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David Anderson, Valtech, Inc. and Modus Cooperandi,
Inc. |
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What is the essence of agile management? Empowerment, delegation,
trust, continuous improvement—and a consistent focus on the leverage points
to get the maximum advantage from agile—all with a light touch. Learn the
Zen of agile management from David Anderson as he shares the techniques he’s
honed managing teams at Motorola and Sprint. While working as Senior Director of
Software Engineering at Corbis, David pioneered the introduction of Theory of Constraints
and Lean ideas, such as kanban, to consistently deliver value to customers. You’ll
explore ways to manage with queues using kanban boards, identify and eliminate bottlenecks,
and reduce variability using cumulative flow diagrams. Learn about additional metrics,
measures, and indicators you can deliver to line, middle, and upper management to
keep them informed and onboard with the project. Take back the keys for building
a kaizen culture of continuous improvement and ways to institutionalize enterprise-scale
agile change in your development team and organization. |
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Learn more about David Anderson |
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives |
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As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more
companies are discovering that simply breaking down projects into small iterations
is not sufficient. Agile methods require changes in management, analysis, architecture,
design, testing, and quality assurance, as well as project management. Given the
substantial adjustments required, where can a team or enterprise look for guidance
in its transition? Learning the required skill sets individually is fraught with
problems—analysis, design, code, and test are not independent; they must be
integrated. Join Alan Shalloway as he describes the landscape of skills that a development
team needs to become effective agile developers. He discusses a set of principles
and practices that integrate the guidance provided by lean, agile methods, design
patterns, and more. In particular, Alan details how agile analysis and design patterns
support agile methods, and how core “lean” principles support all agile
methods, including design and test-driven development. |
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Learn more about Alan Shalloway |
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Rob Myers, Net Objectives |
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Test-Driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining
software design, testing, and coding to increase reliability and productivity. Rob
Myers demonstrates the basic and essential TDD techniques, including unit testing
with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring
code, and using mock/fake objects in development. Use exercises to practice the
techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will
address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of the techniques. |
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Laptop Required |
Attendees should have strong programming skills and be familiar
with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Each delegate should
bring a laptop installed with your favorite programming language and IDE—and
come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java and NUnit for any .NET
language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install
(and verify) your chosen xUnit framework prior to the tutorial. |
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Learn more about Rob Myers |
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Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc. |
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How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve
with agile practices versus traditional, more waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah
to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in
the real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from guesses on a project
whiteboard to realistic agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and
defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers an inside look
at agile measurements by showing you these metrics in action. In hands-on exercises,
you will learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for
time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, you will calculate productivity metrics
using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage
these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices at your
company. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of
implementing agile development practices. |
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Windows PC-Based Laptop Required |
To take full advantage of this session, participants should
bring a laptop computer for metrics capture and productivity calculations.
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Learn more about Michael Mah |
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Ken Pugh, Net Objectives |
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All projects, whether agile or traditional, need requirements.
Ken Pugh explores the differences between agile and traditional requirements by
interactively creating a set of agile-style requirements. These requirements are
developed through progressive elaboration—rather than the big-bang, big-document
approach. Ken first examines with you how stakeholders and requirements gatherers
interact and communicate in an agile environment. Students will create a charter
for a project that defines the overall scope and participate in a story-gathering
workshop to create an initial set of stories. Learn when and how to revise stories
by chunking and de-chunking to ensure that the requirements fulfill the characteristics
of good stories. Explore user roles, personas, and narratives to determine additional
stories. Practice prioritizing the requirements and estimating their business value
to help in that prioritization. At the end of the session, students will begin constructing
use cases and acceptance tests to add details to the requirements. |
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Learn more about Ken Pugh |
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Testing plays a major role for everyone
on an agile development team—analysts, developers, testers, and product owners.
Testing touches every facet of the process, helping the team understand requirements
and scope with acceptance tests, guiding design with test-driven development, and
providing feedback about the software with exploratory and automated testing. Unfortunately,
agile team members often have limited access to training and documentation to help
them take advantage of all that testing can bring to the team. Antony Marcano and
Rachel Davies, who share a passion for agile development and testing, deliver a
highly engaging and interactive session exploring the roles of testing on agile
projects. Learn to use automated acceptance tests that drive development. Use feedback
from testing to evolve the software and determine when the software is ready for
release—and practice providing this feedback in the most constructive way.
Develop your understanding of how exploratory testing fits in the picture. Leave
with new skills to share with your team. |
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Learn more about Antony Marcano
Learn more about Rachel Davies |
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Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software |
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During this highly interactive session, you will experience
an agile project from inception through its first iteration. Put theory into action
working in small groups to create interesting case studies with product backlogs.
