Agile Dev West 2016 - Agile Development
Sunday, June 5
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Integrating Test with a DevOps Approach (2–Day)
Certified ScrumMaster Training (2-Day)
Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training (2-Day)
Monday, June 6
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model,which helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer’s and user’...
Fostering Sustained Agility
Has your team been struggling to become one of those high-performing teams that you were assured it would be if you started doing agile? Are your teams stuck on the agile transformation plateau? Most organizations start off strong in their transformation toward an agile mindset, successfully implementing team practices such as sprints and stand-ups but often a plateau or even a slip back occurs. Why? Because many leaders do not focus on fostering sustained agility―that is, creating an overall environment that influences individuals and teams...
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex...
Essential Test-Driven Development: A Hands-On Workshop
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 until the test passes, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete—and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates...
Planning to Learn and Learning from Delivery: Scrum, Kanban and Beyond
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...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce...
Tuesday, June 7
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
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 tutorial, 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...
Eight Steps to Kanban
Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition 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. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban...
High-Performance Product Development
Large organizations often struggle with the software part of product development when they attempt to create innovative services and products, Obstacles they face are often related to organizational culture and project/program management paradigms that do not take advantage of the unique characteristics of software. In this tutorial session—designed for directors of IT, program/project managers, and software professionals—Jez Humble describes how large—and small—organizations can take a lean approach to developing new products and run large scale product development programs. Jez shows how...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Producing Products and Coaching Agility: Making Agile Practices Matter
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 on 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 rest...
Mob Programming Workshop
All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer. Mob Programming is a cost-effective, collaborative, and fun way to get work done—together. It's a whole-team approach to development, where coding, designing, testing, and working with the “customer”—partner, product owner, user—are all done as a team. In this workshop, led by Mob Programming pioneer Woody Zuill, experience Mob Programming hands-on while learning the mechanics of how...
Wednesday, June 8
DevOps and the Culture of High-Performing Software Organizations
The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of culture in creating high-performing teams. However, often perceived to be subjective and intractable, culture is often neglected in favor of more concrete drivers such as tools and processes. And this is a major failure mode in organizations attempting to achieve substantially improved performance through implementing agile and DevOps. Jez Humble takes a practical, data-driven approach to culture, illustrated with examples from large, successful enterprises. Learn how to measure culture and examine what a generative, high-performance culture...
Three Things You MUST Know to Transform into an Agile Enterprise
The farther we go down the path of scaled agile transformation, the more we learn that adding process and complexity can only take us so far. At some point, size and complexity are going limit our ability to be truly agile, and we must move toward greater organizational simplicity. The challenge is that large organizations are often complex and usually anything but simple. Most agile transformations start by either ignoring the complexity inherent in the system or by wrapping complexity in planning constructs that may help in the short run but ultimately doom your business agility. Mike...
Determining Business Value in Agile Development
Both agile and lean focus on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible. On agile projects, story points are often used to estimate and track development effort for user stories. However, to concentrate on delivering value, we must be able to place a business value on these stories. Through lecture and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh explains how to estimate and track business value, presenting two methods for quickly estimating value for features and stories. He shows the relationships between business value and story points, and discusses how to chart business...
Blending Product Discovery and Product Delivery
More and more organizations are realizing that while they are getting more done, they are not necessarily getting more value. More code does not mean more product and more product does not mean more market share. According to David Hussman, we need to shift our focus toward a balanced investment in discovery and delivery without going back to gathering big requirements up front. To accomplish this, we need to embrace new discovery metaphors and practices. David draws on his years of experience working with product managers, heads of product, and product owners as he introduces ideas like...
Slay the Dragons of Agile Measurement
Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers eight tools to slay the dragons of agile measurement. The #1 Dragon slayer—Use measurement for feedback rather than as a lever. What's the difference? Feedback is used to improve your own behavior; a lever is employed to change someone else's behavior. The distinction is subtle but critical. If you think what gets measured gets done, you are already venturing into “thar be dragons” territory. But it's not too late. Larry shows how to create a culture where...
