.

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Tutorials MH: Usability Testing in a Nutshell
Julie Gardiner, The Test People
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Because systems are now more complex and competition is extreme, testing for usability is critical for ensuring our products not only stand out from the crowd but even exceed our customer’s expectations. As testers, we often encounter requirements such as “The system must be user-friendly.” What does this mean? And, more importantly, how do we test against this vague notion? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents usability testing techniques to help evaluate system efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction.

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Tutorials MI: Design Patterns Explained: From Analysis through Implementation
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Ken Pugh takes you beyond thinking of design patterns as “solutions to a problem in a context.” Patterns are really about handling variations in your problem domain while keeping code from becoming complex and difficult to maintain as the system evolves. Ken begins by describing the classic use of patterns. He shows how design patterns implement good coding practices and then explains key design patterns including Strategy, Bridge, Adapter, Façade, and Abstract Factory.

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Tutorials MJ: Problem Solving and Decision Making in Software Development NEW
Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Unfortunately, those of us who struggle with complex problems for a living don't have time to keep up with the enormous amount of cognitive science research that could help us become better thinkers, better problem solvers, and better decision makers. Having devoted more than ten years to researching the fast-moving fields that almost daily reveal new information, Linda shares what she has uncovered—some of it surprising, some even counterintuitive. She summarizes the research and provides concrete tips for improving your individual, team, and organizational abilities.

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Tutorials MA: Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning. In hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

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Lunch - 12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Tutorials ML: The Developer’s Guide to Test Automation
Dale Emery, DHE
George Dinwiddie, iDIA Computing, LLC
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Your shrinking project deadlines are increasing the need for automated tests—but, simultaneously, reducing the time available for writing them. The system requirements are continually changing. The implementation is changing. You spend more and more time maintaining old tests, leaving less time to write new ones. The tests take longer and longer to run. And when they fail, the problem is as likely to be in the tests as in the system.

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Tutorials MM: Configuration Management Best Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Robust configuration management (CM) practices are essential for creating continuous builds to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling change, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore.

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Tutorials MN: An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework NEW
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Many organizations have achieved agility at the team level only to be unable to achieve it across teams. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides both a vision and method for how to achieve this. SAFe is the first documented framework that can be used to scale agile throughout an organization. It is a combination of lean, kanban, and Scrum—lean to provide a context for an organization, kanban to manage the flow of projects, and Scrum to provide agile at the team level. Beginning with an introduction to lean and kanban, Ken Pugh explains why they are required for agile at scale.

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Tutorials MO: Understanding and Managing Change
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it fails. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. It may be that your great idea didn't mesh well with your organization’s culture or a host of other reasons. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work well within your organization.

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Tutorials MP: Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Bob Hartman and Michael Vizdos shares their experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together.

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Tutorials MQ: Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

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.

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Tutorials MR: Congruent Coaching: An Exploration NEW
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

We have opportunities to coach people all the time. Much of what we see as coaching is actually undercover training. Real coaching is richer—offering support while explaining options. In this interactive session, Johanna Rothman invites you to explore how to coach, regardless of your position in the organization. Teaching is just one option for coaching. You have many other options, depending on your coaching stance. You may select a counselor’s stance if you are managing up or a partner’s stance if you are a peer.

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Tutorials MK: Disciplined Agile Delivery: Extending Scrum to the Enterprise
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Going far beyond the limits of a team approach to agile, Scott Ambler explores a disciplined, full-lifecycle methodology for agile software delivery. In this interactive hands-on session, learn how to initiate a large-scale agile project, exploring ways to extend Scrum's value-driven development approach to include both value and risk in the equation. Discover project governance practices that will increase your team's chance of success.

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Tuesday, November 12

Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3-days)
David Bulkin

Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days)
Dawn Haynes

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Tutorials TB: Accelerated Agile: From Months to Minutes NEW
Dan North, Dan North & Associates, Ltd.
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

Formula 1 drivers don’t just drive faster than you—they drive differently. Accelerated Agile uses different rules, based on the core principles of agile but taken to another level, to deliver in hours and days what regular teams can only achieve in weeks or months. Accelerated Agile is for experienced agile practitioners who are frustrated with the pseudo-science of agile planning and estimation, the social pressure to automate where it doesn’t add value, the artificial commitment of sprints, and the unwelcome surprises that still derail projects.

