Better Software East 2017 - Mature Agile Teams

For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization, and it doesn’t get the support you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for organizational change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around 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 team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....

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...

Measuring software development is difficult. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of complex initiatives (such as adopting agile) is even more difficult. One department at IBM struggled to reduce a list of 150 metrics down to a top twenty to use in consulting engagements. Through the years, nearly every one of Anthony Crain’s clients has asked him for help in proving that their teams were “getting better” at development. Nearly all of their measures were “adoption” measures showing how teams were doing agile. However, none of the metrics was focused on whether the development was...

Dozens of books address the mechanics and theory behind Scrum. And they’re great. But they offer little guidance to those who work on Scrum teams and are neck-deep in organizational dysfunction—and have no idea what to do next. This is when a team is most vulnerable and likely to slip back into old practices—including bad Scrum. Ryan Ripley helps break this cycle by taking you through the common anti-patterns that emerge when theoretical Scrum is implemented in complex organizations. Ryan explores why these anti-patterns emerge, and what we can do to “inspect and adapt” our way back to a...

Are you looking for ways to ensure your teams are always working on the highest customer value ideas? Do you want the ability to quickly adapt to microchanges in the market? Do you want end-to-end visibility of work across the enterprise from inception to delivery? If so, this session with Mario Moreira is for you. Discover how to operate in an agile manner at every level of your enterprise and gain the business benefits it can bring. Mario explores innovative concepts such as enterprise kanban, lean canvas, cost of delay, agile budgeting, discovery mindset, incremental thinking,...

Lean software development has been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems...

Many organizations struggle to achieve predictable, high quality software delivery. However, agile software processes are not prescriptive, and we recognize that processes are continuously evolving to improve delivery, consistency, and quality. Karen Holliday describes the challenges that Halogen Software experienced in the past five years as they moved from waterfall delivery to the agile/scrum development model. Karen shares the strategies implemented at Halogen that have led to a string of five on-time quality releases—including two early releases. Learn how to plan in an agile (ALM)...

Ever sit in a strategy review session and get little or no participation from others? Or feel like you left a planning session with a different understanding of what was agreed to? If you feel there must be a more effective way to communicate important information around your strategy and plans and you want a better way to document it so your stakeholders will both understand and engage in providing useful feedback, Jennifer Bonine has a solution for you. Join Jennifer as she describes mind mapping tools and techniques and explore how mind maps can help increase team velocity and...

Creating a cohesive team doesn’t require knowledge of dark arts or forbidden rituals. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be fun! Using exercises built around the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) methodologies, Paul Wynia explores techniques that ensure full team engagement and collaboration resulting in more meaningful discussions. Working as teams, discover Team Values using a series of individual and collaborative LSP builds. Once the Team Values are defined, use them to guide your team’s behaviors. These are finally turned into the Team Working Agreement, a powerful tool for...

Scrum is everywhere. More than 90 percent of agile teams use it. But for many organizations wanting to scale agile, one team using Scrum is not enough. Dave West says the Nexus Framework, created by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, provides an exoskeleton for Scrum. Nexus allows multiple teams to work together to produce an integrated increment regularly. It addresses the key challenges of scaling agile development by adding new yet minimal events, artifacts, and roles to the Scrum framework. Dave discusses Nexus, addresses its boundaries, and explains what else is needed for agile...

The change in mindset necessary to become a servant leader is incredibly hard for a scrum master who comes from a command and control background. As a newly minted Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), Ryan returned to his team excited and ready to get underway with a scrum adoption, but he had not fully grasped the concept of servant leadership. Instead of being a change agent, he was an impediment. Ryan’s cautionary tale is a common one. Attendees will learn about the difficulties of becoming a scrum master, how scrum team members need to embrace the scrum values to promote healthy team...

Metrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to...

The idea of transformation can be both exciting and frightening. How do we shake off old ways of thinking? What will emerge when the transformation is complete? How will I know the transformation is finished? These are questions and challenges that many product teams face as they make the transformation to agile.

Kevin Stilwell shares his experience and techniques for shaking off old paradigms and practices to break the organizational “muscle memory” that exists in many companies. What emerges will be a high performing product team—and the reward will be well worth the effort.