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Agile Development

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Measurement: Benchmarking to Chart Project Trends NEW
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

How can you compare the productivity and quality you achieve across the span of your projects—whether agile, waterfall, or outsourced? Join Michael Mah to learn about schedule, quality, and defect metric trends and how these patterns behave on real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to understand your own project trends for productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of software measurement, showing you these metrics in action. With hands-on exercises, learn how to use these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. Leverage these metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

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MD Eight Steps to Kanban
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

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ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.

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MG Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.

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TA Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.

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TD The GROWS™ Method: A Modern Software Development Suite NEW
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

Join Agile Manifesto author Andy Hunt and Jared Richardson to learn about GROWS™, a modern development approach that’s built around the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition and deliberate experimentation to guide project decisions. Incorporating existing practices, it's a methodology designed to improve both initial adoption and on-going evolution of your team and organization. Andy and Jared describe GROWS in detail, diving into specific steps and practices for managers and executives. Learn techniques to share the company's vision effectively, and simple tools for managing progress without micromanaging. Know when a project is doing well—and when it's in trouble. Discover how to keep your team on track with the “3 Rs”—building on a Rhythm (their iteration cadence), building the Right thing (from the vision), and working the Right way (with craftsmanship and technical practices). Come, learn, and participate as Andy and Jared provide an understanding of the GROWS Method and how it can move your company forward.

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TE Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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 problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.

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TI Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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 on 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. This assessment guides you through the rest of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.

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TL Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Principles and Practices NEW
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce delays in development by decreasing re-work. Through interactive exercises, Ken shows how acceptance tests created during requirement analysis decrease ambiguity, increase scenario coverage, help with effort estimation, and act as a measurement of quality. Join Ken to examine issues with automating acceptance tests including how to create test doubles and when to insert them into the process. Explore the quality of tests and how they relate to the underlying code.

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TM Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders SOLD OUT
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 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 tutorial, 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. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. Explore the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or failed. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and examine the patterns of the bad.

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Keynotes

K2 Continuous EVERYTHING: How Agile Is Changing Our World Forever
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 10:00am

Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.

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K3 Introducing the GROWS™ Method for Software Development
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 8:30am

Agile software development is in a rut. Agile is consistently misapplied, misunderstood, misused, and then, all-too-often abandoned. Worse than that, many popular agile methods are not actually agile. They've remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. And despite preaching inspect and adapt, users adopt and forget, following practices by-the-book and suffering when a practice conflicts with their local context. Join Andy Hunt as he describes the GROWS™ Method—a new approach to software development. The GROWS™ Method is based on four key ideas—the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, and local customization. The Dreyfus Model speaks to limitations in human cognition and problem solving. Evidence-based practice is a framework for first-class experiments that encourage us to make decisions and answer questions with actual outcomes—not wishful thinking or popular folklore. Inclusivity includes more of the organization than just the developers, and local customization makes adaptation to individual environments a first-class part of the method. It’s now time to grow software development beyond the limitations of agile.

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K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

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Concurrent Sessions

BW7 Visualization to Improve Value Delivery
Michael Harris, David Consulting Group
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

Small organizations usually lack the time and money to make mistakes in what they work on next, so prioritizing by business value is a survival skill. In large organizations, work is organized into projects to which resources are assigned to maximize their utilization. Lean product development flow theory suggests that this strategy of assigning resources to projects and optimizing their utilization is a poorer—and sometimes catastrophic—strategy for delivering economic value. Instead, the flow of work through small teams of expert resources is preferred. Mike Harris gives an overview of the key elements of flow theory and shares five simple but essential metrics—value visualization—for defining and tracking business value. These metrics optimize the flow of economic value and bring economic value metrics into tactical decision making in the software development process. Mike explains how these metrics require more involvement from the business and represent more accountability for the business and IT.

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