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Tutorials TC: Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enable the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations.

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Tutorials TA: Deliver Projects On Time, Every Time
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
8:30 AM - 4:30 PM

Ken Whitaker shares pragmatic techniques to help project managers and software development leaders put into practice innovative scheduling techniques, make consistent customer-centric decisions, reduce project risk, quickly negotiate with product owners the most important project scope, and transition teams to become more agile. Ken shares revealing statistical data on how waterfall is simply not suited for modern-day adaptive software development projects. With fellow participants, you’ll spend time performing a “Scrum walkabout” to get the idea of just how an agile project really works.

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Tutorials TD: Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

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 agile 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.

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Tutorials TE: Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.

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Tutorials TF: Design for Testability: A Tutorial for Devs and Testers
Peter Zimmerer, Siemens AG
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all. Testability is not free; it must be explicitly designed into the system through adequate design for testability.

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Tutorials TH: The Role of the Agile Business Analyst
Steve Adolph, WSA Consulting
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders.

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Tutorials TI: Eight Steps to Kanban
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

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. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

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Tutorials TJ: Coaching and Leading Agility: A Discussion of Agile Tuning NEW
David Hussman, DevJam
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Are you an agile practitioner wanting to take your agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns from their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that identifies both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you examine the processes you are using, why you are using them, and if they are providing real value.

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Tutorials TG: Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
8:30 AM - 12:00 PM

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

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Lunch - 12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM

Tutorials TK: Essential Test-Driven Development
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

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.

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Tutorials TN: Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—And What to Do about Them
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Every large software project is unique—each with its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns, and succumb to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented—or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—only make things worse.

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Tutorials TP: Planning to Learn and Learning from Delivery: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond NEW
David Hussman, DevJam
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Planning is a tool and, like all tools, can be used for good or ill. Too much planning can be wasteful; too little planning can breed chaos. Successful teams gravitate toward “just enough planning.” Building on his years of coaching XP, Scrum, kanban, and lean, David Hussman pragmatically describes planning that promotes early and continuous learning. He details how to collaboratively create plans that allow teams to continuously measure, learn, and pivot.

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Tutorials TO: Keystone Habits of Organizational Agility NEW
Ahmed Sidky, SCG Inc.
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Transforming an organization to become agile requires more than just changing the development process; it requires a complete culture shift. Yet, the focus of most agile transformations is on changing the process aspect of work. Sustainable, effective agile transformation affects all elements of culture—leadership style, values, organizational structures, reward systems, processes, and work habits.

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Tutorials TM: Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Your organization is doing well with functional, usability, and performance testing. However, you know that software security is a key part of software assurance and compliance strategy for protecting applications and critical data. Left undiscovered, security-related defects can wreak havoc in a system when malicious invaders attack. If you don’t know where to start with security testing and don’t know what you are—or should be—looking for, this tutorial is for you.

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Tutorials TQ: Patterns for Collaboration: Toward Whole-Team Quality SOLD OUT
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Matt Barcomb, odbox
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

A lot of talk goes on in agile about how collaboration among team members helps drive a shared responsibility for quality—and more. However, most teams don't do much more than just hold stand-up meetings and have programmers and testers sit together. Although these practices improve communications, they are not collaboration! Most teams simply don't understand how to collaborate. Janet Gregory and Matt Barcomb guide you through hands-on activities that illustrate collaboration patterns for programmers and testers, working together.

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Tutorials TL: Getting Started with Agile: An Experiential Workshop NEW
Brian Button, Asynchrony
1:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Agile is now mainstream, but many companies continue to struggle. When agile is adopted, common issues occur in every organization: getting people to try agile, selling agile to management, learning how to do efficient standup meetings, fitting planning into a short window, and running effective retrospectives. When you add in scaling issues, different development styles, and outsourcing, your simple agile adoption just gets more difficult.

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Wednesday, November 13

Keynotes K1: Connecting with Customers
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
8:30 AM - 9:30 AM

Even today, to the detriment of agile success, most organizational cultures remain delivery date-driven—resulting in delivery teams that are not focused on creating value for the customer. So how can we redirect stakeholders, the business, and the project team to concentrate on delivering the greatest value rather than simply meeting dates? Pollyanna Pixton describes the tools she has used in collaboration sessions to help all stakeholders and team members begin the process of adopting customer-centric agile methods.

