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Agile Development East 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 from track sessions from both Agile Development Conference East and Better Software Conference East.

                

Concurrent Sessions
AW1 Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption
Steve Adolph, Blue Agility
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

“Can we do agile?” is a question often asked by individuals enviously looking at the impressive results reported by other organizations that adopted agile practices. What they are usually concerned about are the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture and tools; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Yet, despite these perceived barriers, many organizations with these challenges do agile. Others wonder why, after all their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile. What they’re not seeing are the real barriers to agile adoption—the social barriers that impede fast decision cycles. Steve Adolph introduces a fast decision cycle model, explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, and provides a configuration guide to help participants identify and evaluate these social impediments. Using a case study of a “high ceremony” organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve impediments to doing agile.

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Learn more about Steve Adolph.
AW2 Scaling Git for the Enterprise
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Due to its ease of use and distributed repository infrastructure, Git is quickly becoming the version control system of choice for many. Getting started takes only a few minutes, and available online tutorials explain Git basics and more advanced features including branching. As easy as Git is to implement, many developers find Git challenging to scale for large enterprises. Some go to Cloud-based Git service providers; others implement tools such as Stash and gitflow for effective branching patterns and variant management. Integrating Git with other tools including workflow automation, continuous integration, and continuous delivery all come with their own challenges. Bob Aiello “gits” you started with understanding how to implement and maintain a flexible and scalable Git infrastructure that can support your agile development efforts including continuous delivery and DevOps. Git is a great tool, and scaling Git for the enterprise is very doable—if you implement the right tools and processes.

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Learn more about Bob Aiello.
AW3 Shifting Left: The Evolution of Test Automation
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Michael Faulise, tap | QA
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

As the software development lifecycle shifts toward agile and lean methodologies, quality in every build becomes critical. Continuous integration allows development teams to receive immediate feedback on their code, creating more efficiency and higher quality. After exploring the differences in continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, Jennifer Bonine and Michael Faulise discuss what is needed for their successful implementation, including the technologies and resources required at each stage of the process. Jennifer and Mike share models that show where your organization is on the continuous integration/continuous delivery path, the required technical skills needed to implement them, and how to decide if this strategy is right for you. They describe the inevitable “shifting left” of testing, and what your projects will need to optimize quality and increase velocity. Jennifer an Mike share a perspective of what has been successful and what has not worked in companies from start-ups to Fortune 100.

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine and Michael Faulise.
AW4 Simplify Project and Portfolio Planning with “Real Options”
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Do you work in an organization that spends too much time budgeting, road mapping, and planning their project roadmap or portfolio? Do you ever feel like all this effort is pointless and wasteful? Do you think perhaps there might be a simpler, more pragmatic way? If so, this session is for you. After a brief overview of necessary strategic and budgetary inputs to an investment-like product portfolio, Matt Barcomb and David Hussman share practical ideas for generating and validating projects as Real Options. You’ll explore how to collaboratively create value models and consider risk to create a lightweight portfolio framework for prioritization and decision-making. Finally, Matt and David will wrap up by embracing the uncertainty of development planning using Starting and Stopping Triggers to begin or terminate a project. Ask them your questions on simplifying portfolio planning, and leave with answers and lightweight practices you can put to work immediately.

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Learn more about Matt Barcomb and David Hussman.
AW5 Why Agile Fails in Large Enterprises—and What to Do about It
Mike Cottmeyer, LeadingAgile, LLC
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Agile works. We get it. You don’t have to sell people on the underlying principles anymore. Even so, many large-scale agile transformations are struggling. Some have failed. Others can’t figure out why things aren't working after multiple attempts. It’s easy to blame the people, the process, and the culture. And it’s especially easy to blame management. However, the underlying problem is that most large organizations weren’t built to be agile. You need a way to safely and pragmatically refactor your company into an organization that can adopt agile and sustain the transformation. Mike Cottmeyer introduces a framework for understanding the type of company in which you work, its delivery constraints, and likely challenges you’ll face in your agile transformation. Mike shares a strategy for establishing an end-state vision and operational model to guide your transformation. Finally, he defines an approach for incrementally introducing change, measuring outcomes, and sustaining those changes.

