Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Agile & Lean Practices
Tuesday, June 6
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
NewMany 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...
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...
Approaching Conflict Productively
NewWhen it comes to high-performing teams, conflict is inevitable and necessary. The very essence of gaining the best value outcomes is a result of leveraging the wisdom of various perspectives and experiences. Those variances will generate conflict. Yet, this is only a negative if we are unequipped with the knowledge and tools to embrace and approach conflict. In this tutorial, expect to unpack the differences and the relationship between conflict and drama. Discover tools for helping all voices be heard. Plus, have fun practicing skills in preparing how to react to conflicts productively...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
Wednesday, June 7
Everyone...Is an Agile Coach
Some perspectives imply Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else. Or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers, Scrum Masters, and leaders, will find difficult to impossible to master. This session intends to debunk those notions. Bob Galen subscribes to several generic notions in agile contexts. One is that everyone has leadership potential and can rise to be a leader. And the other is that everyone is a coach, can coach, and has a foundational responsibility to coach, regardless of their role. The only questions are will,...
DevOps, Development Cadence, and the Product Lifecycle
In many DevOps initiatives, the DORA metrics are treated as the gold standard. When teams have good scores on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to recover, and change failure rate, we assume that we are on track, but this steady-state view doesn’t align with the fact that innovation and delivery are often episodic and have cadences that vary cross the product lifecycle. In this session, we’ll look at the general issue of development and delivery cadence, and explore a model based on Kent Beck’s 3X which allows us to interpret and target DORA performance in terms of the...
Humanizing Work
Is your favorite flavor of agility resulting in process over people? Is your contribution mired in person hours that inevitably turn into mythical person months? Are human efforts in heroic zeros and ones measured in seemingly pointless (story) points instead of customer, business, and employee value (ROI)? What began as a technology revolution has devolved into frameworks and processes that focus solely on mindless over mindful measuring, tracking, and projecting. And while many organizations find initial success that generates interest and demand for scaling agile and digital...
Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?
One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and...
What Are Your Automation Strategies?
Everyone in your organization has probably discussed automation at least once. But who is responsible for automation? And what are the automation strategies for your organization? Several factors should be considered before jumping into automation. In this session, Lisette Zounon will share her personal experiences and cover case studies and successful quality transformation. Lisette will also cover what to consider for your automation strategies because it always depends on your organization and what you are trying to achieve. Attendee takeaways from this session include identifying your...
Thursday, June 8
Collaborating Effectively as a Tester to Anticipate Defects in Code Review
Júlio de Lima has lost count of the times he's heard people saying that he should start testing as soon as possible when working as an agile tester. However, no one told him how to do this practically. So he started thinking about how to anticipate his tests and managed to find a few ways: 1) Gather refinements and ask questions about quality risks, 2) prepare his testing strategy in advance, and 3) read the code and mentally compile the code and verify that the tests he planned would pass. Júlio can say that #1 and #2 helped him a lot, but #3 had a big impact on the software testing...
The Power of Personal Engagement
Two steps forward in professional scrum. Come and explore the advantages of personal engagement. What makes a team thrive? How do you increase the maturity of a scrum team? What tools can you use to wake up from zombie scrum? Do you want to understand how to increase your team's engagement and help your team grow? In this session, we will help you advance forward by using scientific principles and practical tools by starting with personal engagement. We will share how to increase personal engagement, we will provide you with tools to get everyone involved, and we will help you gain insight...
What the Titanic Disaster Can Teach Us About Software Quality
An engaging and entertaining session that takes lessons from the Titanic maritime disaster and uses them as jumping off points for lessons about software quality. As an example—on the Titanic, the lookouts did not have access to binoculars, which impacted their ability to see icebergs in time to prevent the disaster. What tools are we missing that allow us to see problems coming? By presenting this topic as a series of stories instead of as a dry set of bullet points, people will take away key details and be able to apply them to their own unique situations.
Scaling Agile and DevOps Capabilities
It is important for businesses to understand scaling agile and DevOps capabilities before considering an agile transformation. In this session, Dr. Tawanna Sargent will share her experience joining a business that wanted to go through an agile transformation, but leadership didn't know how to make this happen. Dr. Sargent quickly learned about the organization and discovered that structure and alignment did not adhere. This session will dive into the key lessons learned including creating synergy and autonomy in teams, SAFe improving DevOps, identifying ineptitudes, and embracing the...
The Impact of Leadership Effectiveness
Leaders often don’t realize how their style impacts the people around them or their business results. Effective leaders give their businesses strategic and competitive advantages. During times of transformation, people’s feelings are heightened, from loss of control, interruption of power, fear of failure. We fall into reactive fear-based patterns instead of coming from a place of curiosity and creativeness. Organizations that commit to growing more effective leadership find they attain and sustain high levels of business performance. We are all leaders and can involve our entire...
Using Neuroscience to Boost Your (Scrum) Events
Inspired by Sharon Bowmans’ Training From the Back of The Room, this session will explore how you can use brain science to keep scrum events live, active, and worthwhile. For example, research shows that our brain 'disconnects' after ten minutes when nothing changes. In a training setting, you would use this knowledge to change the setting regularly, or to make short exercises or chunks of information. In a scrum event, you could use this knowledge also. How? That's what we will explore during this session. You will learn about neuroscience and how you can use it to activate your brain and...
Regulated Industries—Is Agility Even Possible?
Agile ways of working are thought by many to be incompatible with the realities of highly regulated industries. Financial services, insurance, healthcare and governmental organizations often are those which could see the most benefits from greater efficiency, transparency, and customer-value focus. However, due to real and perceived constraints of compliance, auditing, validation and related issues, traditional waterfall approaches are the de-facto default for these industries' product development and project management, with the traditional challenges with these traditional methods. Is...