agile

Conference Presentations

The Product Champion

If you look at the history of software failures, the vast majority can be attributed not to technical mistakes but to mistakes in understanding what should be built, what customers will pay for, and what the system really needs to do. When there is a difference between the mental models of the customers and users of the software and those who develop it, a system will never achieve its full potential. It is the product champion-also known as product manager or product owner-who is responsible for building the right thing. Mary Poppendieck describes successful product champions in companies with which she has worked, focusing on how their role is defined, perceived, and executed. Discover the patterns of product management that have succeeded and those that have been less than successful while learning ways to train and empower product champions that help development teams build the right thing-the first time.

Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
Comparative Agility: How Agile Are You? How Agile is the Industry?

Are you curious about how "agile" your organization is? Do you wonder how you compare with other companies that have been using agile for a similar period of time? Do you want an authoritative source of information to help guide your successful transition to agile? Kenny Rubin presents Comparative Agility, a framework for assessing your organization's agility and benchmarking it against similar companies. Kenny examines the areas of teamwork, requirements, planning, technical practices, quality, culture, and knowledge creation. He describes how to use Comparative Agility to assess agility at various times during your organization's agile adoption and how to derive actionable information from an assessment. Kenny presents industry-specific findings derived from analyzing the results of more than 1,500 assessment surveys collected from participants working on agile projects around the world.

Kenny Rubin, Innolution, LLC
Coaching Large Company Agile Transitions

Today, many larger companies are taking notice of agile practices, starting agile transition programs, or testing the water with pilot projects. Unfortunately, the realities of inter-team dependencies, ingrained cultural issues, and human nature quickly get in the way and threaten progress. Multi-team development environments can foster excessive standardization, gaps in dependency management, and vague reporting structures. Fortunately, good agile coaching can help you avoid many of the issues and mitigate others. Through first-person stories and from eyewitness accounts of fellow agile coaches, Rob Myers shares the warning signs of these threats and provides recommendations for avoiding them. Learn to identify and engage hidden stakeholders before they become unwitting constraints or worse. Discover how to organize and empower a team of agile coaches who will breed trust during your agile roll-out.

Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Root Causes of Agile Project Failure

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions-accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, improve software quality, and more. Unfortunately, agile projects do not always deliver on these expectations. Sometimes failure is due to external factors beyond our control; other times we have the power to get things right the first time or turn things around. If you are seeking ways to assure the success of your agile projects, this class is for you. Jeff Payne discusses common root causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these pitfalls. He discusses failures due to poor project management, inadequate requirements management, ineffective communication, faulty development practices, and lack of sufficient testing. Learn practical tips for identifying early warning signs that your agile project is in trouble and discover how you can get your projects back on track.

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Lean, Kanban, and the Art of Flow

It doesn't matter what you're producing-physical goods, software, or other products. When efficiency and workers' time utilization become more important than the value of the work product, the production system is optimized for the wrong thing. Lean thinking shifts the emphasis to creating value through the concept of "flow." The goal of flow is to eliminate delays and bottlenecks producing the product to speed up its delivery and earn value for the organization sooner. Kanban explicitly recognizes the advantages of establishing flow-an idea inherent in most agile processes. Through presentation, simulation, and discussion, Jean Tabaka and Bill Wake open your eyes to how different processes affect flow. Learn about the impact of sub-optimization and the sometimes deadly costs of delay common in many teams-even those that profess to be agile.

Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
Paying Down Technical Debt

Your reputation as a development team depends on your ability to deliver quality code-on time, safely, and with the functionality you committed to deliver. Whenever you compromise good design principles or development habits, you make future modifications and maintenance of the system more difficult and costly. We all know that eventually we will need to return to fix our short cuts and mistakes-this is technical debt. Like financial debt, technical debt grows and compounds if we do not deal with it immediately. Amir Kolsky discusses the technical debt that can pervade the organization-from the product definition, thorough development and testing, and into deployment. He describes how the debt manifests itself and how to identify technical debt-not only in the code but also in the way we work. Join Amir and your peers to explore methods to reduce your existing debt and actions you can take to prevent future debt.

Amir Kolsky, Net Objectives
Story-o-Types: Patterns Within User Stories

Have you noticed that similar stories appear over and over as you develop a system? According to Dan Rawsthorne, stories-those small chunks of work that make up your backlog and provide demonstrable value to the project-can be categorized by purpose: production, analysis, cleanup, business support, infrastructure/environment, or other. Within each of these categories are different "story-o-types"-patterns that define the commonalities among the stories themselves. Dan defines and describes some of the most common story-o-types, explains why they are useful, and demonstrates the concept with examples including "Alternate Path" and "Clean-Up Interface" for the production category, "Talk to Stakeholders" and "Exploratory Testing" for the analysis category, and others. For each story-o-type, Dan provides sample tasks and canonical "doneness" criteria that make planning and backlog grooming easier and more consistent.

Dan Rawsthorne, CollabNet
Agile Development Practices East 2010: The Agile PMO: From Process Police to Adaptive Governance

Although success stories from individual agile teams abound, agile adoptions often run into significant challenges when companies attempt to scale beyond one or a few teams on a single project or multiple projects. The role of middle management in agile, especially the Project Management Office (PMO), remains poorly defined. PMO managers often are seen as focusing more on process compliance than on business results. However, in the long run, agile cannot succeed without middle management's support and leadership. Sanjiv Augustine shares success stories from industry-leading organizations that are scaling agile to large projects and across many smaller ones.

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed, LLC
Avoiding Speed Bumps on the Road to Agile Adoption

Some companies take the low road to adopting agile: renaming team leads to Scrum Masters, declaring business architects to be product owners, and holding a daily meeting where everyone has to stand up. Others get excited and march bravely down the road to agile proclaiming "We're all going to be agile, all agile, all the time!" embracing both agile values and principles. If you're starting your agile journey, join Don Gray and learn how to keep your organization focused on the benefits while avoiding some bumps along the way. Don shares the transition problems he's overcome including managers taking Scrum roles, inserting agile teams in the middle of sequential software development, and many more. Explore how defining the goals of your agile transition, establishing a shared vision, understanding the plan, and giving everyone a meaningful role help people better deal with the changes they face.

Don Gray, Independent Consultant
Better, Strategically - Aligned Decisions, Every Day

Organizations generally use some type of formal decision-making process, such as cost/benefit analysis, to prioritize and approve projects and initiatives. However, once the project is approved, people make numerous and diverse implementation decisions in a less formal, more ad hoc way. Imagine the benefits that would result if we defined and used a strategically-aligned decision-making framework to help make these decisions. Niel Nickolaisen describes such a framework and helps you learn to adapt the framework for your projects. Niel shares case studies of how development teams have used decision frameworks to dramatically improve their project results. In one of these case studies, a distributed team developing a complex transaction processing engine reduced their release planning cycle from three months to three days.

Niel Nickolaisen, Energy Solutions

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