Better Software West 2018 - Leadership

The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...

Are important words often left unsaid at your place of work? Do you feel like you're navigating a complex maze in conversations? Does your message tend to miss the mark with co-workers, who increasingly seem to be impediments to your reaching your goals? Trust and communication issues within the workplace can hollow out an organization. When organizations suffering from a lack of trust, it costs them speed, productivity, and collaboration. Join Allison Pollard and Marcus King as they share models to evaluate your own behaviors and facilitate activities to help you find your voice for...

Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing 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. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...

The world of work is transforming at an unrelenting pace. Product development is increasingly more complex and uncertain while the speed of decisions and delivery is escalating at an exponential pace. Many of us are unaware of how our thoughts and actions work against our own objectives and our organizations’ goals and needs. Pete Behrens illustrates how leadership agility improves self-awareness, amplifies decision-making, improves outcomes, and grows resilience and capacity in highly complex and fast-paced environments. Sharing stories from his two decades of personal experience—...

Do your Retrospectives feel like a repeat of the last one? Are they moan and groan sessions? Want to try something new to give your team a boost? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users. Why not try using known design principles during your retrospectives to get that "wow" factor for your teams! In this session Catherine Louis will provide a Design Thinking overview. You’ll roll up your sleeves up and try it...

Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore—actually, they haven’t been for quite a while. Agile's collaborative, iterative, incremental approaches to work have caused it to go mainstream. But can we apply team-based agile straight out of the box in a nonsoftware context? Although most of the principles and patterns apply, sometimes the practices and frameworks need modification for a particular context. Mike Cottmeyer will explore two case studies of agile journeys: an international hotel chain going through a major rebranding initiative, and a well-known fast food restaurant looking...

On any team, from infrastructure engineering to development to HR, there is always a looming danger of one individual being the only person capable of performing a key task, either because of their technical skills, domain skills, or business experience. The risks of having key-person dependencies—reduced productivity, inaccurate project estimates, morale problems, delays, and business-impacting defects and downtime—are hard to identify and can be even harder to resolve. Lee Eason is a leader and coach who has experienced this problem for so long, he finally decided to do something about...

Think about your latest retrospective. Were people interested and engaged, or did they complain and accuse? Did you leave the retrospective feeling like you learned something valuable, or were you simply there to check the retrospective off your list? Retrospectives are hard work, but effective retrospectives can have a transformative effect on your team’s performance and, ultimately, your organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Join retrospective expert David Horowitz as he explores tangible steps you can take to turn your retrospectives into the catalyst of continuous improvement...

So, your company wants to be innovative. Are you comfortable with failure? The word failure is littered with negative connotations. Elon Musk financed three failed SpaceX rocket launches. Edison designed more than 2,000 light bulbs that did not work. The Wright brothers crashed dozens of planes and gliders before one took off. And the Americas were discovered through failed circumnavigation. Some failed small and learned. And some failed big but survived and thrived. The lesson is that organizations must embrace failure to accelerate innovation. Join Stefana Saxton to learn how to...

As an agile community, we talk a lot about innovation and failure. But we often forget to talk about the head games that keep us from innovating. Billie Schuttpelz unearths those internal dialogues that prevent us from taking risks that drive innovation. Become a part of breaking open the conversation around impostor syndrome—yes, it exists, and it's stealing far too many of our authentic voices. Join Billie to get insights into how imposter syndrome is holding you back. You'll learn three ways to unleash your creative ideas, break free of the swirling thoughts and inactivity that...

For years, people have made recommendations for how to develop software in an agile way based almost entirely on intuition, folklore, and anecdotes. They've never been able to quantitatively show the accuracy or applicability of these recommendations. This session quantifies those recommendations in the most precise and objective terms, including a presentation of general findings in Larry Maccherone's research correlating agile practices to performance along the dimensions of productivity, predictability, quality, and time to market. These data can be used to make general decisions about...

Scaling agile is tough. Convincing regulated financial institutions to change their "governance" processes to a matrixed, decentralized decision-making organization is almost impossible. But that’s just the change of direction that adopting agile approaches requires.

Come listen to the journey that Mary Thorn took with two regulated financial institutions by implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) without the business-side and people actually realizing the source of the change.

You will learn why and how the principles and values of SAFe and agile can transform any...