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Personal Improvement

Tutorials

MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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Keynotes

K1 The Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW8 Improvisation for Agile Skill Development
Robie Wood, ImprovAgility
Jody Wood, ImprovAgility
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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.

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AT10 Software Craftsmanship and Agile Code Games
Mike Clement, Greater Sum
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

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.

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