Start by writing the high-level epic user stories that might be used to gain funding
for a real-life project. Because no project proposal is likely to be accepted without
a schedule, you’ll learn how to estimate with story points and then forecast
the team’s velocity. You’ll use these techniques on your product backlog
to establish a baseline release plan for your project. Knowing it is important to
work in priority order when a project begins, you’ll learn the four essential
factors to consider when prioritizing feature delivery. Practice using these factors
to divide epic user stories into smaller user stories more suitable for the development
team to produce during iterations. |
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Learn more about Mike Cohn |
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David Hussman, DevJam
Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development |
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Join David Hussman and Jean Tabaka in a journey that guides
participants in how the best agile teams truly engage and adapt. By investigating
the notion of “Beginner’s Mind” versus “Expert Mind”
through interactive exercises, David and Jean invite you to embrace an agile adoption
approach that keeps your mind in the present, open to new ideas, and always curious.
They “open their agile kimono” by sharing experiences of teams that
have successfully adopted Beginner’s Mind versus teams that unfortunately
embraced Expert Mind. David and Jean challenge you about your team’s decision
styles, agile practices, and notions of best practices—any of which can inadvertently
invite the damaging blinders of Expert Mind. They invite discussion within small
groups about how Expert Mind practices actually impede agile maturity and keep teams
from gelling. Finally, they invite you to create and share a set of Beginner’s
Mind practices with other participants in a quiet reflection of how to stay fresh.
Bring your experiences and curiosity—and expect to be surprised! |
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Learn more about David Hussman
Learn more about Jean Tabaka |
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Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting |
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Learn the essential skills you need for planning and conducting
a series of three agile workshops—Product Roadmap, Release Plan, and Iteration
Requirements—for large or complex agile projects. Find out how to generate
“just enough” requirements information at the right time and for the
right stakeholders. Avoid the struggles some agile teams have grasping enough of
the big picture to mitigate the myriad of problems that can arise—guessing
which slice of the product to start with or build next, needing extensive rework
due to undetected architectural dependencies, establishing a viable release strategy
for business planning, and suffering from inadequate customer involvement. These
three facilitated workshops help you combine “grokking” your product
requirements with the benefits of a collaborative process that builds trust, mutual
understanding, and accountability. Ellen Gottesdiener shares her toolkit of guidelines
and practices—reinforced with practice sessions and group discussions—to
improve the quality of your large agile product development efforts. |
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Learn more about Ellen
Gottesdiener |
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Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant |
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Is your agile project buried under a mountain of user stories?
As you add stories, does your vision of the product you are building grow hazier?
As story count increases, do business stakeholders become more frustrated with priorities?
Do you find it difficult to communicate the big picture about what the system does?
User story mapping helps agile teams create a simple model that places user stories
in the context of a complete system. With a story map in hand, you’ll be able
to see the big picture—the breadth of functionality the product implements,
the users it serves, and the activities in which they engage. Jeff Patton shows
how to visually prioritize user stories and create realistic, incremental release
plans. Learn the essentials of story mapping, story splitting, story thinning, and
incremental planning. Discover the characteristics of a good user story and how
those characteristics differ when you are writing stories for planning versus development.
With a living story map, all stakeholders—management, developers, and end
users—will, for the first time, see a complete view of the entire system before
you build it. |
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Learn more about Jeff Patton |
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Linda Rising, Independent Consultant |
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One of the Agile Manifesto principles states, “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more
effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” How can
this best be done? Join Linda Rising to learn why project retrospectives are a critical
part of your agile practices. By taking time to reflect, learn, and proactively
decide what the team should do differently—in the next iteration, release,
or project—teams discover what they’re doing well so that successful
practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance.
Retrospectives are not finger pointing or blaming sessions. Rather, they are highly
positive and interactive sessions in which teams reflect on the past to become better
in the future. Linda shares her experiences leading several types of retrospectives
for dozens of projects—both small and large. Her lessons learned will help
your project and team become a true learning organization. |
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Learn more about Linda Rising |
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova |
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In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders
who foster environments with incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while
others try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics,
Pollyanna Pixton explores ways that the best leaders create safety nets that allow
people to take risks to discover and try new possibilities, fail early, and correct
faster. Join Pollyanna to remove fear and engender trust to make your team and organization
more creative and productive. They will spend less energy protecting themselves
and the status quo and more energy creating and innovating. Pollyanna shares the
tools you, as a leader, need to create open environments based on trust and to take
the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn how to do the right
thing without breaking trust and find out when and how to acknowledge and reward
trust within your team and organization. |
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Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton |
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Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software |
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Transitioning to an agile development process is unlike most
transitions development organizations make. Many transitions begin when a strong,
visionary leader plants a stake in the ground and says, “Let’s take
our organization there.” Other transitions start with a lone team thinking,
“Who cares what management thinks, let’s do this.” The problem
in transitioning to agile is that neither of these approaches alone is likely to
lead to the long-term, sustainable change you want. Mike Cohn describes how you
can iterate toward more agility by combining a senior-level “guiding coalition”
with multiple “action teams.” Along the way, you will learn the acronym
ADAPT to describe the five steps necessary for any successful agile transition:
Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promote, and Transfer. Explore the true role of leaders
and managers to guide self-organizing teams toward agility. Take back proven patterns
for getting started—Start Small, Stealth Mode, Going All In, Public Displays
of Agility, Impending Doom, and more. Leave knowing what you must—and must
not—do to succeed with agile in your organization and team.
