agile

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps East Agile Distributed Teams: Oxymoron or Viable Option?
Slideshow

Many surveys indicate that more teams work in distributed environments. But agile approaches work best when people collocate, huddle around a problem, and closely collaborate on the best solutions that will deliver value. Is collocation the only option these days? Does distributed always imply “dysfunctional”? Does technology help or hinder? Maybe the problem is how we think about the working environment. Mark Kilby will share key principles of successful distributed agile teams that help define better working environments. Understand how the principles apply to different types of distributed teams, and discover how agile practices change in distributed teams and how they may vary from team to team. You'll take back ways to assess your current distributed team environment and generate ideas for improvement.

Mark Kilby
Agile DevOps East User Stories Are like Onions: Let's Peel Away the Layers
Slideshow

In the world of agile product development, user stories are like onions ... and no, that doesn’t mean they stink or they make you cry (although they have been known to do both). Writing user stories is still one of the hardest crafts in agile product development today. We all know that a good user story can be the difference between a low-performing Scrum team and a high-performing one. Katrina Thacker will introduce the "onion pattern" as a paradigm for creating great user stories, and she will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to practice applying the pattern. In this interactive session you’ll learn a new approach to user story creation and practice peeling back those user story layers in a way that promotes collaboration, co-creation, and understanding and sets up your teams and product for success.

Katrina Thacker
Agile DevOps East Service Virtualization: How to Test More by Testing Less
Slideshow

Agile teams tend to struggle in getting development and testing in sync. Many teams run minified waterfalls, where testers get working code a few days before the end of the sprint—and tools usually can't help. But service virtualization is one of those rare tools that can make a huge impact and accelerate software delivery by limiting the dependencies needed for testing. Join Paul Merrill to get an introductory demonstration of service virtualization with a freely available, open source tool. Learn the five modes of service virtualization: capture, simulate, spy, synthesize, and modify. Return to your workplace with one more tool in your tool chest. Paul will walk through a common scenario for service virtualization and teach you how you can test more, faster, by testing less!

Paul Merrill
Agile DevOps East How Agile Killed Managers
Slideshow

Agile adoption has changed the corporate landscape in many different ways. And while the change has been mostly positive for the teams, some can see agile and Scrum ideas as a revolt against traditional management practices. If the team is self-organized, then what's the manager's role? Have no fear—managers are not obsolete; their job just looks a little different. Katy Sherman will discuss how agile has reshaped the manager's role. You will see examples of what not to do, such as when managers become a real obstacle during agile adoption, as well as learn how individuals, teams, and managers can work together to become successful and achieve true agility. All agile enthusiasts—including engineers and other individual contributors, product owners, managers, ScrumMasters, and agile coaches—are welcome, so come exchange ideas and learn techniques to become effective agile leaders, regardless of your titles and roles.

Katy Sherman
Agile DevOps East How Design Thinking and Agile Can Be Friends
Slideshow

Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why pure agile practices require design to be performed within a sprint while the product backlog item is in development. Having a validated long-term product vision from the lean methodology may be the key to harmonizing the needs, processes, and roles of user experience design with the desire of agile teams to be self-sufficient.

Mary Thorn
Agile DevOps East Commonalities of Agile and DevOps Transformations for Large Organizations
Slideshow

As the adoption of agile and DevOps have been steadily growing over the years, many organizations have been taking a proactive approach to prepare for the changes needed for success. This means giving people the skills and resources they need to be successful, working with customers and users for improved collaboration and transparency, and providing teams with the tools and infrastructure to enable continuous flow of value. Are there commonalities across organizations that others can learn from to support their journeys? Join Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson as they provide an interactive discussion around proven practices for large-scale transformation, the challenges they have experienced, and the amazing similarities of two agile DevOps journeys.

Suzette Johnson
Agile DevOps East Holistic Agile: Treat the Whole Company, Not Just IT
Slideshow

As agile methods find more global applicability, we are finding groups outside of IT that have nothing to do with technology or software development demonstrating success with agile methods. But the approach to the solutions they deliver are often catered to their own unique circumstances. The original Agile Manifesto, principles, and supporting frameworks were formed with software development in mind, but from a holistic perspective, a different approach is needed for enterprise solutions outside of IT. Robert Woods will show you how to translate the success seen in agile software delivery to parts of the organization that don't deliver technology as its core solution.

Robert Woods
Agile DevOps East Pushing Pennies: Playing with the Principles of Product Development Flow
Slideshow

Lean and agile concepts can sometimes be counterintuitive, but the right game or exercise can effectively demonstrate those concepts, providing a practical basis for conversation and learning. Being able to talk beyond anecdote and theory and actually demonstrate why something works is a powerful statement. In this workshop, Bill DeVoe will execute some games you can take back to your organizations to help them understand some basic lean and agile concepts regarding optimization of flow and throughput. Through these activities, we’ll demonstrate the value of a prioritized backlog, optimized batch sizes, limiting work in progress (WIP), and more.

Bill DeVoe
Agile DevOps East No One Cares About Your Practices: A Modern Agile Approach
Slideshow

Organizations often declare they are "going agile." This goal is misplaced, misguided, and just plain wrong. In fact, the agile community has become a cult of practice: Teams are too focused on the way to do things and making sure they are doing those methods correctly. We even turned agile into a proper noun so that we could more easily sell it. But what about the outcomes? This workshop will use the Modern Agile principles proposed by Joshua Kerievsky to walk some of those ideas back. The four principles—Make People Awesome, Deliver Value Continuously, Experiment & Learn Rapidly, and Make Safety a Prerequisite—will drive our exploration of what agile can mean today and how to put the focus back on outcomes. Bob Payne will focus on learning and continuous improvement to reach better business outcomes.

Bob Payne
Agile DevOps East Agile Program Management: Measurements to See Value and Delivery
Slideshow

Do you have measurement dysfunction on your program? Are you trying to measure teams and extrapolate each team’s status to the program? That doesn’t work. Teams have personal statuses, and you can’t add them together to understand the program state. But you can use a handful of program measurements that help everyone understand where the program is and where it’s headed. Instead of trying to “scale” measurements, take a new approach. Join Johanna Rothman to learn to use and share quantitative and qualitative program measurements that show everyone the program state. It starts with measuring what you want to see. This simple principle is so effective because it takes your needs into account before you decide on a metric to use. Next, we'll look at the scope. We’ll talk about why you want to measure completed features and how measure at this level can bring clarity to your project.

Johanna Rothman

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