Better Software East 2017 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics | TechWell

Conference archive

Better Software East 2017 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics

Sunday, November 5

Brian Hicks
Coveros

Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile *SOLD OUT*

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm

This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Upon completion attendees will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile and awarded the ICAgile Professional (ICP-FDO) designation.

Monday, November 6

Erik van Veenendaal
Improve IT Services BV (Bonaire)
MD

Requirements Engineering for Developers and Testers—and Everyone

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Developers, testers, and other stakeholders often participate in requirement reviews, scanning documents for ambiguity and testability, and then using these requirements as the basis of their activities. In an agile environment, many contribute to the development of user stories and acceptance criteria. Erik van Veenendaal believes that unfortunately many of these participants have little knowledge or skill in real requirements engineering. What level of quality and detail is realistic to expect for requirements and user stories? What does testability really mean? How can developers and...

Larry Maccherone
Independent Consultant
ME

Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MF

Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather...

MG

Leading Successful Organizational Change Efforts

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
MK

Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster—ready to take on the world. Then reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from What is management’s role on a scrum project? to How do we manage dependencies...

Tuesday, November 7

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TH

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time—with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TC

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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....

Tim Lister
Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
TM

Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Tim Lister, along with five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild, have compiled project patterns from their combined 150 years of consulting, and have described them in their Jolt Award winning book, Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. We all talk about best practices but only a tiny minority of organizations actually practice them all. Not to worry, think of “best practices” for human health. We know all about them, but very few of us actually practice them all. Maybe if someone did arduously practice all health practices, they...

TN

The Lost Art of Live Communication

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Have you ever been in the same room with co-workers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? Many people are starting to prefer virtual or instant chat messaging to live conversations, but live communication can get better results at work. As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer shares a toolkit to help you assess your core communication competencies and see how you...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TI

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
TL

Leading Your Agile Transformation: A Workshop

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

In the past decade agile development has become mainstream in software development and now is spreading beyond software to other domains. It is important for leaders and managers to understand how to build, develop, and lead agile teams—not just for the organization but for their own careers. Ray Arell introduces a cohesive set of methods, practices, and principles to maximize business results from agile and lean development, while also cultivating a workplace where people thrive. The workshop topics are highly dynamic and customizable, and more than 80 percent of the discussion will be...

Wednesday, November 8

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
K2

You Might Be an Agile Leader If...

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces—and even Lean Coffee “meetings.” Channeling comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and the...

BW1

Keep Engagement High in Difficult Projects

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team dissatisfaction, shares techniques to uncover hidden issues, identifies the most common traps project managers fall into, and offers general tips to avoid them. Now that you understand what could be impacting your team’s performance, Larissa guides you on how to minimize the dissatisfaction and keep the team...

Anthony Crain
Blue Agility, LLC
BW2

Measure Anything: The Quality, Productivity, Predictability, and Engagement Model

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Roland Cuellar
LitheSpeed
AW1

Creative Disruption: A Guide for the Perplexed

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Fire the project managers … do DevOps … hire plenty of agile coaches. Agile leadership books, guidance, and carnival barkers abound. However, with much hype to sort through and little guidance, how can you separate the snake oil from the real thing? How can you develop a North Star to guide you through agile, DevOps, and organizational transformation? Roland Cuellar shares lessons based on two decades of experience consulting with leading executives worldwide. Rooted in a foundational philosophy of self-management that evolved into a cutting-edge approach, Roland shares an essential...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AW2

Breaking Bad Scrum

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Dave Todaro
Ascendle
AW3

Rightsizing User Stories

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

User stories and their big brothers, epics, are an excellent way to describe requirements for a software system. They act as stakes in the ground to keep track of what the system needs to do, the type of user most interested in each feature, and the reason the requirement provides value. As projects reach a certain size, stories often become too large for a team to complete within a single sprint. The solution? Split them into smaller stories, each of which can be completed within the duration of one sprint. Dave Todaro describes proven techniques to split epics and stories, making...