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Industry Technical Presentations ITP2: An Agile Solution to Fit Your World of Work
Jesse Dowdle, AtTask
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
  • Learn what the primary barriers to agile adoption are and how to select the best methodology for the job—no more
    square pegs and round holes
     
  • Learn how to prioritize and collaborate work across multiple projects—make sure the right work gets done at the
    right time and stop losing work in email and chat (eliminating frequent status meetings)
     
  • Learn how businesses roll up reporting and management without stifling creativity and efficiency
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Industry Technical Presentations ITP1: Enterprise Agile Requirements
Steph Hubert, BluePrint
10:15 AM - 11:15 AM
  • Learn why traditional business functions are clashing with new agile development approaches and how to reduce
    this conflict
     
  • Learn how requirements directly impact audit, compliance and successful software delivery with Agile approaches
    like they do with traditional approaches
     
  • Learn a practical approach for defining and managing enterprise agile requirements compatible with popular Agile
    approaches such as Scrum, Disciplined Agile Delivery, and Scaled Agile Framework
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Concurrent Sessions AW2: Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar Some More
David Hussman, DevJam
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

History repeats itself as people once again become addicted to process. Today’s difficult problems call for a renaissance of agility, drawing on past success as we invent the future. Real value lies in intentional and contextual selection of agile tools instead of the noise associated with calls to practice “pure agile.” It is time to replace process-based thinking with outcome-based thinking. It is time to stop talking about process adherence and start focusing on product delivery.

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Concurrent Sessions AW4: An Automation Culture: The Key to Agile Success
Geoff Meyer, Dell, Inc.
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

For organizations developing large-scale applications, transitioning to agile is challenging enough. But if your organization has not yet adopted an automation culture, brace yourself for a big surprise because automation is essential to agile success. From the safety nets provided by automated unit and acceptance tests to the automation of build, build verification, and deployment processes, the iterative nature of agile demands a culture of automation across your engineering organization.

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Concurrent Sessions AW1: The Mindset of Managing Uncertainty: The Key to Agile Success
Ahmed Sidky, SCG Inc.
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

The speed of global change and the advancement of technology will continue to increase the uncertainty in our work. Those with an Agile Mindset can manage uncertainty through continuous value-based discovery; those with a Fixed Mindset try to “freeze” things early to decrease uncertainty. Unfortunately, many people never switch their mindset and are doing agile while not being agile. Ahmed Sidky explains that your mindset is at the heart of your day-to-day challenges as you try to manage uncertainty more effectively.

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Concurrent Sessions AW3: Getting Ready for Your Agile Adventure
Mario Moreira, Agile Consultant
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

When a team is ready to embark on an agile adventure, it is vital to consider the behavioral and practical aspects of agile prior to jumping in. Mario shares the important readiness factors within his “Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone” deployment framework. This includes preparing for an agile mindset of culture change and providing insight and knowledge into the challenging decisions that should be made prior to embarking on the adventure.

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Keynotes K2: Reading the Tea Leaves: Predicting a Project’s Future
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
12:45 PM - 1:45 PM

Is a project’s fate preordained? Does a project’s past suggest its likely future? Can anything be done to influence that future when the current signs aren’t promising? Payson Hall has participated in and reviewed many projects during his thirty-year career in software development. Without claiming mystical or magical powers, Payson shares problem symptoms he has observed and discusses strategies for isolating and correcting them. He helps you learn to identify “problem seeds” that can grow into larger issues over time.

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Industry Technical Presentations ITP3: You Can’t Do Agile without Service Virtualization
Wayne Ariola, Parasoft
2:15 PM - 3:15 PM
  • In agile and iterative development environments, schedule overruns or last-minute “features” commonly result in
    time-boxed testing, which shortchanges software quality.
     
  • Considering the complexity of today’s modern systems, this approach falls considerably short of the breadth and depth of
    testing required to ensure that each iteration is truly “done.”
     
  • Service virtualization—with its simulated test environments that remove dependencies on missing or evolving system
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Industry Technical Presentations ITP4: Need 4 speed: Data Driven Practices to Boost Velocity Without Compromising Quality
Paolo Lacchè, HP
2:15 PM - 3:15 PM
  • Hear from HP what we have learned after 6 years practicing Agile ourselves in a large, distributed software organization to
    move towards a continuous delivery model.
     
