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Lean Management

Tutorials

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.

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MJ Stop Making Lists, Start Making Products NEW
David Hussman, DevJam
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

Many product backlogs are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value, focusing only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. If this sounds like your team, join David Hussman and Janet Gregory as they drive a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathe new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David and Janet combine their shared experiences to teach tools you can use to fuse centered product thinking with end-to-end testing.

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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.

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TI Eight Steps to Kanban
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Al Shalloway shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW3 Driving Lean Innovation on Agile Teams
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Wed, 06/04/2014 - 12:45pm

The Lean Startup® methodology has taken the business world by storm and is revolutionizing product development through the application of a Build-Measure-Learn cycle, and the systematic application of techniques such as Customer Discovery, Customer Development, and Pirate Metrics. With agile teams in place, how can organizations drive lean product innovation on their agile teams? How can we bootstrap product development with product roadmaps and business requirements that are truly aligned with end-user needs?

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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.

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