Certified ScrumMaster Training (2-days) Sanjiv Augustine
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days) Dawn Haynes
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2-days) Jeff Payne
Agile Tester Certification (2-days) Rob Sabourin
Product Owner Certification (2-days) Arlen Bankston
Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training (2-days) Bob Payne
The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in an agile world is knowing what skills are needed for you to be effective. Join Jennifer Bonine as she identifies these skills and shares a toolkit for agile leadership. The basic attributes of successful agile leaders are adaptability and the ability to change. At this boot camp explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help others adapt to change. Learn your leadership style and identify your potential blind spots. Determine what metrics you should capture and use as you move to agile. Explore these ideas during hands-on activities dealing with how to influence and promote ideas that inspire others to follow and invest in new ideas. Finally, learn how to partner across cross-functional teams and geographies. Leave with ideas of what will work for you and your organization and take away tools you can use to help ensure you are an agile leader that your teams want to follow.
How can you compare the productivity and quality you achieve across the span of your projects—whether agile, waterfall, or outsourced? Join Michael Mah to learn about schedule, quality, and defect metric trends and how these patterns behave on real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to understand your own project trends for productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of software measurement, showing you these metrics in action. With hands-on exercises, learn how to use 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. Leverage these metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous application build, package and deployment to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore. Bob Aiello presents an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change management and control, release management, and deployment which are the prerequisites for continuous delivery and DevOps. Bob describes current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, container based deployments including Docker, cloud computing, and mobile apps development—and reviews the industry standards and frameworks available in practice today. Take back an integrated approach to establish proper IT governance and compliance using the latest CM practices while offering development teams the most effective CM practices available today.
Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition 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. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.
You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.
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.
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 are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Mike identifies several metrics paradigms and discusses the pros and cons of each.
Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Employing lean principles, you optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, cross-functional teams, implementing pull, and managing work in process. Ken describes how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.
One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may now think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile, IoT, and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile, IoT and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of ten attacks against mobile, IoT, and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software today. Like software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be customized for particular contexts. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack, who should conduct the attack, and why the attack works to find bugs. In addition to learning these testing concepts, attendees will get to practice the attack pattern on devices containing mobile, IoT and/or embedded software—so bring your smart phones.
In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little to no consideration of an overall plan, architecture, or the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test automation journey in large and small enterprises. Discover approaches to ensure that the test tools you currently have and the new test tools you acquire or develop will work well with other testing and application lifecycle software. Explore approaches to drive test automation adoption across multiple project teams and departments, and communicate the real challenges and potential benefits to your stakeholders.
To make it possible for designers and developers to collaborate and build compelling user interfaces using the same assets, Microsoft created the extended application markup language XAML and introduced it in the release of the Windows Presentation Foundation. Based in XML and using language features that enable data binding, templating, styling, and adaptive layouts, it creates the interfaces declaratively and efficiently. XAML has appeared in Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Metro and has now gone cross platform to Android and iOS with Xamarin. Mike Benkovich begins with the basics of XAML—controls and containers, options for layout including canvases, stack panels and grids, and responsive layouts that take advantage of the available screen real estate. Next Mike dives into XAML advanced data binding and converters. Finally, he takes a brief look at Xamarin to show how you can deliver great applications across platforms on almost any device.
A great deal of confusion surrounds the concepts of release automation, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. How these concepts work progressively to achieve high-quality software delivery is generating a lot of discussion and controversy. Jennifer Bonine defines the methodology options, processes, and tools associated with release automation, as well as the differences between its maturity levels. Understand the benefits of more frequent, smaller releases, and the exponential risk generated by large, infrequent releases. Hear highlights of industry case studies that demonstrate the substantial speed, quality, and ROI gains of improving your release automation process. Acquire the insight and motivation needed to take the next step—from wherever your organization is now—toward full release automation. Learn to build your continuous deployment strategy, and discover ways to incorporate mobile and device testing into your plan. Start building out a roadmap using a case study and understand your options for building a continuous deployment pipeline.