  • Discuss how you can use analytics and metrics from your existing processes to make better decisions and focus time where
    it will matter the most
     
  • Gain insight on how to understand velocity beyond a single number, how to stay on top of changes, and quickly uncover risks
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Concurrent Sessions AW5: Agile Success with Scrum: It’s All about the People
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Is it possible to be doing everything Scrum says to do and still fail horribly? Unfortunately, the answer is yes—and teams do it every day. To many, Scrum means concentrating on the meetings and artifacts, and making sure the roles all do their jobs. Bob Hartman and Michael Vizdos explore why success with Scrum means understanding the people who do the work and giving them the tools and environment to do their best in a meaningful way.

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Concurrent Sessions AW6: Six Impossible Things before Breakfast
Dan North, Dan North & Associates, Ltd.
Kyle Thomson, Bank of America Merrill Lynch
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of things that just don’t happen in real life. A managing director at Bank of America abandons decades of organizational “best practices” and recreates his organization by letting people organize their own teams. And, if that weren’t unusual enough, the teams even choose their own coach. Impossible. A group of former managers reinvent their role as servants rather than masters. Also impossible.

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Concurrent Sessions AW8: Pivoting Your Testers to Become Agile
Howard Deiner, BigVisible Solutions
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Many organizations struggle with transforming from the old-style specialized silos of skills into agile teams with generalized specialists. Without this pivot, we get sub-optimal agile/Scrum environments. Howard Deiner describes what can go wrong when integrating testers properly into an agile organization and how to fix that. Without a proper agile mindset, an organization will “revert to form” and return to their old practices after a frustrating failure to adapt agile.

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Concurrent Sessions AW7: Adopt Before You Adapt: Learning Principles through Practice
Steve Berczuk, Fitbit, Inc.
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Although agile principles sound simple, adopting agile is often extremely difficult. Some teams adopting agile start by making changes and tweaks to prescribed processes—bad! Steve Berczuk explains how following the recommended practices of your chosen agile method for a time will help you internalize the process and leverage the experiences of those who developed the method. Through experience, Steve has discovered that premature customization can lead to more problems and eventually to failure.

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Industry Technical Presentations ITP5: Easy Agile Development in the Cloud with IBM’s JazzHub
Kate Hauser , IBM
Sreenivasan Rajagopal, IBM
3:45 PM - 4:45 PM
  • Developers are building new types of applications that demand speed and agility. As requirements evolve over time, tooling and
    processes are crucial to ensuring that code changes can be delivered quickly and efficiently
     
  • With the strength of Rational Team Concert behind it, JazzHub is a powerful fully-hosted agile software development solution that
    helps agile teams get productive in minutes.
     
  • Demonstration of an agile team’s workflow using JazzHub’s built-in scrum process.
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Industry Technical Presentations ITP6: Secure Mobile App Testing with a Private Device Cloud
Dan McFall , Mobile Labs
3:45 PM - 4:45 PM
  • Test manually or with automation through a secure, cloud-based lab management solution
     
  • Facilitate device management and secure, 24x7 access to testers located anywhere in the world
     
  • Seamless integration with UFT means test automation engineers are ready to test – no complicated,
    proprietary scripting language to learn
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Concurrent Sessions AW10: I Thought YOU Were Flying the Plane: Preventing Projects from Falling Out of the Sky
Steve Adolph, WSA Consulting
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

One of the most cherished concepts of the Agile Manifesto is valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Within this idea is the implicit assumption that individuals innately know how to interact. Dramatic lessons from aviation suggest otherwise. During the mid-1960s the frequent crashes of perfectly good aircraft alarmed the world’s airlines. Investigators discovered nothing lacking in the pilot’s “stick and rudder” skills; these accidents were the result of the flight crew’s inability to work as a team.

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Concurrent Sessions AW11: Organizing a Self-Organizing Team
John Lynch, Clashmore Software Solutions
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Your organization is embracing agile. When it comes to adopting the process, your team seems to be doing all the right things. Yet deep down, something still doesn’t seem quite right. As their leader, it could be that you haven’t figured it out either. Perhaps your team is lacking some spark and is reluctant to take on real ownership. What can you do to help the team organize themselves to become the high-performing software development group you know they can be?