DevOps Is More than Just Dev and Ops: Don’t Forget Testing
What exactly is DevOps? It’s not just Dev, and it’s not just Ops. In fact, successful DevOps implementations meld development and operations activities with agile practices and a strong dose of automated testing. Organizations cannot afford to wait for a manual testing process to do the job. Developers need fast feedback loops, and managers need agile organizations. Join Jonah Stiennon as he discusses the importance of agile and testing in DevOps. Jonah introduces practical ways engineering departments can shorten the iteration cycle between Dev and Test. Automating the repetitive parts of...
Integrate Regulatory Auditing with Agile
When attempting to audit agile in regulated enterprises, auditors all too often hear “We are agile, so we have no evidence for you to examine.” For a profession rooted in plan-driven methodologies—from validating software development to documenting audit work papers—agile presents a unique conundrum for auditors. Join Chong Ee as he explores ways for agile teams to develop and sustain an open dialogue with auditors on internal controls. From updating age-old mindsets such as segregated development and testing phases to employing the agile artifacts of user stories and burndown charts,...
From Unclear and Unrealistic Requirements to Achievable User Stories
"What do you want the system to do?" can be a loaded question for agile teams. Ideally, the product owner gives you a product backlog with fully groomed user stories prioritized by business value, ready for team discussion and estimation. Instead, you may have the “big picture” product owner who can describe high level requirements but struggles to provide clear direction on specific system behavior, or the “aspiring developer” product owner who is more than happy to give you exact system implementation in intricate technical detail. You may have the “kid in a candy shop” product owner who...
Agile Metrics: Measuring Outcomes and Results
When organizations move to agile approaches, two very common metric anti-patterns surface: (1) The organization doesn’t change its metrics at all and simply continues to measure as they always have; or (2) The organization throws out every metric and just focuses on velocity and trying to increase it. Both of these anti-patterns lead to metrics dysfunction and disastrous results. Bob Galen explains that agile organizations should be developing their measurement strategies early. He explores unhealthy metrics (for example, velocity) and the drives behind measuring them. Then he describes...
Continuous Integration as a Development Team’s Way of Life
Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword in software development today. We know it means “run lots of builds,” but having a continuous integration pipeline opens up opportunities well beyond making sure your team's code compiles. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews to how often and safely you deploy to production and how you monitor your product in the wild? What if CI could provide insights into how automated tests are performing and how to improve them? Melissa Benua describes how to set up a basic CI infrastructure and then transform it into...
Why Agile Works—and How to Screw It Up!
Agile practices can be the easy part of agile. It’s getting people into the agile mindset that can be a real challenge. Do you have a team member who doesn’t quite support agile or someone who’s playing along but not really committed? One step toward obtaining real commitment is a better understanding of why agile works, why it is different, and when it is the right approach. In this fast moving session, Perry Reinert provides a fun look at some of the theory that gets to the core of why agile works. Yes, we really can use the words fun and theory in the same sentence. Combining parts of...
Architecture vs. Design in Agile: What’s the Right Answer?
Is architecture the same as preliminary design in agile? It shouldn't be. Do we create architecture up front, then do iterative development after the architecture is done? That is edging back toward waterfall. Can you explain the purpose of the architecture in just two or three statements? Anthony Crain says that when he asks that question, he gets either verbose answers or blank stares. So Anthony shares an elegantly simple two bullet explanation of what an architecture does. Explore the models architects and designers should produce and learn why these models are so important to keep...
Your User Stories Are Too Big: Yes, They Are!
When a user story is too big, it is harder to understand, estimate, and implement successfully. Some teams break the “business story” into “technical stories” but this generally doesn’t help because most or all of the technical stories need to be completed before there is anything meaningful for the stakeholders. There is a better way. Chris Sims teaches four simple yet powerful techniques for breaking big stories into smaller stories that are meaningful to stakeholders and deliver incremental business value. For each of the four techniques, Chris models the technique and then gives...
Improvisation for Agile Skill Development
In today's economy, the Creative Economy, businesses face a disrupted, highly competitive, and constantly changing landscape. Robie and Jody Wood say that to thrive in the Creative Economy, team members, managers, and executives need to become and remain agile. Improvisational theater provides a proven model for developing agility skills since the characteristics of “being agile”—engaging people, learning, making decisions in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and adapting—are the very skills that improv artists work to develop with every exercise they perform. This session is about “...