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AW6 Transforming How We Deliver Value: Agility at Scale
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Continuous delivery in software development allows us to deliver incrementally, get quick feedback, and react. A key enabler is the adoption of agile techniques and methods; key inhibitors in the enterprise are size, scale, and complexity. The Rational ALM organization is a typical enterprise, and our teams have (mostly) adopted agile principles. But agility at enterprise scale is not the same as team-based agile development. Now we must coordinate work across multiple interdependent teams to deliver value, rather than focusing on developing a single product or application. Amy Silberbauer shares her experience of adapting SAFe in an enterprise organization and describes the struggles, mistakes, and successes throughout that process. Amy identifies the key challenges, including the need to identify value, provide the right data for various audiences, and the inherent required culture shift. Learn how to avoid some common pitfalls as you and your own organization embark on this same transformation.

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AW7 Continuous Delivery: Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job
Steve Povilaitis, LeadingAgile, LLC
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Until your code is in production, making money for your business, or otherwise doing what it was built to do, you are merely building toy castles in a technological sandbox. Continuous delivery gets more business value into production as soon as possible, validates business decisions, and responds rapidly to customer feedback. Steve Povilaitis demonstrates what continuous delivery is all about and why automation is your only option for rapidly and reliably building, testing, and deploying software. Steve relates his experiences implementing continuous delivery pipelines in both large and small organizations, with examples of continuous delivery workflows and patterns. He describes a real-world implementation wholly based on open source tools, and another implementation using enterprise class commercial software. Steve leads you down the path of continuous delivery enlightenment. You will realize how correct Agent Smith from The Matrix was when he stated, “Never send a human to do a machine’s job.”

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AW8 Crafting Smaller User Stories: Examples and Exercises
Stephen Frein, Comcast
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Agile development techniques generally emphasize frequent iterations. But even after adopting agile values, methods, and ceremonies, many organizations struggle to make such iterations work in practice. These organizations inevitably wrestle with agile rhythms until they learn to break up their work into small user stories that will fit within short iterations and allow for fast feedback. Stephen Frein discusses the importance of small user stories and how crucial they are to finishing the stories within the iteration and avoiding a mini-waterfall inside an iteration. After reviewing the characteristics of a good user story, Stephen introduces various techniques for identifying stories that could be decomposed into several other stories, along with accompanying practice exercises to help you get a good feel for the practical aspects of breaking up large stories. Join Stephen if you are having trouble finishing stories within their planned iterations or if your work seems to double in the last days of an iteration.

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AW9 Agility at Scale: WebSphere’s Agile Transformation
Susan Hanson, IBM Software Group
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

In today's rapidly changing environment, organizations—both large and small—must quickly respond to shifting market requirements to remain competitive. To be successful, many are adopting agile development and continuous delivery methodologies to deliver software quickly, while keeping the quality and maintainability high. Several years ago the WebSphere Application Server development teams embarked on the journey from traditional waterfall development to agile. They are now expanding to use both agile and continuous delivery methodologies across their organization worldwide. Susan Hanson shares the challenges of working with a worldwide team across multiple time zones while shifting away from component-based teams. Learn how the team transformed their development processes, tools, and culture to better adapt to changing requirements. See how, by integrating tools, the team is able to have a complete lifecycle from customer-submitted requirements through planning, development, test, and delivery of these requirements back to the customers, allowing for continuous delivery of cloud-based services.

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Learn more about Susan Hanson.
AW10 How Agile and Project Management Can Coexist
James Hannon, The Bentley Group International
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Through the years—until agile software development took hold, that is—project management provided visibility to stakeholders and helped guide product development. However, as agile has risen to prominence with its de-emphasis on formal project planning, there are gaps that many organizations need to fill. James Hannon says that organizations now need to deal with the conundrum: Can agile and project management really coexist? Today’s manager must decompose both the standard project management flow and the agile development flow to look for symmetry and compatibility in their parts. This analysis will show that the agile backlog planning and sprint planning are excellent candidates to be integrated with the planning process from PMI. The analysis also shows that the best of the PMI methodology and agile can be woven together to give a renewed sense of agility and a vibrant logical approach to take on complex projects. The end result is a viable integration plan that you can use.