Patrick Turner
Small Footprint
DW2

Your DevOps Goal: A Culture Shift, Not Just a Toolset Implementation

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Becoming a DevOps shop isn’t just about hiring DevOps engineers and implementing a new toolset. It’s about changing the culture of your organization. Patrick Turner believes that your focus for DevOps should be to bring a cultural shift throughout the organization—up to the business team and down to product delivery. Focusing on the culture shift of DevOps creates faster innovation. And all of this enables transparency in this process for those who have not had visibility in the past and encourages transparency for those who have worked behind the curtain of complexity that has...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
BW4

The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us...

Niranjalee Rajaratne
Third Bridge
BW6

A Holistic Approach to Software Quality: Yes, You Can!

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

As software organizations grow, maintaining quality is vital. As digital transformation gains strength in the industry, both clients and IT demand increased delivery speed. Thus, traditional test methods are being challenged, and a paradigm shift is required that emphasizes testing and recognizes the need for expanded skill sets to meet this demand. However, quality is not all about testing. Niranjalee Rajaratne believes it is important to create a culture that supports a quality organization and understands the value it brings. She describes why we must choose and encourage processes that...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
BW7

A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions
BW9

Word Smatter: Exploring Semantics, Testers, and Problems

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

“Testers [do|don’t] (help) [prevent|detect] problems.” Throughout his career, Damian Synadinos has encountered many variations of this phrase, which uses just a few small words to express many big ideas. It is important to understand what each word means individually to better understand the ideas they convey collectively. The study of the meaning in words is semantics. Damian begins with a brief and broad overview of semantics and some related ideas, which set the stage for deep analysis of each individual word and its potential meaning. We consider: Testers—What might this word mean in...

V. Lee Henson
AgileDad
AW7

The Top Five Agile Concepts That Most Companies Completely Miss

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Organizations claim to be going agile. Many agile leaders promise twice the results in half the time. Unfortunately, most organizations and leaders fail before they even start. In five basic concepts Lee Henson shares the reasons for their failures. First, focusing on the outcome instead of the output is critical for agile project success. Second, organizations that succeed are those that take time to eliminate technical debt and focus on test automation. Third, as organizations strive to be precise in their estimates, they are learning that time-based estimation was never intended...

Thursday, November 9

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
K4

Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

For decades, product development has been focused largely on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the true goal—delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value...

Matthew Phillip
ThoughtWorks
BT1

To Estimate or Not to Estimate, is that the Question?

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice, or why you would want to move toward NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz or read Vasco Duarte’s book. Maybe you simply want to understand how you can spend less time estimating and more time delivering working software—all while providing your customers with some understanding of predictability. If so, Matthew Phillip will help you understand through lessons learned with NoEstimates what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. Join Matthew to learn how to move from upfront intuition-based estimates to create a data-...

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT2

It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

BT4

Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Siva Katir
PlayFab, Inc.
BT5

Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Most of us dread failures. But things go wrong. We can become paralyzed by the fear of being the creator of the next outage or critical bug. After a failure, we often hold a postmortem, but this rarely addresses how we can be more proactive in preventing catastrophes. Considering our missteps, failures, and outright crash and burns, we can learn how to ask the right questions at the right time. Siva Katir has thirteen years of experience causing and surviving failures—from the mundane to the maddening. Siva shares the lessons he has learned analyzing his, his co-workers, and his...

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA
AT6

Discover Your Team’s Values with LEGO® Serious Play®

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Logan Daigle
VersionOne
DT4

Measure DevOps for Objective Continuous Improvement Practices

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Logan Daigle says DevOps has brought about unprecedented changes in the way organizations solve problems and break down silos. DevOps is empowering employees to automate expensive processes and leverage the power of cross-functional teams to benefit development and operations culture. DevOps is helping bridge a culture gap and focuses on providing shorter feedback loops with more responsiveness to failure. But are we missing something here? Do we really know how much all of these process and automation improvements cost? Do we really know if we are improving our products, processes...

BT7

Cultural Intelligence: A Key Skill for Success

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Diversity is becoming the norm in everyday life. However, introducing global delivery models without a proper understanding of intercultural differences can lead to difficulty, frustration, and reduced productivity. Priyanka Sharma and Thena Barry say that in our diverse world, we need teams with people who can cross these boundaries, communicate effectively, and build the diverse networks necessary to avoid problems. We need to learn about cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural quotient (CQ). CI is the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is the cognitive,...