Using DevOps to Drive the Agile ALM
Many organizations struggle to implement sustainable processes to drive their software and systems development work. This leaves their technology managers and teams to use whatever worked for them on the last project, often resulting in a lack of integration and poor communication and collaboration across the organization. Based on his new book Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement, Bob Aiello explores how to use DevOps principles and practices to drive the entire application lifecycle management process including establishing agile...
Five Critical Elements for Successful Agile Data Management
In the past few years we’ve used cloud technologies to improve pre-production flexibility and solve many problems that previously prevented us from delivering high quality apps to production. However, one problem consistently prevents full test coverage prior to deployment—the lack of comprehensive test data. As we try to get faster and leaner in our agile development processes, the problem with data becomes even more difficult to solve. Robert Kelman describes the evolution of DIRECTV’s (now AT&T) Agile Test Data Management program. He explains the five critical elements—centralized...
The Issues Agile Exposes and What To Do about Them
Before the short iterations in agile, projects were segmented into large blocks of work taking many weeks or months. If problems emerged, it was relatively easy to hide them. Now, with agile, many of these problems and issues can’t be hidden for long. Lee Copeland exposes these issues—trust, organization, work, measurement, and change—and explores solutions. Leaders often distrust their teams; teams often distrust their leaders. Learn the symptoms and solutions to these trust issues. A key organizational issue is that organizations cannot give up their previous team structures. Explore...
Apply Phil Jackson’s Coaching Principles to Build Better Agile Teams
Often referred to as the “Zen Master” for his unorthodox coaching style, professional basketball coach Phil Jackson won more professional sports championships than any other coach in history. Jackson led the Chicago Bulls and Los Angeles Lakers to a total of eleven NBA championships, but rather than studying and following the strategies of other coaches, Jackson developed a set of coaching principles aligned with his personal beliefs. Dion Stewart believes that agile coaches can learn a lot from Jackson’s focus on selfless teamwork, mindfulness, compassion, and ritual rather than simply...
Thursday, June 9
Implementing Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment
Developing medical devices that are subject to FDA approval has traditionally followed the waterfall methodology, largely due to the structure of the regulations that govern development practices. But we know from myriad case studies in different industries that agile methodologies are far superior in providing the highest value to customers in the shortest time to market. Neal Herman shares how one developer of complex medical devices embraced agile software development practices and proved that it could not only develop software faster with higher quality but also meet all regulatory...
Agile Hacks: Creative Solutions for Common Agile Issues
Whether you are just starting agile or have already made the transition to using agile in your organization, you may face the issues that Susan McNamara describes. Is your team not firing on all cylinders? Do people feel stuck or bored? Is your team having trouble getting to Done at the end of each sprint? Susan has booted up agile in three different organizations and has found valuable approaches that work across different environments. She covers topics including getting the most out of your product owners/product managers, dealing with organizational constraints in the agile group,...
The Tester's Role in Agile Planning
If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be glossed over or missed altogether. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers can—and should—contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great...
Which Agile Scaling Framework Is Best?
Choice can be a wonderful thing—when you’re buying a car and research abounds to help you decide. But when selecting the best agile scaling framework for your organization, choice can be downright intimidating and costly. SAFe, Scrum of Scrums, DAD, LeSS, or SSwS? There is a lot at stake. With many scaling frameworks to choose from, you’re probably questioning what each brings to the table. How can we assess which will result in the best outcome? What selection criteria should we use? Join Tom Weinberger as he shares expert insights, comparing and contrasting the capabilities of the most...
Playwriting, Imagination, and Agile Software Development … Oh My!
Agile practitioners are constantly striving to improve their processes and delivery to gain a competitive edge. To become a cross-functional T-shaped rock star, you have to be open to learning from other disciplines and adapting quickly. Tania Katan knows a little about crossing disciplines and adapting at a breakneck pace. She is a playwright by training who recently made the audacious leap into software. Tania helps you find your inner “T” so you will have the breadth and depth to take on the unpredictability of software development with the imagination and insights of a playwright....
