Better Software West 2018 - SCRUM
Monday, June 4
Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high-quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the basic principles and practices 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 than resource...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
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...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
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...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
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 fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven/Behavior-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done are often areas 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 our difficulty performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)/behavior driven development (BDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD/BDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. By decreasing re-work, ATDD/...
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...
Tuesday, June 5
Advanced Backlog Refinement and Estimation Techniques
One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...
Wednesday, June 6
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Testers
Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you...
Thursday, June 7
Let's (Re)Learn about Agile and Scrum in One Hour!
Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking...
Lean-Agile Learning through Games
Most agile practitioners first learn agile by reading a book, attending a class, or attending local meetings. But learning lean and agile concepts works best when we're able to put some concrete examples and practice behind the concepts. By adding a set of games and exercises that teach and reinforce lean and agile concepts to our toolboxes, change agents can provide some practical basis for conversations both inside and outside their organizations. In this talk join experienced agile coach Bill DeVoe, as he shares two of his “go to” games. First, up will be The Name Game, a game that...
Waterfall to Scrum: It Only Goes Up from Here
You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and...
Essential Product Ownership: It takes a Village
Scrum surfaced in 1993. So, the role of a Product Owner has existed for 20+ years. Surely the whole idea is well understood by now. Right? And the role is a simple one. There is a single product owner per product team or teams. Defining and accepting the work to meet the clients’ goals. Always mucking around the backlog. Again, simple and clear. Right? Well, in my coaching travels and observations it’s not that simple. I still see literally tens of organizations and hundreds of teams that struggle with the notion of product ownership. So, let’s go over it...
Friday, June 8
Shhh...it's not "SAFe"!
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...