Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Teams & Leadership

Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...

Unleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...

Join one of the leaders from the Washington, DC, Atlassian User Group, for a hands-on workshop of Atlassian Portfolio, Jira, and Confluence. We will create and finish our own project starting from strategic planning, through development, and ending ready for operations and maintenance using the Atlassian tool-suite while discussing best practices, common barriers, and past experiences for managing information flow on projects. Be prepared to practice your improv skills as literally every aspect of the project will be fake and made up. Will we launch a rocket? Write a novel? Create...

The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...

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...

While the Scrum product owner is arguably the most crucial role within agile teams, we often hear horror stories about POs who aren’t available to their teams, change their minds incessantly on business priorities, or ignore quality requirements and technical debt. Even the best POs struggle to meet the demands of their “regular business-focused job” while providing sufficient team guidance. Bob Galen shares real-world situations where he’s observed product owners who deliver truly balanced value for their business stakeholders. Find out how story mapping and release planning set the stage...

Does it feel like you're toiling away in agile hell? Fear not—you don't have to be confined there for all eternity. Dave Bujard and Chris Stemen will describe the nine circles of agile hell, each an example of a problem that exists in many programs. They'll discuss the underlying issues that often are the cause and how to deal with them. Bring your smartphones—during the first five minutes, Dave and Chris will ask the audience to prioritize their pain points via an interactive app. During the presentation, they will focus on the six agile hells closest to participants' experiences...

Most agile practitioners first learn by reading a book, taking a class, or attending local meetings. But learning concepts works best when we can put some concrete examples and practice behind the theory. Being able to talk beyond anecdote and theory and demonstrate why something works the way we think it does is a powerful lesson. Join Bill DeVoe as he leads the audience in a few exercises to illustrate key agile and lean concepts. First, learn about the fallacies of multitasking and how to properly structure our work. Then complete an exercise demonstrating how typical projects work and...

Do you want to grow your organization’s ability to respond to market opportunities, competitive pressures, or opportunities for innovation? Then join Ryan Ripley as he explores how leadership in an agile world has sparked a change in the way we show up as leaders and managers in our organizations. We’ll discuss how leaders enable agile to thrive and grow, while keeping a laser focus on delivering value to customers and stakeholders. Ryan will address your questions and give you practical tips and ideas that you can start using tomorrow. Join us and learn what professional agile leadership...

Come get your questions answered by an agile expert! We won't have an actual fireside, but Bob Galen will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss the topics that are most important to you. Bob is an experienced agile coach with a broad range of knowledge on almost any agile topic—practices, leadership, or methodologies. And he wants to discuss whatever interests you. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.

Have you ever been in the same room with coworkers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Many people are starting to prefer virtual or chat messaging to face-to-face conversations, but live communication can get better results at work—and with your customers. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer will share a toolkit to help you assess your core communication...

A large company moves to agile, but when the going gets tough, they abandon all their agile processes and revert to old ways—which are now a combination of Scrum and waterfall—and delivery is worse than before they started. Usually, what happens next is the CTO gets removed, and the new CTO comes in and proclaims again that we are all moving to agile to re-energize the organization, and they start their transformation once more. Have you seen this movie before? The agile transformation for Standard & Poor's played out this way twice, but finally, the third time was the charm—their last...

Pair programming: the practice you love to hate! Twenty years after being introduced as part of Extreme Programming, the collaborative practice is still a thing. And if you thought pairing was nuts, now there's mobbing, where the entire team works together on one thing at a time. Yet we often hear teams say, "We go faster because we are mobbing." In this anecdote-heavy session, you'll hear Jeff Langr's history of working through various models for collaboration (or not) across the past several decades, including solo programming, pairing, and mobbing. He'll show you his office blueprints...

Agile is an incremental and iterative approach to delivering value to our customers. But too often, we assume that both approaches are fundamentally equivalent. However, there is a crucial difference, and getting the balance wrong frequently results in projects and teams that are AINO—agile in name only—often without even realizing it! Mathias Eifert will discuss how to differentiate between incremental and iterative approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you really need both. He will explore how iterative thinking shapes the core of agile practices, helps us manage today’s...

When it comes to an agile transformation, going through the motions of adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level is easy. The hard part is building the enabling structures that allow agile to thrive, aligning the flow of work, measuring progress based on outcomes, and achieving communicable results that will resonate with stakeholders. This talk will cover the hard part. Mike Cottmeyer will explore the economic rationale behind going agile, considerations that will drive your organization’s change approach, what the fundamentals of an agile ecosystem look...

Are you curious about design thinking? Hungry to experience it for yourself? Don’t just watch from the sidelines—come give it a try! This is a hands-on, experimental session that will be a fun and engaging experience with design thinking tools. You’ll learn some of the core values of design thinking, including how human-centered design, empathy for the people you are designing for, and feedback from users are fundamental to good design. You'll learn that experimentation and prototyping are not simply a way to validate your idea, but an integral part of your innovation process....

Getting quality software into production quickly and efficiently is a major priority for organizations of all types. Yet many find that development teams’ focus on “innovation and experimentation” conflicts with Ops’ mandate to mitigate risk and increase predictability. This cultural and organizational mismatch puts transformation success at risk and generates a constant state of “release anxiety.” However, breaking down these silos and implementing new trends in organizational structures, value stream mapping, and pipeline monitoring and tracking can help get development and operations...

Join us for a game of Agile+DevOps Feud, where two teams of thought leaders compete to name the most popular responses to survey questions to win bragging rights and to share their experiences. Questions and voting will be in the TechWell Hub leading up to the conference, where community members will name their greatest concerns, best practices, etc. Our two teals of panelists, Mary Thorn, Ryan Ripley, and Lee Eason, versus Melissa...

Are you a new ScrumMaster who is trying to figure out what the heck to do each day? Or have you been a ScrumMaster for a little while now but still find it difficult to set aside time to continue to grow your team’s knowledge of agile best practices? Do you struggle to improve the team dynamic or the relationship with your product owner because you are too busy removing roadblocks all day? These situations have become all too familiar. Courtney Wilkinson knows because she has successfully overcome many herself. As a former ScrumMaster and current agile coach, Courtney can tell you...

When moving toward automation, establishing trust in the automation test suite is important to unite the team as a whole. Once trust is established in the process and the tests, it becomes crucial to the overall software development lifecycle. Join Sneha Viswalingam as she shares the journey of how her team of manual test engineers contributed to automation, the steps they took to build clean automation and win the confidence of the organization, and how they came to believe that the automation effort has their backs. She'll outline the strategies used to make the tests reliable...