Join Agile Manifesto author Andy Hunt and Jared Richardson to learn about GROWS™, a modern development approach that’s built around the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition and deliberate experimentation to guide project decisions. Incorporating existing practices, it's a methodology designed to improve both initial adoption and on-going evolution of your team and organization. Andy and Jared describe GROWS in detail, diving into specific steps and practices for managers and executives. Learn techniques to share the company's vision effectively, and simple tools for managing progress without micromanaging. Know when a project is doing well—and when it's in trouble. Discover how to keep your team on track with the “3 Rs”—building on a Rhythm (their iteration cadence), building the Right thing (from the vision), and working the Right way (with craftsmanship and technical practices). Come, learn, and participate as Andy and Jared provide an understanding of the GROWS Method and how it can move your company forward.
It used to be that your work and the results spoke for themselves. No longer is that the case. Today you need to be more collaborative and a better communicator and facilitator so that you drive results from a team perspective. One of the most effective communication paradigms is the “Story.” You can tell stories that drive specific action. You can tell stories that communicate general product requirements or customer needs. You can tell stories that inspire teams and drive results. Or you can try to write everything down and hope for the best.
DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables 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. Bob explains how to implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.
Identifying, documenting, and communicating 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, use cases, and epics 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. Practice specifying and evaluating traditional requirements and user stories while learning how to gather information through varied elicitation techniques. Explore the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Learn a rule set for determining how much documentation you need for “good enough” requirements. Explore requirements review techniques—walkthroughs and inspections—to determine what will work best for you. Create a set of Golden Rules for requirements engineering that your project can use.
More and more large organizations are adopting agile methods. As they do, many are not focused on what level of process will help and are adding more process than needed. David Hussman describes the use of agile methods on large programs and small teams in large organizations including Disney, Target, Siemens, and others. David uses real-world experiences to teach concrete ideas of when scale is needed or not, as well as how to spread lasting agility that is based on concrete measures of success. Be warned—you will be participating. So come prepared with one or more situations where you would like to see agile methods spread throughout your organization or scaled to address the production challenges of a large system or process. Working in pairs and small groups, learn how to apply less process with more value, being mindful that large groups working on a single effort need disciplined practices to synchronize, validate, and promote real and lasting agility. Please come with your questions, experiences, and skepticism (the latter is always welcome).
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. Rob Sabourin says that the key to good estimates is to understand the primary variables, compare them to known standards, and normalize the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when very little is known about the project and what is known is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking, and estimation can become a nightmare. Rob provides a foundation for anyone who must estimate software testing work effort. Learn about the test team’s and tester’s roles in estimation and measurement, and how to estimate in the face of uncertainty. Analysts, developers, leads, test managers, testers, and QA personnel can all benefit from this tutorial.
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 on 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 rest 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.
Many organizations use the terms quality assurance and software testing interchangeably to describe their testing activities. But true quality assurance is much, much more than testing alone. Quality assurance encompasses a planned set of tasks, activities, and actions used to provide management with information about the quality of software so appropriate business decisions can be made. Jeffery Payne discusses the differences between software testing and quality assurance, examining the typical activities performed during a true quality assurance program. Topics discussed include evaluating software processes, validating software artifacts (requirements, designs, etc.), presenting a quality case to management, and how to start implementing a true quality assurance program. Leave with a working knowledge of quality assurance and a framework for incrementally improving your overall software quality assurance program.
Many enterprises today are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis, although there are currently no formal models describing UX. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, UX becomes paramount. Phil Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving UX on the mobile platform. To build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX, Phil gives examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce delays in development by decreasing re-work. Through interactive exercises, Ken shows how acceptance tests created during requirement analysis decrease ambiguity, increase scenario coverage, help with effort estimation, and act as a measurement of quality. Join Ken to examine issues with automating acceptance tests including how to create test doubles and when to insert them into the process. Explore the quality of tests and how they relate to the underlying code.
Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways that test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection, appropriate automation design, and team collaboration can be combined to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams. Learn how automation supports and drives agile testing activities, and how test automation is implemented in diverse organizations. Rob illustrates many types of automation with sample test descriptions, source code, and test scripts. See examples of automated tests for TDD, acceptance test-driven development, and behavior driven-development. Leave with a new toolkit of agile automation methods and techniques.
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. Explore the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or failed. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and examine the patterns of the bad.
Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.
Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.
Extrinsic motivators like crunch time worked a hundred years ago in the era of low-tech factories. In the knowledge economy today, the high pressure of crunch time efforts often backfires. So why do many agile software shops still default to crunch time—probably to their detriment? Ryan Tang says that traditional management motivators—crunch time, cash rewards, and even employee recognition—have their place in today’s workplace; they work for straightforward tasks. But creative work, on the other hand, is impeded by the same external pressure. People performing mundane tasks work faster with these motivators, but workers who need to find a creative solution actually take longer under crunch time pressure. Using three case studies, Ryan explores the effect of crunch time, analyzing the positive and negative effects of management pressure. He provides guidance to agile software managers and leaders on the effective use of crunch time and offers alternative motivators that foster, rather than stifle, creativity.
All too often, companies adopt a mission to “go agile” before truly understanding what that entails. Business managers are quick to jump on the agile bandwagon, believing that going agile will magically make projects happen faster. Teams are getting certified in Scrum believing it is the silver bullet that will suddenly make everyone more productive. Inevitably, cracks begin to develop, and expectations are not met, leaving everyone questioning the value of going agile at all. Heather Fleming and Justin Riservato say there is a better way! The truth is that going agile will result in more productive teams and faster delivery of projects—but only if everyone can agree on the rules of the game. Learn why gaining consensus on the principles of agile is more important than implementing a specific process. Explore how having three key conversations—about saying no to deadlines, ensuring business partner engagement, and experimenting with process—up front can save you from an agile disaster.
Remember the old days when software engineering teams used to tune software until it passed quality gates, gave golden bits to marketing, and finally threw a big release party? The world was simple, and writing code that worked according to a specification was enough to be a star developer. Viktor Veis says that world has changed. Software now often dials back home to record information about its usage and health. This telemetry flows back to engineering teams who are accountable for making sense out of this data. This is a fundamental shift in the software engineer role. Teams who can leverage data-driven engineering will delight customers by learning more about customers than they know about themselves. Teams who ignore data-driven engineering will continue based on assumptions and eventually lose competitive nerve. Join Viktor to learn how to start data-driven engineering today. Discover a practical approach that sometimes deviates from classical data science but is easy to learn and apply.
Of course we know what customers want, right? Product owners have the roadmap. Sales teams know what sells. Support talks to customers every day. So if we really know what our customers want, why is 65 percent of all software functionality rarely or never used? Why aren’t our customers delighted with the products we ship? Stop guessing what customers want and start delivering it! Tom Gimpel discusses the challenges of feature prioritization and determining what your clients really want and what they really need—and why they’re not the same thing. Learn how you can employ the KANO prioritization model to delight your customers by giving them functionality they value without the fluff they won’t use. Learn what’s wrong with most feedback surveys and build your delivery process to maximize customer satisfaction. Take away valuable tools for prioritization including an Excel-based scoring model that actually chooses the “best” possible combination of features that you can ship.
Software processes are commonly portrayed using machine metaphors in which consistency is highly prized. Frequently, organizations set up Centers of Excellence in a well-intentioned effort to create enterprise consistency. Steve Adolph reminds us that, in reality, software development takes place in a diverse ecosystem of corporate policies, competing interests, personal agendas, personality types, and a variety of formal and informal relationships. An aggressive top down imposition of practices is like sending a bulldozer through an ecosystem. This can create a prized consistency, but it also can destroy the environment’s productive vibrancy. It does not matter if the bulldozer says waterfall or agile on the side—it’s still a bulldozer. How do we live in harmony with our ecosystem? We can start by replacing machine metaphors with biological ones about leveraging and embracing diversity. Then use these metaphors to interpret two case studies of how organizations either bulldozed their ecosystem or learned to boost their productivity by living in harmony with it.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful agile methodology that organizations both large and small can leverage to achieve consensus, collaboration, and quality. Based on his organization's experience with implementing TDD and the feedback he has received from other organizations, Adam Satterfield shares some of the top challenges of implementing TDD—insufficient information for foundation of tests, tests take too long to run, TDD is too difficult to get up and running, and it is the tester’s job to find defects. You can overcome these challenges by creating solid acceptance criteria and tests, organizing tests by separating them into unit and integration tests, creating a test first mentality, and increasing collaboration during sprint planning. Whether creating TDD tests in Java, Groovy, or Python, you can successfully implement TDD in your organization by following several core principles of agile development. All code examples are in Python and Django.
