Conference Presentations

Focus on Value First: An Agile Transformation Competency Framework

Organizational transformation is difficult work. Many agile transformation efforts begin with lofty goals only to be sabotaged by unrealistic expectations about the depth and complexity of the changes required. Often, resistance to change is ingrained in an organization’s value system and difficult to overcome. Tamara Runyon presents an overview of a new Agile Transformation Competency Framework-a strategic tool for evaluating and guiding your transformation efforts. Evaluating the organization against the dimensions of the framework-collaboration, agile engineering, product management, environment, organizational culture, and distributed teams-results in a transformation plan that avoids setting unachievable expectations. To institutionalize agile values within an organization and lay the foundation for wide-scale adoption, a company must align with these six competency areas.

Tamara Runyon, CollabNet
Agile Pathologies: People Problems in Agile Shops

For agile adoptions that fail, you may not be sure of what went wrong or exactly where but you know something is broken somewhere. And with success, you often do not know what went right. Rajeev Singh shares his experiences regarding emotional and behavioral problems on teams trying to embrace agile values and practices. Join with your peers and hear Rajeev's tales of timid managers, ineffective product owners, poor agile coaches, and self-organizing teams that attempt to "run the asylum." He offers case studies of times when agile adoption has put organizations’ strengths and will to the test. Rajeev will help you develop an acute awareness of your organization's pathologies and offer specific paths to resolve these issues. If your agile team or teams are having "people problems" and sometimes seem to be in chaos, this session is for you.

Rajeev Singh, ThoughtWorks Inc
TOSCA OneView
Video

End to end testing for 21st century business applications (multiple technologies). Rapid test automation for agile software development teams. Test case design as the way to cost effective regression test sets.

Anastasios Kyriakopoulos, Tricentis
Empowering Agile Teams

Teams, when truly empowered, will always make better decisions than any one individual. Where can you empower teams as you adopt agile?

Jean Tabaka's picture Jean Tabaka
Five Dysfunctions of Agile Teams

Is your agile team not reaching their potential? They may be suffering from internal dysfunctions that contribute to less than optimal results. When core dysfunctions are left to fester, the end result may be a late or failed project-and the cause will be chalked up to “that's just the way agile sometimes is.” Based on his coaching work with hundreds of agile teams, Bob Hartman presents an agile team dysfunction model and identifies the five most common dysfunctions-Leave me in my silo, When we communicate it’s only by email, Others make commitments for us, Don't blame me because I didn't do it, and Worship the heroes. Bob shows how to determine dysfunctions, communicate them, and, most importantly, help teams get past them. Learn how teams can reach their full potential and even achieve greatness once they fully understand their weaknesses, and embrace practices and efforts necessary to overcome them.

Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Agile Leadership: Where Do Managers Fit?

When adopting agile software development, many of the agile roles and practices focus on the team and its members. So, where does that leave the managers-project managers, software managers, IT directors, etc? Based on his many years as an agile coach, Skip Angel answers these questions and explores the role of leadership in software development. Skip discusses common challenges agile team face and how managers within the organization are needed to address those challenges. Explore areas in which both the team and the organization value leadership: team structure and reporting; coordination among teams and teams of teams; team space, facilities, and infrastructure; mentoring and training; and optimizing processes, especially where they touch other parts of the organization.

Skip Angel, BigVisible Solutions
Growing and Nurturing Coaching for Sustained Agility

Where agile thrives, great coaching is present. Whether formal or informal, coaching is a key ingredient for successful and lasting agility. Unfortunately, many people call themselves coaches yet they fail to do any real, helpful coaching. David Hussman presents tactics for growing coaching in your organization. He begins by focusing on finding coaching candidates-what skills and attributes they need-and then engaging them to grow their coaching capabilities. From there, David walks through pragmatic coaching tools that foster appropriate ceremony and meaningful coaching opportunities. He teaches you how to develop a process that helps teams draw on their experience while overcoming their unique constraints. Leave with new ideas for helping with backlogs, working out estimation challenges, keeping stand up meetings lively, and getting developers to stop just talking about testing and really start doing it.

David Hussman, DevJam
Getting Executive Management on the Agile Bus

Much of the focus on agile transitions is on the team. However, the business side of an organization and the managers that lead it are not particularly interested in the mechanisms of agile teams and processes. They want faster time to market, schedule flexibility, predictability, visibility, better quality, and useful metrics. In other words, they want to know about things that help them get to success and that show when they've achieved it. Alan Shalloway describes agile development from an executive's point of view. Rather than focusing on the "how" of agile, he talks about the "why." Alan highlights ways for you to communicate to executive management how agile teams enable what they are trying to accomplish. Find out how improving time-to-delivery can drive higher quality into software development while driving waste out of the development organization.

Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Practices, Principles, and Values: Moving Beyond Dogma to What Works

The concept of software process improvement is not new. Many methods have been defined to conduct and pursue improvement. We never seem to lack for “improvement” ideas, as if they are fresh and exciting-which they often are not. Maybe that's because so much of what has been espoused through the years has not worked. Hillel Glazer examines long-held assumptions about process improvement, proposes plausible flaws, and reveals new levels of understanding that have facilitated breakthroughs in high performance. Hillel looks at what happens when there is too much focus on practices, when the underlying principles aren't honored, and when basic values aren't internalized. We see too much arguing over practices instead of working toward results-too much worrying about compliance to some dogma instead of moving forward with what’s really working.

Hillel Glazer, Entinex, Inc.
flow chart Four Agile Tips to Eliminate Rework in Application Development

Your applications need to meet business needs, overcome complex processes, and provide instant results to customers. And, ideally, they’ll require minimal rework on your part. The first step to success is requirements definition. Here, Filip Szymanski offers some tips from agile methods that will improve your requirements—even if you haven’t otherwise adopted agile.

Filip Szymanski's picture Filip Szymanski

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