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Learn more about Mike Cohn |
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David Hussman, DevJam |
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Although a strong product backlog is one key to sustained agility,
this practice is less defined than other agile processes. Backlogs contain different
work items—user stories, architectural spikes, investments in updating and
maintaining development, and more. While it is clear that developers primarily code,
it is often less clear who builds and grooms the backlog and how to best find a
groove with this practice. David Hussman explores how to create, prioritize, maintain,
and groom your product backlog. He covers the core topics of user stories and personas
as well as backlog items that do not neatly fit in the user story mold. Find out
what other agile communities have done to establish a customer cadence that balances
product planning with the work necessary to feed iterative development. Learn how
to sustain a strong, continuing product backlog that feeds the innovation and evolution
of your systems. |
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Learn more about David Hussman |
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Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development |
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Jean Tabaka leads you through a series of simulations around
the life of a user story. After setting the context within the Scrum methodology—explaining
the roles and responsibilities in the care and feeding of user stories—the
work and the fun begin! You will work in small teams applying what you have just
learned about user stories. First, each team writes a set of user stories based
on a Product Owner’s view of how several features benefit the project. After
prioritizing the new stories, the team sizes each one using “Planning Poker”
and then reprioritizes the stories. Next, the team determines the tasks and estimates
the effort to convert their user stories into acceptance criteria. As a new agile
group, each team will debrief its work to the class. Come, join in, and be part
of the active learning in this exercise-driven, on-your-feet session. |
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Learn more about Jean Tabaka |
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Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers |
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Software development happens in your head—not in an editor,
IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and
hardware, but what about wetware—our brains? Join Andy Hunt for a look at
how the brain really works (hint: it’s a dual processor, shared bus design)
and how to use the best tool for the job by learning to think differently about
thinking. Andy looks at the importance of context and the role of expert intuition
in software development. Learn to take advantage of pole-bridging and integration
thinking. Compare different laterally-specialized functions, including synthesis
vs. analysis and sequential processing vs. pattern-matching. Discover the one simple
habit that separates the genius from the “wanna-be.” Andy helps you
discover how to learn more deliberately by managing your knowledge portfolio. Explore
practical learning techniques, including mind maps, reading techniques, and situational
feedback, that help you to cope with the torrent of new information that assaults
each of us. |
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Learn more about Andy Hunt |
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Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc. |
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When is mixing roles on a Scrum team an acceptable solution
on a project? On the surface, it seems innocent enough. Capable people should be
able to switch roles among team members, ScrumMaster, and product owner. Why is
it that this approach often ends in disaster for the team, the project, and the
customer? What are the impacts of mixing roles on projects? What are some early
warning signs that tell you that your role mixture is destined for failure? Mitch
Lacey takes you through examples of three projects in which the teams mixed roles—one
turned out good (OK, well), one was bad, and one was ugly. Through small group discussions,
you will explore Scrum roles in great detail to identify the actions each team took
that led to three dramatically different outcomes. Leave this session with a deep
and clear understanding of Scrum roles and how they counterbalance each other. Ensure
your team remains balanced—and productive. |
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Learn more about Mitch Lacey |
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Poorly written stories are a common source of friction for agile
teams, and the outcomes are dire. Such stories lead to inaccurate estimates, resulting
in broken commitments, and in the worst cases to a death march. Well-designed story
examples—also called acceptance tests or story tests—hold the key to
effectively delivering features to customers. Teams struggling to design good examples
end up dumping the responsibility for examples on the wrong people or worse, reverting
to confusing and wasteful, formal specification documents. If you are having trouble
designing story examples, J. B. Rainsberger can help. You’ll learn how to
combine familiar software design principles with specific domain expertise to produce
excellent story examples. This session is for team members with any job description—programmers,
designers, architects, business analysts, subject matter experts, domain experts,
product owners, product managers—and for anyone who wants to deliver the right
software the first time. |
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Learn more about J. B. Rainsberger |
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© 2008 Software Quality Engineering, All rights reserved.
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