The Scrum Guide describes Product Backlog Refinement as “the act of adding detail, estimates, and order to items in the Product Backlog.” New and even experienced agile teams often underestimate the importance of well-groomed stories and find the process of reviewing numerous stories, breaking them down, and estimating the work chaotic and cumbersome. As this happens, teams push problems downstream into sprint planning meetings—or worse, into the sprint. Becky Moshenek shares how, working with the Product Owner, they create stories for backlog items to be reviewed. The stories include a link to the actual item, tasks outlining how and what to review, and a deadline for a future refinement meeting. These become refinement stories that are assigned to team members and brought into a sprint for an allotted ten percent of their time. Coordinating the team’s effort around backlog refinement in this way has cut meeting times, increased team involvement, produced more polished items, and made for a happier team.
In today's economy, the Creative Economy, businesses face a disrupted, highly competitive and constantly changing landscape. To thrive in the Creative Economy team members, managers and executives will need to become and remain Agile. Improvisational Theater provides us with a proven model for developing agility skills since the characteristics of "Being Agile"--engaging people, learning, making decisions in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and adapting--are the very skills that Improv Artists work to develop with every exercise they perform. This workshop is about "Being Agile," developing the mindset and behaviors that grow great abilities in communication, collaboration, inspiring others, building on others ideas, learning, adapting and evolving. This workshop will engage the attendees in experiential learning exercises from Improvisational Theater that will have immediate impact in improving Agile mindset and behavior. The workshop participants will find the exercises lively, inspiring, fun, life changing and an experience that they will never forget.
Agile practices can be the easy part of agile, but getting people into the agile mindset can be a real challenge. Do you have a team member who doesn’t quite support agile or someone who’s playing along but not really committed? One step toward obtaining real commitment is a better understanding of why agile works, why it’s different, and when it is the right approach. In this fast moving session, Perry Reinert provides a fun look at some of the theory that gets to the core of why agile works. Yes, we really can use the words fun and theory in the same sentence! Combining parts of the Agile Manifesto, Empirical Process Control, and Cynefin, Perry leaves you wondering how anybody can choose not to use these methods! After explaining the why, Perry connects the dots from that theory to some of the agile practices. Finally, he wraps up with a discussion of common ways to screw it all up—and how not to.
Agile at scale continues to be a hot topic as more large organizations begin their transformation. Many frameworks are available, including SAFe, DAD, LeSS, Enterprise Scrum, and Nexus. Scaling agile across the enterprise is very challenging; even understanding the options is complex. How can you pick one? Do you need to pick just one? Or pick at all? The right answer depends on your unique situation. Smart scaling with the Agile Scaling Knowledgebase (ASK) 2.0 provides a way to compare different approaches, going beyond the more “popular” frameworks to include new, emerging ones. Steve Spearman and Richard Dolman explore the evolution of popular approaches and discuss how you can make the best decision to fit your company and your project. Join the conversation, share your experiences, and learn from others. Get to know ASK as a valuable tool to help you and your organization explore the topic of agile scaling within the context of your organization’s specific needs.
Agile methods are empirical. You must inspect and adapt to make agile work. This requires using effective feedback systems which are vital to your success. Agile teams often suffer from agile feedback systems that are dysfunctional—non-existent, delayed, or no learning from feedback. Satish Thatte explains three agile feedback systems—daily, sprint, and release—and their associated value and challenges. Satish discusses how to improve these feedback systems so they are beneficial to each team member, the project, the program, and the organization. The key is to use templates that capture information and show if the double feedback loops (basic as well as learning feedback loops) are working properly, and then to leverage connections among the agile feedback systems. As a bonus, every delegate receives these templates refined with feedback by industry users during the past six years.
