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Process Improvement

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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.

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MB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations.

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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.

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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.

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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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MK Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups NEW
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then?

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ML Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—And What to Do about Them NEW
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Every large software project is unique—each with its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns and succumb to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented—or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—only make things worse.

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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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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.

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MO Essential Test-Driven Development
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles. The developer first writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

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TB Testing Mobile Apps—From All Angles
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

As the need for testing mobile apps increases, so does the need to understand and apply test practices that cover more than just functional correctness. Randy Rice leads you through techniques for designing the right tests for your mobile applications, whether they are on the device or on a website. Learn how to know which items of functionality are important to test based on relative risk. Randy presents his visual method of how to rank important attributes including usability, compatibility, accessibility, and security, and then how to design tests for them.

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TD Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them.

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TH Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

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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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TJ Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

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 from 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.

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TK Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement.

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TP The Essential Product Owner: Championing Successful Products
Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Ellen Gottesdiener as she shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations.

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TQ Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate.

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Concurrent Sessions

AW2 Story Maps, Customer Journeys, and Other Product Design Tools
David Hussman, DevJam
Wed, 06/04/2014 - 12:45pm

Are you sure you are building the right product? Although agile methods help teams build products faster, many teams struggle to validate customer direction or product features. Some teams talk about “grooming the backlog” but still find their stories are not strong. If you’re struggling with bad backlogs or weak stories, this session is for you.

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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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AT1 See the Value: Focus on Delivering the Right Software
Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan, LeanDog
Ardita Karaj, EPAM
Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

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.

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AT3 Lessons from the Front Lines: Implementing DevOps in Large Complex Organizations
Mike Baukes, ScriptRock, Inc.
Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

Financial services are not about high fives, flashy suits, and Maseratis. Behind the scenes, the technology that powers these companies walks a delicate line, balancing regulatory risk and the need for rapid technology response to continually changing market conditions. DevOps is the perfect fit, a natural for these organizations. Getting it right, however, is quite another story. Mike Baukes describes two recent experiences of wide-scale organizational change in establishing DevOps capabilities in a trading firm and a commercial banking operation.

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Keynotes

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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