Glen Morris
Vectren
AT8

Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile Transformation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...

Leon Fayer
OmniTI
DT6

A Business-First Approach to DevOps Implementation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created,...

Rob Burkett
Buckle Down & Grind
BT10

The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—Leadership

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these measurements are usually taken against the triple constraints. According to the Project Management Institute, only 53 percent of projects are completed within budget, and only 49 percent are completed on time. If so many projects overrun budget and are late, we can’t really say, “Good, fast, or cheap...

Jeff Dalton
Broadsword Solutions
AT10

Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile Teams

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton...

Steve Martin
Pegasystems
AT11

Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile Game

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Sumit Kumar
Capgemini
DT7

Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOps

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

With the recent emergence of DevOps across the industry, testing organizations are being challenged to transform themselves significantly within a short period of time to stay meaningful within their organizations. It’s not easy to plan and approach these changes considering the way testing organizations have remained structured for ages. These challenges start from foundational organizational structures and can cut across leadership influence, competencies, tools strategy, infrastructure, and other dimensions. Sumit Kumar shares his experience assisting various organizations to overcome...

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
K5

Individuals, Interactions, and Improvisation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

As agile practitioners, we constantly strive to better ourselves, our team, and our delivery. A great way to achieve this is simply being open to learning new ideas from other disciplines—including improvisation. Jessie Shternshus shares her story of realizing the uncanny similarities between agile team principles and the pillars of improvisation. Effective improvisers give their teammates unconditional support, practice active listening and accept (and build on) each other’s ideas, see and use mistakes as opportunities, learn to embrace the unknown, and always consider who their audience...

Friday, November 10

Josh Anderson
Broadvine
SMT1

Building an Agile Organization at Light Speed

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 9:00am to 10:00am

Everyone loves the idea of explosive growth. Unfortunately, explosive growth often lives up to its name. Everywhere you look, things are blowing up. Josh Anderson shows you how to corral the chaos and provide your company with the growth it desperately needs.

The two key challenges of explosive growth are diametrically opposed: protect and support your existing teams and processes, while simultaneously growing an organization around them. To make that happen, you must walk the tightrope of process evolution as you grow your team. Josh shares real-world strategies you can use to...

Kevin Stilwell
Dude Solutions
SMT2

Transform a Product Team to Agile—and Live to Tell About It

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 10:15am to 11:15am

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.

Kevin Stilwell
Dude Solutions
Josh Anderson
Broadvine
SMT3

The Yin & Yang of Agile Success at Dude Solutions

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:00pm

In this mini-panel discussion Kevin Stilwell and Josh Anderson share their from-the-ground-up experiences building an agile organization and field participants’ questions. From their unique perspective Kevin and Josh share tactics and practices they used to build a high-performance agile organization. They are essentially sharing the “secret sauce” that made Dude Solutions a great example of “agile done well.”

Laura Burke
Ipreo
SMT4

Leverage Big Wall Planning for Truly Aligned Organizational Execution

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Love it or hate it, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was found to be the most used framework for enterprise-level agility in Version One’s annual survey. That said, many aspects of SAFe—including effective portfolio management—are difficult for organizations to implement.

Laura Burke Olson shares Big Wall Planning, a technique that Ipreo uses to “seed” their release trains with high-priority, high-value, and balanced portfolio-level epics. Big Wall Planning engages all aspects of company leadership in deciding the product roadmaps. This is a huge challenge in organizations that...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
SMT5

Aligning Toward Business Agility–360° of Freedom

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

What happens when the product vision is unclear? Simply put, your teams struggle to build valuable features and your customers are not happy. This lack of alignment eats away not only at the value you’re trying to deliver but also at your customers’ good will—and it can demoralize your teams.

Ryan Ripley examines the why behind your current practices and shows you how the agile values, principles, and ceremonies of an agile organization are designed to create and maintain alignment all the way from customers to individual team members. Drawing from real-world examples, Ryan explains...