Adopting agile development methods in a conservative environment can be a daunting and time-consuming venture, facing resistance at all levels of the organization. You may wonder: Will this organization ever get with the times? Will our leaders ever change their way of thinking? Brian Duncan shares personal experiences and lessons learned in bringing an agile development mindset to two distinct organizations—a bottom-line product-driven software development organization, and the conservative, risk-averse Space Department at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. Sharing the Good (what worked well), the Bad (what set us back), and the Ugly (what we had to abandon), Brian shows how to bring a slow-to-change organization into the forward-thinking agile methods of today. He presents practical approaches (adoption committees, grassroots techniques) and creative endeavors (free classes, an innovation lab) along with their impact on the organization. With persistence and a multifaceted approach, even risk-averse organizations can adopt agile.
Businesses are hit by thieves from all angles. Thieves often go unnoticed until something is missing. If you are adopting agile, you may have thieves stealing from your transformation right now. Every organization is different, but some thieves of agile adoption are well-known. Francie Van Wirkus shares her “most wanted” list of thieves, common organizational impediments and patterns, and her ideas on how to mitigate them. At the foundation of all solutions is strong leadership muscle, so expect stories and action items on how to raise your leadership game. Francie introduces high-level concepts including the mistakes of managing change instead of leading change, pushing culture ahead of environment, and skipping agile coaching. Awareness of what’s stealing from your agile adoption is only part of the conversation. Francie provides real-life actions to keep your strategy and goals on track. Don’t wait for something to go missing from your organization before you take action.
“I have noticed that even people who claim everything is predetermined and that we can do nothing to change it, look before they cross the road” (Stephen Hawking). As agile teams, we know that we can’t know everything, so we shouldn’t waste time thinking about that which we don’t know and can’t predict. Faster feedback loops, smaller pieces of functionality, and product owners imbedded with project teams help us identify risk better than speculation. So why are we still losing sleep over it? Annette Head shares the story of how her team used a risk census and a risk burndown chart to help them sleep peacefully at night. A risk-based approach is inherent to properly executed agile projects. Integrating risk assessment into the agile process tells us where to focus our energies first. So arm yourself with tools to help you and your team stop worrying about the risk monster lurking under your bed.
Is architecture the same as preliminary design in agile? It shouldn't be. Do we do architecture up front, then do iterative development after the architecture is done? That is edging back toward waterfall. Can you explain the purpose of the architecture in just two or three statements? Anthony Crain says that when he asks that question, he gets either verbose answers or blank stares. So Anthony shares an elegantly simple two bullet explanation of what an architecture does. Explore the models architects and designers should produce and learn why the models are so important to keep separate. Understand why it is vital to separate functional from nonfunctional requirements and how this affects architecture, design, and even code and test. Explore what a conceptual architectural model should look like vs. a physical one, and for the conceptual design model vs. a physical one—and the timing of all four models. Finally, explore the impact of iterative development on architecture.
Aristotle once stated, “Well begun is half done.” However, many agile initiatives suffer from a feeble launch. So how can we increase the likelihood of success for a team or organization? By developing a sound team charter. Beginning with the end in mind, we use retrospective techniques to develop consensus around objectives, vision, and mission. Linda Cook and Chris Espy introduce the components of a good charter and explain how those components help focus the team toward a common goal. In addition, the development of the recommended charter components ensures that key questions are succinctly answered during the kickoff of a team’s efforts. Linda describes when to create or revise a charter and the associated artifacts and process that provide a framework for the team charter. Learn the various types of charters and their recommended content. During the workshop activity, teams will develop a complete charter for a team of their choice or for a provided case study.
