People and Teams

Tutorials

MA An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is quickly being adopted by many large organizations that have had some success with agile at the team level but have not been able to scale up to large projects. Al Shalloway describes what SAFe is, discusses when and how to implement it, and provides a few extensions to SAFe. Al begins with a high-level, executive’s guide to SAFe that you can share with your organization’s leaders. He then covers the aspects of implementing SAFe: identifying the sequence of features to work, establishing release trains, the SAFe release planning event, SAFe’s variant of Scrum, and when to use the SAFe process. Al concludes with extensions to SAFe including creating effective teams—even when it doesn’t look possible—and implementing shared services and DevOps in SAFe using kanban. Get an introduction to SAFe, discover whether it would be useful to your organization, and identify the steps you should take to be SAFe.

MJ Continuous Testing to Drive Continuous Integration and Deployment NEW

Cory Foy, Cory Foy, LLC

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration processes monitor source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems. Jared Richardson explains the ideas and then the tools needed to implement both continuous integration and continuous deployment. Jared demonstrates the open source continuous integration tool Jenkins as the center of the process. These powerful concepts ensure issues are detected within minutes of most code changes, and the developer is notified so he can fix the problem and learn from the experience. Even a partial adoption changes the cadence of a development organization and eliminates a great deal of ongoing code maintenance. Learn how to sell the idea and set up the process in your own organization.

TD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence SOLD OUT

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it. Learn how to use oratory and literary instruments to make the story come alive for your audience. Do your part to put an end to bad presentations―attend this tutorial.

TF A Product Ownership Practicum for Product Owners and ScrumMasters NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Congratulations! Your boss has selected you for a Product Owner role ... or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how to play with your Product Owner ... or you’re an experienced Product Owner struggling achieve balance among your stakeholders, customers and team ... or you’re newly CSPO certified but don’t know how to be a REAL Product Owner. Well fear not. Join author and Product Owner coach Bob Galen in this fast paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and delivering high-impact sprint reviews. Then we’ll raise the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively interact with your teams. Leave this workshop with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner you—and your boss—envisioned you to be.

TH Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

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? When done with utmost skill and to its greatest advantage, risk management starts before a project is even born. Tim Lister presents the advantages—and the dangers—of practicing risk management like a grown-up. Tim offers a process for you to consider tailoring for your organization and discusses how your organization can grow up.

TJ Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices SOLD OUT

David Hussman, DevJam

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 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. 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.

TK Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders SOLD OUT

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 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. Join Bob to 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. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in to provide guidance and direction. Examine the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and to examine the patterns of the bad.

TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities SOLD OUT

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

Concurrent Sessions

AW3 Forging a Path to Paradise: Replace Retrospectives with PRO-spectives

Jay Packlick, Improving Enterprises

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 11:30am

A cornerstone principle of the Agile Manifesto is periodic reflection on how to be more effective. So it's a bit ironic that retrospectives, widely practiced as a way to improve performance, are so ineffective. Teams often produce few, if any, significant improvements. Why is this? What can teams do instead to produce better results? Jay Packlick suggests that “Journey to Paradise Island” is a powerful exercise that introduces the practice of PRO-spectives―a forward-facing approach to continuous improvement that helps teams create and focus on achieving a compelling vision of their own creation. Unlike retrospectives which tend to be backward facing and reactive, producing superficial responses to transient problems, PRO-spectives begin with the end in mind. They incorporate the goal-focused power of the Toyota Kata model of improvement. Join Jay to learn how your teams can create their own Paradise Island, discover just how far they are from it, and determine the best course to get there.

AW6 Extreme Agile: Managing Fully-Distributed Teams

Alan Bennett, Linaro

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 1:30pm

It is challenging—if not impossible—to find local experts in low-level Linux or specific open-source software projects. However, this isn’t a challenge with a fully-distributed organization which has this talent worldwide. So the challenge becomes how to effectively manage, motivate, and retain this talent. At Linaro, Alan Bennett is responsible for producing many of their open source products. Having successfully worked with Kanban and Scrum in the past, Alan was surprised how difficult implementing agile practices was when the workdays of most team members overlapped only an hour or less. Realizing that their sprint planning and retrospectives were not going to be sustainable, the team knew they would have to make some changes. Alan shows you how his teams effectively manage their workload, combine agile with open source software processes, and create a system that survives and thrives even with the extreme communication latencies of a fully-distributed team.

AT1 The Joy of Work: People Performance and Innovation in Agile Development

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 10:00am

Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your agile team rewarded for finding better ways to work and innovating? Even though many organizations have adopted agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with agile values or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition. With a new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the annual review and recognize its limitations, and the damage it causes to individual morale and team productivity. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to agile principles but also actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how de-link merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.

Keynotes

K4 Shaping the Future of Agile Software Development

Christin Wiedemann, Professional Quality Assurance, Ltd.

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 4:15pm

Software development needs to continuously re-invent itself to take full advantage of new and evolving technology trends—and to keep up with user expectations. Are our agile approaches evolving as quickly as the new technologies, or are we being left behind as we use the same methods and techniques of a decade ago? Christin Wiedemann says that the future of agile development is ours to shape, and in shaping it we must be willing to question our habits and overturn today’s conventions. We must create a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and innovation. Christin shares what she means by innovation and why the future of agile depends on innovation. She explores ideas around brainstorming and collaboration, and discusses the importance of having the creativity and courage to investigate new approaches. Christin says we must continuously challenge and question methods, techniques, and core beliefs. Discover new insights that can change how you view the future of agile.