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Tutorials

ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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MI Building Cross Platform and Mobile Apps with XAML NEW
Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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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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Concurrent Sessions

AW15 Architecture vs. Design vs. Agile: What’s the Answer?
Anthony Crain, Blue Agility
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

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.

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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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AT14 Power Your Teams with Git
Josh Anderson, Dude Solutions
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

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.

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Keynotes

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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