Agile software development is in a rut. Agile is consistently misapplied, misunderstood, misused, and then, all-too-often abandoned. Worse than that, many popular agile methods are not actually agile. They've remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. And despite preaching inspect and adapt, users adopt and forget, following practices by-the-book and suffering when a practice conflicts with their local context. Join Andy Hunt as he describes the GROWS™ Method—a new approach to software development. The GROWS™ Method is based on four key ideas—the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, and local customization. The Dreyfus Model speaks to limitations in human cognition and problem solving. Evidence-based practice is a framework for first-class experiments that encourage us to make decisions and answer questions with actual outcomes—not wishful thinking or popular folklore. Inclusivity includes more of the organization than just the developers, and local customization makes adaptation to individual environments a first-class part of the method. It’s now time to grow software development beyond the limitations of agile.
The Agile Manifesto was stated in less than seventy words. Now, fourteen years later, layer upon layer have been added to it. What was supposed to be a simple philosophy has exploded into a gigantic industry. Much of this layering makes agile seem overly complex. We know developers want to focus on getting their work done, unhindered by rules and regulations. Developers should know the priorities of what to work on, do their work, report their progress, and be held accountable. This process should be supportive, not burdensome. Geoff Perlman shows how a small engineering team built a large project (Xojo) with new releases regularly, using a simplified agile process that gets the job done without adding complexity to the lives of the team. If your team is grumbling about your agile processes, join Geoff as he shows you how to focus on the “meat” of agile so you can be both fast and efficient—without the complexity.
Has the adoption of agile techniques magically erased risk from software projects? When we change the project and product environment by adopting agile, have we tricked ourselves into thinking that risk has been abolished—when it hasn’t? Agile risk management is a continuous process that makes risk management part of how the team works so they get value from the activity. Thomas Cagley suggests that we develop user stories that specifically address risk so it is prioritized, planned, and executed as part of the normal agile cadence. Agile techniques—daily standups, demonstrations, retrospectives, and sprint-planning activities—provide a platform for monitoring and controlling risks. The built-in feedback loops act as a safety net to ensure eyes are continuously looking at what is happening and what could be happening. By constantly evaluating risk, agile processes avoid spending significant time analyzing risks that are not on the horizon, while making it very difficult for an unseen risk to sneak up on your project.
We teach managers to foster agility by encouraging their teams to self-organize, stop assigning work, and telling them how to do it. Since the Product Owner defines the what and the team defines the how, what’s left for managers to do? Managers need to become servant leaders. It’s a key success factor for agile transformations. However, most managers have no idea what servant leadership is or what these leaders do. David Grabel teaches the true meaning of servant leadership—transforming it from a buzzword to a guiding principle. Learn how, as a leader, you can accelerate your team’s agile journey. Working in groups, participants discuss the challenges faced by an agile manager. As part of your learning, create artwork using Legos, clay, and pictures to illustrate how a servant leader meets the challenges of today. David defines the new job description for today’s managers in tomorrow’s agile culture. Come and prepare to take your part in it.
Many organizations are actively searching for the perfect product owner—a unicorn who knows all about the product, anticipates the market, innovates, and improves the product’s quality and architecture, all while making and meeting commitments to the organization. That's a difficult if not impossible role to fill. So, how can we achieve these goals? Various enterprise patterns of scaling the product owner are emerging including the technical product owner, the proxy, the product owner team, the program team, the market manager, and the innovator. Tim Wise describes where each is applicable in large enterprises. Learn how to apply these approaches to both a service organization and a product development organization. Get a glimpse into the evolution that will influence product owner roles in large organizations as companies scale agile in the enterprise. Leave with knowledge of patterns that are emerging in large enterprises around the product owner.
Actionable customer feedback, although difficult to capture well, is critical to adapting to customer needs. How can you ensure you identify the right customers, get customers to feedback sessions, and capture the most useful feedback? Mario Moreira shares ways you can establish a customer vision focused on gaining that elusive customer feedback. He helps you identify customer types via personas for your product, service, or value stream. Mario discusses how you can incorporate customer personas into the way you capture requirements. He helps you identify various types of customer feedback loops you can used and determine strategies to get customers to your feedback sessions. Leave armed with a framework for establishing a customer feedback vision with ways to get more effective customer feedback leading to products and solutions that more closely align with customer needs. Instead of barely hitting the broad side of the “customer” barn, wouldn't you rather hit the “customer” bull’s-eye?