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Learn more about James Hannon.
AW11 Collaboration across Distributed Environments
Bill Krebs, Agile Dimensions LLC
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Distributed work is common today, and often the talent you need is in another geographic location where time zone differences can impede communication. Building seamless collaboration across distributed teams to support development and operational initiatives can seem impossible—even for the most experienced technology leaders. So, where do you start? How do you organize and manage distributed development and operations when traditional silos exist? Bill Krebs, aka AgileBill, will discuss six categories of tools and six practice areas to help you leverage today’s global talent. Bill contrasts traditional and spatial communication tools and discusses the use of agile infrastructure tools. He continues with attributes of your teams, workspaces, and pragmatic techniques you can use to put it all together to get the job done. Cases and examples span six key facets of distributed teams, including tools, culture, process, and pitfalls. Learn to break down the geographic barriers so distributed agile can thrive in the enterprise.

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Learn more about Bill Krebs.
AW12 Grooming the Backlog: Plan the Work, Work the Plan
Andy Berner, QSM, Inc.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Stories in the backlog must be ready to go in time to begin each sprint—priorities are set, stories are at the Goldilocks level of granularity (not too big, and not too small), and stakeholders are prepared to discuss the details. Getting the backlog ready and grooming it take serious consideration and work. You need to plan, budget for, and track this work. Andy Berner describes five key issues to consider in that planning. Since keeping the backlog groomed is the best way to make the development team most productive and maintain the release schedule, Andy describes metrics you can use to find out whether or not the backlog is ready to go as the project progresses. He demonstrates how to monitor whether the metrics are staying within expected control bounds and when they indicate you might need to re-plan the release. Take back a new process and techniques to maintain the well-groomed backlog that your team and project deserve.
 

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Learn more about Andy Berner.
AW13 A Very Large Enterprise Agile Transformation: Lessons Learned at Salesforce
Mike Register, Salesforce.com
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

When the agile consultants leave, how do you ensure that the enterprise agile transformation sticks, evolves, and grows throughout the organization? What challenges will you face? What support must be in place to address the challenges? Like software products, the real cost of an agile transformation occurs after the initial rollout. Salesforce.com has sustained an enterprise agile transformation for more than seven years. Mike Register shares the major challenges Salesforce faced and how they addressed them―challenges that include scaling coaching within a very large enterprise (230 teams and growing rapidly) and effectively emphasizing the foundation principles behind the practices. Mike describes what has worked and not worked during their agile journey. He enumerates the primary support structures that need to be in place to support long term enterprise agile transformation. Mike also explores the cultural and leadership aspects necessary to support large scale agile adoption that sticks.

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AW14 The Agile PMO: Right Work, Right Time, Right People
Heather Fleming, Gilt Groupe
Justin Riservato, Gilt Groupe
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

One of the core functions of a PMO is to help an organization standardize efficient processes to select and execute strategic projects. Unfortunately, many PMOs are finding themselves struggling to justify their own existence. In a recent survey, more than half of the respondents reported that the value of their PMOs is in question. By using a one-size-fits-all approach to best practices, we may set our PMOs up for failure, holding them accountable for predicting the future. There is no magic crystal ball! Heather Fleming and Justin Riservato demonstrate how an agile PMO can help your organization ensure you are tackling the right work at the right time and with the right people. Participate in retrospectives on multiple process iterations, from Request for Work to Swagathons to something called The Social Experiment. Join Heather and Justin to learn why trust is the key to scaling agile.

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AW15 Putting Quality in the Driver’s Seat with DevOps and ATDD
Adam Auerbach, Capital One
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Capital One has a highly integrated environment, creating many dependencies for its agile teams. As a result, the teams faced prolonged and increasingly more difficult sprints over time, and did not realize expected improvements in time to market. As Capital One Technology worked through the implementation of various facets of agile, it wasn’t able to take full advantage of the real benefits that agile promises. To solve this, the group leveraged DevOps and ATDD practices, branding them quality-driven delivery or QDD. QDD provided the foundation needed to achieve the goals of delivering high-quality working code to production early and often. Adam Auerbach explores Capital One’s experience implementing these practices. He covers the core principles of QDD, the common roadblocks that occur, and some recommendations on how best to remove the impediments from your environment.

