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David Hussman

DevJam

Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in the audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education sectors. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam (devjam.com) focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills.

Speaker Presentations
Monday, November 10, 2014 - 8:30am
Half-day Tutorials
Build Product Backlogs with Test-Driven Thinking—and More
NEW

Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and, instead, focus only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. Bring your failing product backlog stories and discuss them, too.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 8:30am
Half-day Tutorials
Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take 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 you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides you through the remainder of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014 - 1:00pm
Half-day Tutorials
Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.

Wednesday, November 12, 2014 - 11:30am
Product Definition
Simplify Project and Portfolio Planning with “Real Options”

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.