Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Agile Practices
Wednesday, June 10
Live from Las Vegas, It's Saturday Night: The Agility of SNL
Saturday Night Live is one of the longest-running agile institutions in the world. For 44 years, they have developed and delivered small batches of comedy in weekly intervals. Talk about sustainable development. But how do they do it? The practices and principles they employ are quite agile. From welcoming changing requirements to maintaining technical excellence, there’s a lot we can learn from how they deliver. Join Johns Krewson for a backstage and onstage view into the process SNL has developed over decades to get from concept to cash in one week. Along the way, gain a new...
5 Ways to Prevent Scrummerfall
There are many names for dysfunctional Scrum, one of which is "Scrummerfall"—embedding waterfall phases inside a sprint. It’s alive and well in 2020, more than 25 years after Scrum was first introduced. Yet the Scrum Guide says that you should have a definition of done and a potentially shippable increment at the end of each sprint, not keep rolling stories from sprint to sprint to take credit for partially done work. We hear development team members complaining at retrospectives all the time that we do not have enough time to complete all the stories. And team members often work overtime...
How Great UX Improves Dev’s Efficiency and Sanity
Agile methodologies often lack the details of how UX fits into software development projects. Some suggest that a product manager describing features is enough for developers, that UX should train others to do their specialized jobs, or that excluding UX experts solves their being “too siloed” and “not collaborative.” This happens with no other role in software; it’s hurting culture, efficiency, and productivity, as well as creating poor products for customers. Your customer only sees your UX, not your developers' skill or if you were agile or lean. UX failures remind us that skimping on...
Thursday, June 11
Agile Fireside Chat
You've got agile and lean questions, and Mary and Tom Poppendieck want to answer them for you. They won't really be sitting by the fire, but they will be on hand to talk about all things lean and agile. Mary has been a programmer, IT manager, and product champion and is well known for the Lean Software Development books that she wrote with her husband, Tom. Tom has been in computing for 25 years, working with health care, logistics, mortgage banking, and travel services, and he holds a Ph.D. in physics. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
Delivering Agile Results on a Fixed-Scope Contract
What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object? In this case, the immovable object is a contract with extensive requirements embedded in the scope and no flexibility for leveraging agile methods. The unstoppable force is the agile delivery team determined to find a way to make agile methods work, even with this seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Iterative waterfall delivery against a predefined scope goes against everything agile stands for. The solution is a combination of proven strategies to transform this rigid contract into an agile platform for delivering the highest-...
Flawed Thinking Exposed: Exploring Cognitive Bias
Many team challenges can be tracked back to cognitive biases: Our judgment gets anchored, we think we're better than we are, and we are our own favorite reference point. And even though we're encouraged to "think outside the box," there are conditions where we have a bias against creativity. If that's not a recipe for a tough team environment, I don't know what is! Improve your game by learning about bias. Dan Neumann will explain engrained flaws in the way humans process information. These flaws express themselves in unrealistic estimates and over-optimistic forecasts. You will also learn...
Agile Teams—Not So Cross-Functional!
In the purest Scrum organizations with teams that are fully cross-functional, it is easy for those teams to complete delivery of their quality work in their own way. In other organizations, however, there are Scrum or agile teams that can't accomplish every single thing by themselves and need help from other teams or departments. When we talk about teams being cross-functional, we assume they are able to complete their commitments on their own. However, in a growing number of organizations, this is not the case. Let's take a dive into some ways that Scrum or agile teams are able to...