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Concurrent Sessions AW12: Test (and More) Patterns for Continuous Software Delivery
Andy Singleton, Assembla
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Top web companies employ continuous delivery of software to build and deploy systems faster and gain a marked competitive advantage. You can do it, too! Andy Singleton shares the patterns for testing in real time that result in more frequent and more reliable releases. He explains why you will have to invest seriously in automated tests and shares experiences developing the most time-efficient types of automated tests, setting up a social structure to get the tests you need, and employing existing layers of testing and production monitoring.

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Concurrent Sessions AW9: Transforming the Large Organization
Sara McClintock, Nationwide
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Transforming software development across geographic locations in a large company is difficult. But Nationwide Insurance found a way to successfully implement more than forty agile teams in multiple locations around the United States using their internal Application Development Center. Sara McClintock explains what worked for Nationwide: using Scrum practices, including creating standard work, and lean techniques, using tools such as A3s. Sara provides insight into some of the challenges Nationwide faced and shares some things they should have avoided.

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Thursday, November 14

Keynotes K3: Worse Is Better—For Better or for Worse
Kevlin Henney, Independent Consultant
8:30 AM - 9:30 AM

More than two decades ago, Richard P. Gabriel proposed the idea that “Worse Is Better” to explain why some things that are designed to be pure and perfect are eclipsed by solutions that are compromised and imperfect. This is not simply an observation that things should be better but are not, or that flawed and ill-considered solutions sometimes win out over those created with intention. Rather, many solutions that are narrow and incomplete work out better than those seen as comprehensive and complete.

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Concurrent Sessions AT1: Large Agile Transformations: A Roadmap for Lasting Change
Ole Jepsen, goAgile
Jenni Jepsen, goAgile
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

Agile methods have gained the attention of leaders as a way to speed time to market and increase motivation. Businesses are looking to agile as a way to achieve organizational change so teams deliver more value faster, and where people’s pride and joy of work are enhanced. However, we know from extensive experience that agile practices by themselves will not lead to this kind of an organizational transformation. What does it take?

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Concurrent Sessions AT3: Using Non-Violent Communication Skills for Managing Team Conflict
Pat Arcady, FreeStanding Agility
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

“Going agile” has transformed thousands of workplaces into groups of self-directed teams, more engaged and increasingly more productive. Knowledge workers report increased job satisfaction, strong team identity, and camaraderie. One of the secrets of high performing teams is their ability to manage conflict in ways that support team cohesion, deepen trust, and reinforce commitment to team greatness. Agile practices value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Sounds great on paper!  How do you live that?

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Concurrent Sessions AT4: Lean Startup Tools for Scrum Product Owners
Arlen Bankston, LitheSpeed
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

In just a few years, the Lean Startup movement has gained influence by promoting a powerful but simple agile product management toolset—one that complements agile software development approaches such as Scrum and kanban. Arlen Bankston explores the tools and techniques product owners at startup companies and others are employing today for project visioning, experimental design, evaluating new feature impact, prototyping, split testing, and gaining early customer feedback.

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Concurrent Sessions AT2: Implementing DevOps and Making It Stick
Alex Papadimoulis , Inedo
10:15 AM - 11:30 AM

If you’ve ever been involved in promoting cultural change within an organization, you may have experienced something even more disheartening than flat-out rejection—a full rollback of hard-won cultural change followed by a decade-long resentment of anyone remotely associated with the implementation. This has happened at countless organizations with agile, with SOA, with virtualization—and it’s starting to happen with DevOps. How can such a simple idea that’s been so successful at so many organizations become such a resounding failure at others?

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Keynotes K4: Learning to Be a Developer—From Day One
Iris Classon, Evry
12:45 PM - 1:45 PM

When she was little, Iris Classon was told that if you plan to go from 0 to 100 in a short period of time, you need a very good plan. So Iris made grand plans, but they all failed to deliver on her dreams and aspirations. So, when she decided to make a drastic career change from clinical nutritionist to computer programmer without ever having seen a line of code, she decided not having a plan would be her plan—embracing unpredictability and uncertainty instead of fighting it.

