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Agile for the Enterprise

Tutorials

TD The GROWS™ Method: A Modern Software Development Suite NEW
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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TE Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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TI Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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TM Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders SOLD OUT
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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Keynotes

K2 Continuous EVERYTHING: How Agile Is Changing Our World Forever
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 10:00am

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.

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K3 Introducing the GROWS™ Method for Software Development
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

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.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW1 Going Agile? Three Conversations to Have Before You Start
Heather Fleming, Gilt
Justin Riservato, Gilt
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

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.

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AW5 Don't Bulldoze a Vibrant Ecosystem for Agile
Steve Adolph, Blue Agility
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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.

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AW11 Smart Agile at Scale: ASK the Right Questions
Steve Spearman, Swift Ascent, LLC
Richard Dolman, agile42
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

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.

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AW14 Things That Go Bump: Product Risk Assessment in Agile
Annette Head, Principal Financial Group
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

“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.

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AT1 Agility without Complexity: Fast and Efficient
Geoff Perlman, Xojo, Inc.
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

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.

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AT3 Now That We're Agile, What's a Manager to Do?
David Grabel, Grabel Consulting Services, LLC
Shyam Kumar, UST-Global
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

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.

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AT6 Actionable Customer Feedback: A Key to Product Success
Mario Moreira, Emergn Ltd
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 11:30am

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?

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