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Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am
Agile Leadership
AT1

See the Value: Focus on Delivering the Right Software

Many agile teams focus solely on velocity as their measure of progress. They draw burn-up charts to track it over time and make it the focus of much of their discussion during sprint planning and retrospectives. Is the strong focus on this metric truly in line with the principles of agile software development? Cheezy and Ardita Karaj lead a workshop to explore this question. Discover how focusing first on value, rather than velocity, changes the team approach to the work. Through a series of structured activities, work with a story map for a fictitious project and assign value to the discovered stories. Cheezy and Ardita discuss the practices and skills necessary to track earned value on your project. Learn the valuable lesson of discovering what not to build. Take back a set of new skills you can immediately apply to your development planning efforts. This session will be fun and educational. It is one you don’t want to miss.

Chief technology officer and a cofounder of LeanDog, Jeff “Cheezy” Morgan has been teaching classes and coaching teams on agile and lean techniques since early 2004. Most of his work has focused on the engineering practices used by developers and testers. For the past few years Cheezy has experienced great success and recognition for his work focused on helping teams adopt Acceptance Test Driven Development using Cucumber. He has authored several popular Ruby gems used by software testers and the book Cucumber & Cheese—A Testers Workshop.

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Ardita Karaj, EPAM

Ardita Karaj is a passionate Toronto-based agile coach, trainer, change agent, and consultant. Ardita brings more than fifteen years of software development experience in commercial and public organizations. Recently she has focused on process improvement for organizations adopting agile frameworks including Scrum and Kanban. Ardita is well known for applying agile and lean techniques to help identify and remove barriers in order to streamline software development efforts.

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