Conference Presentations

Scrum vs. Kanban: It's Not Necessarily All of One or the Other

Have your Scrum development teams discovered that grooming some features only one sprint ahead is too late? Have your product owners ever asked you to implement a set of features within a month and continue to implement additional features on a periodic basis? As you manage a product and its releases, you must address these and other timing issues to reduce or eliminate rework, maintain a steady pace of delivery, and consistently produce business value. Sharing experiences managing a large and complex product within State Farm’s vast IT organization, Season Tanner describes the successes and issues they encountered using Scrum and Kanban together. Learn about the Kanban process they implemented and tuned to work while retaining some Scrum practices. Find out what ultimately worked best and how they execute that process today.

Season Tanner, State Farm Insurance Companies
The Whats, Whys and Hows of Kanban

Lean software development practices are gaining momentum-with good reason-and many software teams are learning to use Kanban to help manage development and reduce waste. Sharing his experiences-both good and bad-implementing Kanban at Pillar Technology, Tim Wingfield explains how this practice can help you rapidly refine and improve your development and delivery processes. According to Tim, Kanban, which embodies the seven principles of lean software development, can help you identify practices-context switching, thrashing, and bottlenecks-that may be slowing down your team. Join with Tim to explore the concepts of Kanban, including queue limits, trigger points, and value stream maps. Based on the experiences Tim and his organization faced and overcame to implement Kanban technques, you'll take back a practical grounding in Kanban and a realistic view of how to implement it in your organization.

Tim Wingfield, Pillar Technology
The Battle of Scrum vs. Kanban

Over the past ten years, Scrum has become the leading project management approach in agile development. Now, there’s a new kid on the block-Kanban. Devotees of each approach emphasize their fundamental differences, debating pros and cons of one versus the other. Recognizing that their principles and practices are not utterly dissimilar, Jean Tabaka leads an open discussion about Scrum and Kanban approaches. For instance, both approaches create high project visibility and work in smaller increments than traditional development. And yet, each approach emphasizes its principles that influence which practices and measures guide the team and its organization. Scrum uses a Burndown Chart for visibility on progress; Kanban tracks work-in-process (WIP) as one of its tools for progress visibility. Is one better than the other? Or more importantly, when is one better than the other?

Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
Testing an eCommerce Shopping Cart Site

Karen Johnson takes attendees through a shopping session that recreates a number of possible scenarios-and highlights what can go wrong. She'll also explain how to prevent defects from going live on your production Web site. From securing transactions to managing cart contents, this talk is a must for anyone involved in the eCommerce arena.

Karen N. Johnson, Peapod, Inc.
Successful Project Management in the Face of Shifting People and Teams

The best project managers know to superbly manage the subtleties of risks, employee turnover, personality clashes, shifting priorities, and other unexpected events. And they know how to motivate even mediocre employees to produce exceptional results. The biggest challenge is facing the fact that no project proceeds predictably and according to plan. Learn practical day-to-day techniques you can use to achieve extraordinary project success in spite of seemingly insurmountable setbacks.

Angela Gilchrist, CyberOptics Corporation

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