Agile Dev West 2016 - Project Management

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’...

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...

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...

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...

At a time when organizations of all sizes both want and need innovation, exciting approaches including lean startup and agile development have risen to the forefront. Although there is no shortage of resources and expertise on these approaches, less guidance is available on the daunting challenge of introducing and increasing innovation in our organizations. Organizations of different sizes face different challenges in innovation which, if not dealt with, end up stifling the potential results. Mimi Hoang and George Schlitz share experiences from many years of successes and failures...

Penny McVay shares how her team approached improving the quality of a large policy-writing application for a global insurance carrier. The application has many pieces and parts, thousands of lines of code are changed monthly, and the business depends on a stable application. To mitigate risk, the team investigated the question of how to predict where testing needed to focus. The regression test suite the organization had built was difficult to maintain, identified few defects, and took hours of effort to run. QA needed not only to optimize the regression suite but also to determine how to...

Have you wondered how to progressively harness your agile team’s energy, focus on important goals, and improve outcomes? Woody Zuill said, “If you could adopt only one agile practice, then let it be retrospectives. Everything else will follow.” Retrospectives help individuals and teams adjust to today’s constant change and establish a sustainable pace to deliver complex products. Zorro Circles is a framework for designing retrospectives that employs proven techniques to gather and analyze information required to collectively solve problems. Aakash Srinivasan and Vivek Angiras introduce the...

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,...

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,...

You are understaffed, overworked, and behind on your commitments. Your go-to person just quit, leaving an unbelievable void of knowledge. If the old-school ways of attracting talent—advertising on job boards, filtering résumés, interviewing candidates are not working, then this session is for you. Catherine Louis says the tables have turned. The balance of power has shifted from the employer doing the hiring to candidates operating more as free agents and selecting the job. Leaders must learn how to build teams that engage employees as sensitive, passionate, creative contributors. A shift...