Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Agile & Lean Development, Principles, & Practices

Are you part of an agile team that’s distributed or dispersed around the world? We’ve seen many of these teams and they have trouble “being agile.” Their off-the-shelf agile approach doesn’t fit with their time zones: the planning is impossible, the code and tests never stay quite clean enough, and someone often feels excluded from their retrospectives and other collaborations. The “standard” approaches just don’t seem to work for these teams---where the team members are and how they work. In this workshop, join experienced agile coaches, Johanna Rothman and Mark Kilby, as they explore the...

For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...

The very title of this workshop is meant to challenge you. Many don’t like to use the term transformation, instead, preferring adoption, migration, transition, business agility shift or some other phrase. However, successful implementations of agile require a transformation to occur at multiple levels (teams, leaders, managers, culture, and organization), and goes beyond mere implementation of time-boxed sprints, daily standups, and the use of a product backlog. This workshop was created because so many organizations struggle with how to move towards more agile approaches to product...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...

One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...

Are you a leader tasked with leading a digital transformation, or are you part of a guiding team that is preparing your organization for big change? Scaled agile, lean, agile, DevOps... No matter what methodology your organization intends to use, taking a proactive, strategic approach up front will provide a strong foundation for the journey ahead. Join Claudia Marquette and Francie Van Wirkus to learn why and how to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders assess the landscape of your organization, have productive discussions about your work, its current...

Organizations often declare they are "going agile." This goal is misplaced, misguided, and just plain wrong. In fact, the agile community has become a cult of practice: Teams are too focused on the way to do things and making sure they are doing those methods correctly. We even turned agile into a proper noun so that we could more easily sell it. But what about the outcomes? This workshop will use the Modern Agile principles proposed by Joshua Kerievsky to walk some of those ideas back. The four principles—Make People Awesome, Deliver Value Continuously, Experiment & Learn Rapidly, and...

Operating on the philosophy that one must thoroughly know the rules before one can break them, a global company developed its own delivery model that is still as true to the agile mindset as is possible. Join Arjay Hinek in this lively session as he deconstructs his company's experiment in melding agile with construction project management to create a hybrid delivery model. At first, the teams were struggling with clear ownership, timely communication, and clear follow-through on work in progress. From modifying the user story mapping model in order to improve project initiation to...

Your team's been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You're estimating your work using abstractions like story points, and the predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking about large-batch projects with fixed cost, scope, and time? Robert Pieper will talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Using financial...

From value stream mapping to burndown charts, making things visible is a core component of the continuous improvement process. But even with all this visibility, much of the data surrounding how your teams work is either not captured or not understandable. This data represents a great opportunity for insights and improvement. Think about it: Your management team tells you that your velocity is too low. What do you do? First, you need more information. What does “too low” mean? Why was the velocity low? Did the team deliver value? Brandon Carlson will share one team’s surprising insights...

As agile methods find more global applicability, we are finding groups outside of IT that have nothing to do with technology or software development demonstrating success with agile methods. But the approach to the solutions they deliver are often catered to their own unique circumstances. The original Agile Manifesto, principles, and supporting frameworks were formed with software development in mind, but from a holistic perspective, a different approach is needed for enterprise solutions outside of IT. Robert Woods will show you how to translate the success seen in agile software...

Open work areas, a focus on collaboration and conversations, and group events that seem to require verbal fluency ... It may feel like the agile ecosystem is designed with extroverts in mind. But science tells us that introverts make up almost half of the workforce, and they may struggle to be productive in an agile environments. In fact, introverts might even shy away from agile opportunities because of the radical collaboration it requires. In this interactive session, Julee Everett will teach you to recognize the traits of an extrovert and an introvert through self-identification....

Are parts of your organization embracing agile while others become more resistant, disconnected, or frustrated by the idea? Or maybe your team wants to be more agile but it isn’t sure how to get started because it’s not a typical development team. Agile has been moving out of software and being embraced by nondevelopment teams for years, but it’s not always a great experience. How can we make the best parts of agility relevant to any team? This hands-on session will show you how to start teams down the path to “being agile” by taking a teamwork-centered approach. With examples from a...

The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John...

Distributed teams are the norm in Fortune 100 and 500 companies, crossing many time zones and multiple cultures. These teams seldom communicate directly, instead using a point of contact to relay information. While teams don't need to be collocated to deliver significant business value, they must use their DevOps pipeline to their advantage. Through continuous integration and automated testing, stories can be swarmed by distributed teams and completed in a fraction of the time it typically takes. Treasa Overton will discuss how this distributed model allows for faster delivery of business...

As the adoption of agile and DevOps have been steadily growing over the years, many organizations have been taking a proactive approach to prepare for the changes needed for success. This means giving people the skills and resources they need to be successful, working with customers and users for improved collaboration and transparency, and providing teams with the tools and infrastructure to enable continuous flow of value. Are there commonalities across organizations that others can learn from to support their journeys? Join Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson as they provide an interactive...

Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why...

Not every continuous delivery initiative starts with someone saying, "Drop everything. Let's do DevOps." Sometimes you have to grow your practice incrementally. Sometimes, you don’t set out to grow a practice at all—you are just fixing problems with your process, trying to make things better. Join Gene Gotimer as he walks through two case studies, one from the Department of Defense and one from the Department of Homeland Security, that took different avenues to get to agile and DevOps. Learn about the journey each organization took, the tools used to build quality into the products,...

Every one of us has the potential to be limitless in our careers, personal life, and everything in between! Yet most of us—yes, including you—are only achieving a fraction of what you are capable of. We all want more, but we aren’t sure how to go get it. This session will be an interactive and practical guide to breaking through all the things that limit you and will kickstart your journey to a limitless life. Jessica Soroky will introduce activities from the personal development program Limitless by Choice and address the potential all teams have to be high-performing when they start...