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. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. Bring your failing product backlog stories and discuss them, too.
David Hussman
Working with companies of all sizes worldwide, David Hussman teaches and coaches the adoption of agile methods as powerful delivery tools. Sometimes he pairs with developers and testers; other times he helps plan and create product roadmaps. David often works with leadership groups to pragmatically use agile methods to foster innovation and a competitive business advantage. Prior to working as a full-time coach, he spent years building software in the audio, biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education sectors. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam (devjam.com) focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills.
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. This assessment guides you through the remainder of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.
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. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.
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. Drawing on his years of experience helping teams improve their product learning skills, David Hussman presents techniques―personas, example-driven story mapping, customer journeys, and lean UX tools—for initial and continuous product discovery and validation. Beyond the tools, David shares ideas for creating whole, product development teams and communities which augment and extend simpler ideas like Scrum teams. The session is a combination of presentation and interactive participation so please come ready to engage, learn, and challenge the status quo. Feel free to bring—and ask—your most challenging questions.
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. David Hussman draws on his successful coaching experience in producing product developers and describes tools and techniques for building teams that value product ownership, product discovery, and product learning based on agile and lean delivery practices. David introduces ideas in three areas: 1) Getting Started―forming product centered teams, building product roadmaps; 2) Getting Productive―using agile methods to validate product learning, illuminate uncertainty, and pivot toward the most real value; and 3) Staying Productive―comparing leading indicators to lagging indicators, developing customers iteratively, restructuring teams to meet product needs, and working with people often deemed “outside the team.” Show up ready to question and challenge your status quo—and learn how to improve your future.