After providing an introduction to several key agile testing concepts—including the Automation Triangle and the Test Automation Quadrants—Geoff Meyer discusses approaches to effectively deliver automated testing. Geoff shares practical insights and demonstrates how they were employed in the test automation strategies developed for several large-scale agile projects at Dell. He shows how the overall test strategy and implementation of each underlying agile concept was influenced by the realities of the project’s organization structure, application architecture, incumbent tools, and tester skillsets. Geoff explores the similarities of the projects from their common goals of establishing automated regression suites, achieving in-sprint automation, and test staffing approaches. More importantly, he delves into the implications of organizational structures and how they led to divergent approaches to test strategy from the choice of automation frameworks to the decisions to automate at the REST/SOAP-based API level or UI level.
Substantial evidence exists that coaching plays an important role in helping an organization successfully transform to agile. External coaches can help an organization as it begins to adopt agile practices, but a sustainable, long-term agile adoption requires the organization to stand on its own. Developing an internal coaching team is an important step toward becoming self-sufficient. Join Sue Johnston and Shawn Button as they explore the process of building a team of competent internal coaches. Discuss how to identify coach candidates, put together and run a coach development program, and create opportunities for learning on-the-job. Talk about potential bumps in the road—those organizational impediments to building coaches—and strategies for overcoming those barriers. Sue and Shawn share their experiences with what works and what doesn’t. Leave with a realistic plan to discover and develop coaches within your organization.
Project Management Professional (PMP) or other detailed training has become almost ubiquitous in the project management profession. Through this training, Brian Watson says that many of us have learned what we should be doing when it comes to managing projects, and this often conflicts with what we are doing. This gets more complicated when transitioning from plan-based methodologies to an agile framework. What may seem like chaos is really the perfect time to stop managing projects through controls that lack trust in the development teams, dust off those skills of empowerment, and embrace those activities we should be doing. Project managers are leaders, and agile transformations are the perfect time to eliminate ineffective, micromanagement processes and to implement collaborative, empowering techniques. Brian shares his experiences combining corporate agile transformations with mentoring project managers on how to leverage agile techniques. Learn how to effectively embrace resource management, estimating, reporting, traceability, and courage—all while project managing in an agile world.
This is the story about the Microsoft Developer Division and their two-year journey to agile—from shipping every three years to shipping every three weeks. In the old days, long stabilization phases were part of its DNA. Managers were rewarded for micromanagement. Commitments were made months in advance. Maintaining the appearance of meeting commitments was valued over transparency. Gregg Boer shares how this organization within Microsoft transitioned to one that values agile principles—controlling technical debt, enabling teams, eliminating bogus commitments, and rewarding transparency. When applying agile to such a large, traditional organization, the key to success is allowing autonomy at the team level, while ensuring alignment with the organization. Gregg shares successes as well as colossal failures. Learn how management sets direction while teams own their own backlog, how communication up and down can be transparent and healthy, and other lessons on their journey to agile.
Musicians and athletes spend most of their time practicing—not performing. If as software developers we just learn on our job and don’t practice, we will continue to make mistakes on code meant for customers. We must improve the quality of our skills which will, in turn, improve the quality of our code. Mike Clement believes we must take time to practice, allowing ourselves to improve our skills and develop better “code sense.” Learn how the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto provides a framework for us to improve in our craft. By learning a variety of code games, we can assemble a full toolbelt of activities to help us improve. We then can take these games and give others the opportunity to improve and thus raise the level of the whole community. Join Mike to take a whirlwind tour of some different agile code games and discover what it means to become a true software craftsman.