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AW16 Meeting Strict Documentation Requirements in Agile
Craeg Strong, Savant Financial Technologies, Inc.
Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Teams in many organizations are still expected to produce and maintain significant amounts of documentation. This is generally the case in Federal, state, and local governments where systems must comply with SOX, HIPPA, NAIC, FDA, or SEC directives. In recent years, Agile has made substantial inroads into government and other heavily regulated environments. However, some successful projects have been criticized for failing to generate the expected documentation. Maintaining traditional documentation is a labor-intensive activity that threatens to substantially impair an agile team’s ability to deliver valuable software. Can anything be done to solve this conundrum? Craeg Strong reviews the documentation typically required in heavily regulated environments and discusses specific techniques for reducing, replacing, generating, or “slimming” document deliverables. Craeg reviews specific tools and practices with “before” and “after” snapshots and describes their cost vs. benefit. Gain insights for breaking down one of the last big barriers to significant agile adoption in government and other highly regulated environments.

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AT1 A Holistic View of Complex Systems and Organizational Change
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 10:00am - 11:00am

One of the most misunderstood concepts in the agile community, complexity is often used to explain why we can’t predict anything or why there are no rules we can follow. Ironically, it is exactly this attitude that allows complexity to work against us. Al Shalloway discusses the true nature of complex systems, why we must deal with them in a holistic manner, and ways to evaluate structural and organizational changes to manage this complexity. Unfortunately, most agile implementations take an incremental, piecemeal approach to change, ignoring complexity. Although this approach causes problems that are attributed to the fact that we have a complex system, in reality these challenges are due to the way we are dealing with the pieces individually. Al describes the patterns of effective organizational change management and explains how understanding the true nature of complex systems can be used to lead organizational change―particularly at scale.

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AT2 Choosing between Scrum and Kanban—or Combining the Best of Both
Cory Foy, Cory Foy, LLC
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 10:00am - 11:00am

When an organization is looking to adopt a new process, one of the biggest questions is whether they should use a pre-defined process or adopt a more empirical approach, allowing the new process to emerge. This is especially true in agile, as organizations look at methodologies and frameworks such as SAFe, Scrum, Crystal, Kanban, and others. Even in the face of “inspect and adapt,” many organizations struggle to understand how to adopt an empirical view of their process without simply falling into chaos and old habits. Cory Foy examines the most common agile processes in organizations today―Kanban and Scrum. Cory offers key insights into how to not only choose between them but adopt and grow them into a process tailored for your organization’s unique situation—all while guiding teams and organizations into a true sense of agility and delivery.

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AT3 Toward a Well-Run, Cross-Functional, High-Performance Team
Fuming Ye, Pitney Bowes
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Behind every successful delivery to a customer, there is a well-run, cross-functional team. They trust each other; they work well together. Yet every team, agile or not, faces the challenges of building such a team. And, despite their best efforts, many teams fail in this attempt, never fully realize their full potential, and are unable to deliver the best possible value to their customers. Fuming Ye discusses the foundations to build a high performing team: an agile team’s responsibilities to each other, problem ownership, and the discipline to execute. Fuming reveals how learning and continuous improvement can help teams remove barriers between developers, testers, and other cross-functional members of the team, ultimately fostering the necessary “we succeed and fail together” culture. Additionally, she shares how you can extend these practices to teams that don’t practice agile. Take away new ideas, approaches, and tools you can start using tomorrow to build your well-run, cross-functional, high-performance team.

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AT4 Establishing an Agile Testing Culture
Leigh Ishikawa, TripAdvisor
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Many resources describe how to accelerate performance of your development organization through adoption of agile methodologies, but very few cover testing in a practical manner. And those that do generally focus on technical details, leaving out how to build an agile testing culture while facing numerous adoption challenges. Leigh Ishikawa describes how an organization needs to rethink testing in the agile world. He begins by taking a holistic look at how different groups combine in an agile testing culture. Then Leigh dives into key components including messaging, concepts, metrics, and tools that can be implemented across different groups; how they are integral to one another; how various data from metrics across different teams should be interpreted; and what actions should be taken. Through real world examples from various companies, Leigh takes you through lessons he learned—from both success and failure.

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AT5 Is Agile the Prescription for the Public Sector’s IT Woes?
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Information technology (IT) projects are notorious for exceeding budget and schedule estimates, and high visibility failures are common. IT projects in the public sector are particularly challenging. State, provincial, and federal governments worldwide have sponsored noteworthy disasters in the past twenty years. As agile methods have evolved, become more mainstream, and demonstrated their value in the private sector in the past decade, they are often cited as a remedy for the public sector’s IT misery. Payson Hall examines the gap between current public sector IT project challenges and the often-suggested agile solution. Payson explores the challenges to effective vendor-delivered public sector agile projects and possible responses to those challenges. He answers the questions: Is agile ready for large public sector projects? Is the public sector ready for agile? Leave with a better understanding of the problems public sector entities and vendors face and ideas for overcoming some of those barriers.

