Agile for the Enterprise

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Metrics for Release Planning, Estimation, and Retrospectives

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning.

ME Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing SOLD OUT

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep pace with development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

MF What Do Agile Managers Do? NEW

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

The Agile Manifesto makes no mention of management. So does that mean that we don’t need managers? No. We need managers, but what they do changes in an agile organization.

MI Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Although first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors.

MM An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework NEW

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Many organizations have achieved agility at the team level only to be unable to achieve it across teams. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides both a vision and method for how to achieve this. SAFe is the first documented framework that can be used to scale agile throughout an organization. It is a combination of lean, kanban, and Scrum—lean to provide a context for an organization, kanban to manage the flow of projects, and Scrum to provide agile at the team level. Beginning with an introduction to lean and kanban, Al Shalloway explains why they are required for agile at scale.

MN Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

Keynotes

K2 For Maximum Awesome

Joe Justice, Scrum, Inc

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 10:15am

An agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management.

K3 An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 8:30am

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

K4 Producing Product Developers

David Hussman, DevJam

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 3:45pm

Many teams and organizations have found agile methods help them produce more. Where critical thinking is alive, a more important question arises: Are we producing the right thing? Even though agile tools and processes have helped produce more, they often fail to help us produce the right product, change our focus to product over process, or improve product learning.

Concurrent Sessions

AW7 At Least Five Tips for Improving Your Geographically Distributed Agile Team

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 2:15pm

About half of all agile projects either have team members who are dispersed or are part of large programs where the teams are remote from each other. That makes agile, with its real-time communications rituals, quite difficult. How do you build effective collaborative and autonomous feature teams when they are geographically separated and have different cultural beliefs? Johanna Rothman shares tips on building respect across time zones, how project charters can help create team norms, when to have—and not have—real-time rituals, and how to share data across time zones.

AW9 SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 3:45pm

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is a popular process for enterprise-wide agile adoption. It is a pre-built framework that describes the individual roles, teams, activities, and artifacts necessary to scale agile from team to enterprise level while providing a cadence for teams to follow. Jared Richardson, an agile coach at a large insurance company in the midst of a SAFe adoption, brings practical lessons from that work to this session.

AT7 Preparing for Enterprise Continuous Delivery: Five Critical Steps

Andrew Phillips, XebiaLabs

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 12:45pm

The ability to quickly and reliably deliver new, high-quality features to customers has become a standard business requirement across industries. Development, IT, and DevOps organizations are looking to Continuous Delivery (CD) to meet this need. However, introducing CD into an existing enterprise poses a number of challenges. The vision and principles of CD are well known and articulated, but practical guidance and concrete recommendations based on actual experience are difficult to find.