After implementing Scrum, some organizations slowly stray away from the basics that made their implementation successful. They loosen up Scrum practices, lose sight of core roles and responsibilities, and succumb to their muscle memory of how things were done before. Teams have little accountability and fail the transparency test. Denise Dantzler reminds us of the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, Product Owner, team member, leadership team, organization, Scrum coach, and stakeholders. She then identifies and discusses pitfalls, and recommended actions in each role to rejuvenate a Scrum implementation. Denise explores overall process improvement opportunities for Scrum implementations, including mid-sprint poker, release planning, and the importance of a Sprint Zero. Learn the critical adjustments you and your organization can make to remain successful over the long haul with Scrum.
Static, fixed test suites often do not work well with DevOps—especially in large-scale environments—because the test suites are either too large to execute in the fast continuous integration cycle times or they consume too many resources to be efficient. As the scale of continuous testing for DevOps systems increases in size and complexity, test selection should be automated. Marc Hornbeek shares a comparison of test selection methodologies that resolve the inherent conflicts in coverage, resources, and time for continuous testing. Marc provides instructions on how to implement a test selection tool which uses both software change information and system level risks to create a scalable solution that suits DevOps cycles and conserves resources. As a bonus, Marc provides instructions on how to automate test results analysis and gives each session attendee a free copy of a DevOps Best Practices Assessment Tool.
Warning! You can still build the wrong product using agile. In Eric Ries’ book The Lean Startup, he poses the question: What if we found ourselves building something that nobody wanted? In that case, what would it matter if we did it on time and on budget? We often assume the Product Owner is smart enough to define the right product. But what if we are wrong? Michael Hall shares lean startup principles and how they can be applied to ensure that the product we are building is righteous. Learn new agile concepts such as hypothesis-driven project vision, knowledge broker personas, learning maps, minimum learning product, experiment backlogs, experiment test iterations, validated learning, and pivot/persevere decisions. Case studies and Michael’s first-hand product experience emphasize the learning points. New and mature agilistas alike will leave the session armed with Lean Startup agile techniques that can be applied immediately on their agile projects.
In less than one year, a leading software company's product team transitioned from a twenty-five year history of waterfall development to using agile methodologies. They had produced software the old-fashioned way—sequentially, firmly entrenched in the process and procedure of pure waterfall. Long release cycles, a mature code base, and an ingrained development model prevented their rapid response to the needs of their customers. The “rush for the finish line” left schedules and deadlines shredded, quality and development staff exhausted, and management frustrated. Andrew Montcrieff describes the processes, challenges, and lessons learned while moving from waterfall to agile. He provides insight on how they dealt with the problems encountered along the way. Andrew will make you feel more comfortable with moving a legacy waterfall product to a more predictable, reliable, agile methodology-driven product by learning what to expect and how to deal with the obstacles you’ll likely encounter along the way.
Github revolutionized the coding world with their “social coding” approach. In doing so, Git, the source code repository behind Github, vaulted to the forefront of our industry. If Git hasn’t made its way into your, or your team’s, tool belt, Josh Anderson explains why it should. Learn how Git makes your job as a software engineer easier. Having made the migration to Git from source control systems like Team Foundation Server, Subversion, or Visual SourceSafe, Josh covers the mental and technical shifts needed to transition to Git. Learn how Git enables your team to collaborate and succeed at warp speed. Having led multiple agile adoptions (many powered by Git), Josh shares strategies and tips to help your engineers get up to speed and integrate Git into their processes. Regardless of your technology stack, Git may be the answer for your teams, and Josh preps you for a successful adoption.
The evening before the space shuttle Challenger exploded, a group of engineers discussed what they believed was a potentially catastrophic risk. They brought the issue to NASA’s management but failed to stop the launch. As a leader in your organization, your failure to influence may not cost lives but it could be catastrophic for your business. Metrics and data are just the “What.” You need comparisons, trends, and benchmarks to explain the “So what.” But none of that matters until it changes what your organization does … the “Now what.” This is the people side of metrics and data. Larry Maccherone shows you how to get action and behavior change from your data analysis. He describes how to steer the emotional elephant of your organization and appeal to the risk tolerance level of your stakeholders. Larry finishes with an exercise and approach to decision making that will help you avoid your own cognitive biases and those of your executives.
Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.
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.
