People and Teams

Tutorials

MA An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework NEW

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is quickly being adopted by many large organizations that have had some success with agile at the team level but have not been able to scale up to large projects. Al Shalloway describes what SAFe is, discusses when and how to implement it, and provides a few extensions to SAFe. Al begins with a high-level, executive’s guide to SAFe that you can share with your organization’s leaders.

MF What’s Your Leadership IQ?

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

MJ Building a Culture of Trust Where Agile Thrives NEW

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 8:30am

We know that teams and individuals who take ownership of their work outperform—often by 50 percent—those who don’t. And in agile, team ownership is a key principle. However, leaders often struggle with letting their teams own their work. Leaders are afraid that if they trust, their teams will fail. So leaders must create a culture of trust and help their teams take ownership. But what if the team builds the wrong product? Teams must align with the strategy and purpose of the business as well as with value to the customer. Finally, the organization must deal honestly with ambiguity.

MK Continuous Integration and Deployment through Continuous Testing NEW

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration monitors your source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems.

MP Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success SOLD OUT

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

TB Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it.

TD Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

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 a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could.

TF Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups NEW

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then?

TJ Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices

David Hussman, DevJam

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns from their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value.

TK Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

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 workshop, we’ll 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.

TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating).

Keynotes

K1 From Chaos to Order—Leading Software Teams Today

Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 8:30am

To successfully lead “the nerd herd,” you’re expected to motivate your team to perform, encourage innovation, and produce software solutions that delight the customer. Prioritizing your time for what’s most important can be quite challenging—especially when you’re swamped with a steady stream of incoming requests, meeting overload, and the ever-present personnel issues. The expectation of even faster product deployment, the evolution of software development to agility, and the establishment of self-directed teams often require even more time devoted to planning.

K2 The Roots of Agility

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 10:00am

What we mean by Agile is becoming less and less clear. Rob Myers shares sixteen years of history and observation, noting the amazingly diverse ideologies and practices that people now include under this umbrella term. Agile started with the earliest notions of iterative-and-incremental, inspect-and-adapt principles and practices from Scrum. It now includes the intensive engineering disciplines of XP that have recently branched off into the Software Craftsmanship movement. Along the way, agile grafted in lean principles and saw the flowering of the elegantly simple Kanban approach.

K4 Get Out of Your Comfort Zone―Now

Tricia Broderick, Pearson

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 4:15pm

In an industry that continues to rapidly evolve, the pressure to increase our mastery can be overwhelming. Whether browsing the web or your organization's technical library, it's discouraging to realize that many of the skills you’ve mastered are now obsolete, replaced by new, important ones that you know little about. Is there a way to change discouragement into excitement? Early in her career, Tricia Broderick was terrified to take chances for fear of failing.

Concurrent Sessions

BW9 Gamification and Arbejdsglæde (Danish: Work Gladness/Joy)

Ryan Kleps, Boeing IT

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 2:45pm

You get paid for doing that? Is it possible to both work and have fun in a large corporate setting? Can joy be made part of the workplace? For the past few years Ryan Kleps and his colleagues have been conducting an informal social experiment using gamification (before they knew it had a name) in their corporate training modules to encourage participation, engagement, and enjoyment.

BW15 The Magic of Assumptions

Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 4:15pm

There are no “facts” about the future. Everything we think we know about tomorrow is based on what we think we know about the world today and our assumptions of where that will likely lead. Through a process of trial and error successful project managers, software developers, testers, and analysts usually develop a heightened sense of assumption recognition. But they often don’t think consciously about the assumptions they, their colleagues, business partners, and customers are making.

BT1 Seven Deadly Habits of Ineffective Software Managers

Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 10:00am

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—along with ways to avoid them.

BT5 Applying Courtship Principles: Hiring for the Long Term

Philip Lew, XBOSoft

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 11:30am

As managers, we tend to focus on improving our processes. But have you considered that good people—not processes—are really the foundation of high-quality software? Competent and skilled people—combined with good process—can consistently produce higher-quality software. When we look for a spouse, we go out on a date, then another, and another as part of an information gathering process. We collect several months or even years of information to make this critical decision. So, why do we often make long-term employment decisions with a few brief interviews?