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AT6 Seven Principles of Cross-Continent, Distributed Development
Igor Gejdos, Roche Diagnostics
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Many teams practice agile development as an integral part of their organization with the benefits of collocation and local decision making. However, it is increasingly more common to develop code across continents, either in distributed organizations or with the help of offshore outsourcing partners. Igor Gejdos explains the essential principles of interfacing with distributed agile development teams and describes the essence of successful communication techniques that bridge cultural and time differences. Igor emphasizes how agile teams can approach distributed product backlog management and achieve software architectures that allow software decomposition into distributable components. He emphasizes design for testability, proper documentation of software interfaces, and methods for managing changes to keep the collaboration cost effective. Igor describes techniques for system integration planning by using integration checkpoints aligned with sprint plans. If you are a decision maker, developer, or technical leader interfacing with an agile development partner, join Igor to improve your distributed team interaction.

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AT7 How to Create a Culture of Trust
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who successfully foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to develop open environments based on trust—the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn to step forward and do the right thing without breaking trust. Find out what to do when there is broken trust in the team, foster trust through team measurements, protect team boundaries, build team confidence without taking away their ownership, and create transparency.

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AT8 Integrating Performance Engineering and Testing into Agile
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Performance engineering and testing are a set of activities by which we design, test, and implement the most optimal system that meets the expected performance goals, based on planning and estimation coupled with tests to verify the system’s capabilities. Although the conventional approach to performance testing works well for traditional delivery models, it is ineffective in agile as it involves testing and tuning near the end of development. Arun Shanmugam describes ways to customize the approach to include performance engineering and testing throughout agile sprints by including specific user stories related to application performance as part of the product backlog. Learn why the performance engineer must have a voice in guiding the prioritization of stories to help weed out potential issues before they become bottlenecks. Arun describes how the performance and test engineers can work in parallel with the development team so that there are few or no bad surprises when the release hits the streets.

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AT9 Software Managers: Their Place in Agile
Brian Sobus, Teradata
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

No more managers! No more hierarchy! A truly self organizing, self-running team! These phrases strike fear into managers almost as much as: We are moving to agile. As successful companies like Zappos, GitHub, and Treehouse discard managers from their teams, other software managers are left wondering about their futures. The reality is that managers are even more relevant and necessary today—if they transform from command-and-control to a coaching-style role. Employees need to know they have an advocate—not just in the business but in their careers. Learn from Brian Sobus how to become that advocate as he draws on his experience leading agile and traditional software development teams. Peer over the abyss as Brian delves into the nuances that are required for this new manager role. Learn how we perceive managers, how that perception must change, and how managers can embrace this transformation. Discover why this needed leadership meshes well with and elevates self-directed teams.

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AT10 Making Agile Work—with Eleven Product Owners
Neal Huffman, Apex Capital Corp.
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Small companies that have been highly successful delivering software often struggle as they grow larger and their software needs to grow with them. They must learn to manage multiple technology platforms and multiple releases while dealing with the associated roadmaps and support plans. A small company experiencing phenomenal growth, Apex Capital has built four major platforms with two more coming online in 2014. Apex needed a way to consistently deliver software across each platform and communicate that to the respective user communities. Neal Huffman shares how Apex transitioned to Scrum, provided formal training across the organization, and fully engaged with their eleven product owners. Listen and interact with Neal as he shares the details—both the good and the not so good—about the processes and tools Apex used to deliver releases from their more than twenty-five sprints this past year. Learn how to avoid the heavy layers of tracking and reporting that weigh down many fast-growing organizations.agi

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AT11 Assessing Agile Engineering Practices
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices—first seen together in Extreme Programming and later adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the Scrum Developer Practices. These practices are difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. For an engineering practice to provide real organizational value, it must effectively address real throughput constraints. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―Lean's Value-Stream Mapping and the Theory of Constraints' Five Focusing Steps. He describes the most common set of agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment, including their costs and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. Rob briefly discusses TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration; he then opens the discussion to evaluate practices chosen by the delegates for consideration.