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Industry Technical Presentations ITP7: Become a Big Data Quality Hero
Jason Rauen, LexisNexis
2:15 PM - 3:15 PM
  • Architecture and why you need to know
     
  • Why Test Big Data and How it’s Different
     
  • Strategies and Concepts
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Concurrent Sessions AT5: Transforming to Enterprise Agility: A Leadership Practicum
Phillip Cave , SolutionsIQ
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

The pace of innovation, often hastened by agile software development, has begun to pull entire organizations into the desire and need for more agility. Phillip Cave shares his experiences transforming organizational behavior at the department and enterprise level. He describes the data, tools, approaches, and practices he has used to help leaders and organizations reach higher levels of agility. Going further, Phillip explores the leadership skills needed at all levels of the organization to achieve lasting change.

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Concurrent Sessions AT6: Speed Grooming Requirements with SAFe
André Dhondt, Rally Software Development
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Want your sprint/iteration planning to take less than fifteen minutes (excluding tasking)? The key is in the story writing we do during backlog grooming. Although the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has little to say about story writing, this "speed grooming" practice makes iteration planning a breeze, and better software comes out of the process. André Dhondt shares stories of real-world agile teams using this technique and how they've moved to a customer-empathy mindset. How does it work?

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Concurrent Sessions AT7: Test-Driven Development for Developers: Plain and Simple
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

Test-driven development (TDD) is not an easy discipline to establish. However, it provides considerable return on investment for the effort. Rob Myers describes the costs of TDD (the introduction of test-maintenance overhead) and its benefits (greatly improved quality, productivity, and throughput of real value)—but only when the TDD practices are given time to ripen.

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Concurrent Sessions AT8: The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow
Brad Swanson, agile42
2:15 PM - 3:30 PM

The Kanban Pizza Game is a hands-on simulation designed to teach the core elements of a kanban system—visualize the workflow, limit your work-in-process (WIP), manage flow, make process policies explicit, and improve collaboratively.

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Concurrent Sessions AT12: Demystifying the Role of Product Owner
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Have you ever wondered what makes a good Product Owner? It’s a broad and deep role that is often filled with a hodgepodge of differently skilled individuals. Many organizations struggle to understand its importance as they scale their agile transformations. What about exceptional Product Ownership? What does that entail? In this highly collaborative session, Bob Galen explores the Four Quadrants of Effective Product Ownership—Product Management, Project Management, Leadership, and Business Analysis. Each of these critical aspects of the Product Owner role supports the agile team.

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Concurrent Sessions AT9: Lessons from Busting Organizational Silos
Tricia Broderick, Santeon Group
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

We’ve all heard of the evils that can result from organizational silos—bottlenecks, inefficiencies, and the “us vs. them” mentality. Perhaps you’ve been a victim. As Tricia Broderick repeatedly experienced value from busting individual project team silos, she naturally wanted to expand her busting across the entire organization. Not surprisingly, this turned out to be anything but simple. What surprised her was how many challenges resulted from falling victim to both faulty logic and prior successes, including halting a team’s progress out of concerns of sub-optimization.

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Concurrent Sessions AT10: ATDD: Stop Testing at the End
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Even the fastest agile teams can struggle when they “test at the end.” As automation efforts fall behind, untested features pile up—and so does the pressure to cut corners. In contrast, Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) “tests first” by writing automated specifications for a new feature using concrete examples in plain language. This approach focuses everyone—from analysts and customers to developers and testers—on the same definition of “done.” Join Nate Oster as he explains his skeptical journey from traditional testing to ATDD.

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Concurrent Sessions AT11: Step Away from the Waterfall: Using Agile for COTS Implementations
Jason Fair, Genesis Consulting
3:45 PM - 5:00 PM

Have you wondered how to deliver your COTS projects quicker and realize their business value sooner? How do you remove all of the “ceremony” and “waste” of the implementation process, while maintaining the integrity of the delivered COTS package? Commonly, traditional waterfall project methodologies are used to implement comprehensive COTS projects. However, many of these implementations finish late and over budget. Stakeholders are often disappointed at the quality of the delivered product and the reduced or delayed realization of benefits.

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At the Agile Leadership Summit Kick-Off Reception, join fellow Summit attendees for complimentary food and beverages as you brainstorm agile leadership issues that will become the basis for the Summit's interactive sessions on Friday.

Additional registration for the Agile Leadership Summit is required to attend this event.

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Friday, November 15

Agile Leadership Summit—Leading Agile Culture Change
Thursday, November 14 • 6:00pm–8:00pm and Friday, November 15 • 8:30am–3:30pm

(Additional registration is required)

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