Building Mob Programming Teams Using Lego® Serious Play®
In recent years the idea of Mob Programming has begun to attract the attention of those looking for new ways to take advantage of the genius that can be found in a focused, cross-functional, and unified agile team. But how, in practice, do these teams actually work? Paul Wynia, a Lego® Serious Play® facilitator and agile coach, worked closely with the originators of Mob Programming to develop a fun and simple Lego® game that incorporates the basic concepts, approaches, and roles found in an effective Mob Programming team. Using a test-driven development framework, each Mob team tests,...
Scaling, Spreading, and Succeeding: When to Do What and Why
More and more large organizations are adopting agile methods. As they do, many are adding more process than needed and are not stopping to work out what level of process will actually help their products or projects. David Hussman discusses the use of agile methods on large programs and small teams at large organizations like Disney, Target, Siemens, and others. David uses real-world experiences as examples for teaching concrete ideas about when scale is needed and not, as well as how to generally spread lasting agility that is based on concrete measures of success. Be warned: You will be...
How Far Can You Go with Agile for Embedded Software?
With the proliferation of IoT and consumer demand for smarter homes, appliances, automobiles, and wearables, many traditional product-based manufacturing companies are now becoming embedded software companies. This means that the design and manufacturing of physical products is becoming more complex since it now requires the integration of the physical components of the product, the firmware, and the myriad software components these products contain. Historically, embedded software developers have lagged behind IT in the adoption of agile development practices, largely due to the...
Don’t Make These Scrum Mistakes
Scrum is a project management framework and does not specify a set of how-tos or checklists that some other development processes define. Since Scrum can be implemented in various ways, it is easy—and often common—to misinterpret Scrum’s guidelines and make mistakes while implementing it. A new team, in their eagerness to “go agile” and adopt Scrum, often succumb to common pitfalls. Being aware of these mistakes is the first step toward avoiding or resolving them. Sumedha Ganjoo discusses and shares examples of some common mistakes that she notices new teams making. Examples include shared...
Facilitation Techniques for Agile Meetings and Ceremonies
Facilitation is the art of leading people through processes toward agreed-upon outcomes in a manner that encourages participation, ownership, and creativity from all involved. So how do you take this definition and turn it into facilitating powerful meetings? Most agile practitioners can read about facilitation and the “right” way to do it. However, it can be challenging to take that book knowledge and feel comfortable facilitating agile meetings and ceremonies. Whether you are looking to coach a single team/product or scale agile to the program/enterprise, Darrin London says that...
Going Agile at Scale: A Mindset Transformation of Global Proportions
How do you successfully transform 700 people working on one product? The answer: Give them ownership. Value people over process. This requires that leaders learn how and when to step back—and when to step up. In the past eight years, the Veritas NetBackup organization had tried three agile transformations: two unsuccessful and one showing promise. The key difference has been the transformation of the leaders, helping teams take ownership rather than focusing only on artifacts and ceremonies. What did the leaders learn—and how? Julie Urban and Jeff Byron describe NetBackup’s transformation...
Use Feature Flags for Clean Deployments
Software teams want to move faster and deliver features to end users sooner. Continuous delivery and DevOps promise to deploy quickly. However, pushing faster and deploying more often increase the risk of breaking—and subsequent downtime. Edith Harbaugh finds that a feature flagging system of gating features—and being able to quickly turn them on or off—enables development teams to ship more frequently. With feature flags, engineering changes are pushed live to production “off” and then turned on for different users. Feature flags allow developers to separate deployment from rollout,...
Scaling Scrum with Scrum™ (SSwS): A Universal Framework
Scrum is a simple framework allowing a single team, working from a single backlog, to maximize the value it delivers to its stakeholders. Unfortunately, your organization probably has more than one team and more than one backlog—but you still need to maximize the value to your stakeholders. You need Scrum, but how do you scale it for your organization? Dan Rawsthorne proposes Scale Scrum with Scrum™; tie your organization’s development scrum teams together with Leadership Teams and Coordination Teams. These are scrum teams that assure that each development team has a backlog, that the...