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AT12 Dealing with Auditors: Helping Them Understand Agile
Steve Nunziata, Independent Consultant
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

It is widely understood that agile mitigates project execution risks. However, auditors and regulators unfamiliar with the agile process often reject it as non-compliant. In regulated industries, organizations seeking to adopt agile are often challenged to provide evidence that prescribed processes are being followed and can be evaluated to ensure adherence. This issue is compounded when auditors expect a more traditional, artifact-driven process, which, in an agile environment, does not necessarily mitigate the risks for which they were designed. To harness the power of agile and still satisfy internal compliance groups, we must address their concerns. Steve Nunziata describes opportunities to educate auditors on the power of cadence and content of agile ceremonies, while avoiding falling into the “artifact trap” of waste by layering compliance artifacts over the top of agile processes. Learn how to leverage key agile tenets of visibility and transparency in meeting required audit needs―with greater quality and fidelity than ever before.

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AT13 Executives’ Influence on Agile: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Steve Davi, Synacor
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

The evidence is in—and it's compelling. Well-executed agile practices can shorten software project schedules by 30 percent while cutting defects by 75 percent. However, many organizations struggle with agile adoption. And some of these struggles can be attributed to the executive leadership. In many cases, the "lead, follow, or get out of the way" attitude causes executives to try to lead when they should be following or getting out of the way. Drawing on his experiences with agile adoption at Synacor as it implements agile on an enterprise scale, Steve Davi illustrates how the executives on the ground can help or hurt agile adoption. Steve shares ways to turn those executive wolves into agile enablers as he describes the four critical actions that executives should take to support agile within their organization―define the vision, boundaries, and constraints; gain support and remove impediments; ensure openness and trust; and hold teams accountable.

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AT14 Breakthrough Portfolio Performance: Managing a Mix of Agile and Non-Agile Projects
Michael Hannan, Fortezza Consulting
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Agile has delivered impressive performance improvements at the project level, and some attempts to scale agile’s success to the IT project portfolio have also demonstrated good results. However, agile is not for all IT projects nor all project teams. Sometimes other approaches may be more appropriate. Can disparate approaches co-exist harmoniously in the same project portfolio? Can portfolio managers apply a flexible, “best-tool-for-the-job” approach, while simultaneously driving portfolio-wide adoption of disciplined, hyperproductive techniques? Michael Hannan describes a set of integrated techniques that drive breakthrough performances in IT portfolios comprised of both agile and non-agile projects. These proven techniques and approaches can triple the portfolio’s project completions and double the projects delivered reliably. Specifically, Mike discusses optimal buffer-management methods at both the project and portfolio level, optimal resource sharing methods across agile and non-agile teams, and how to achieve the “common denominators” of focused execution and aggregated risk across the portfolio.

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AT15 Aligning Teams, Architecture, and Governance
Dennis Stevens, LeadingAgile, LLC
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Many enterprises are trying to create a more predictable flow, achieve ROI faster, improve quality, and be more responsive to the market. To this end, they attempt to transform to team-based agile, and then leverage scaled agile models to govern how requirements are defined, decomposed, coordinated, and tested. However, many of these efforts prove ineffective, and organizations fail to realize hoped for business benefits. In complex organizations, interdependencies between team design, architectural design, and governance contribute to this problem. Often misaligned because each is “owned” by a different part of the organization, their overall effectiveness is limited. Dennis Stevens shares an approach for creating a common view of the organization’s offerings. He shows how to use this view to align team design, architecture design, and the governance model with the strategy of the organization. Finally, Dennis shows how to leverage this aligned model to maximize the benefit to the business.

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AT16 Test Automation in Agile: A Successful Implementation
Melissa Tondi, Denver Automation and Quality Engineering
Thursday, November 13, 2014 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Many teams feel that they are forced to make an either/or decision when it comes to investing time to automate tests versus executing them manually. Sometimes a “silver bullet” tool is purchased, and testers are forced to use it when there may be a better option; other times unskilled team members are designated the automation engineers; and often there is a lack of good guidance on what to automate. These pitfalls cause product owners to de-prioritize those tasks when there’s a better way. Melissa Tondi shares how test teams should evaluate automated tools, both open source and commercial; areas to be aware of when traditional manual testers transition to automation engineers; and recommended priorities for automating tests. By streamlining automation tasks in your project and incorporating these recommendations, you’ll find that your automation intersection becomes a clearly marked thruway to a successfully released product.

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