|
|
Gradual Agile: From Here to There Gently Agile practices are popular today because they are working so well for many projects and organizations. However, introducing new, agile practices--or any type of new practice--into an established organization can be difficult. One misstep during the introduction can set back change adoption for a long time. Jared Richardson explains why people tend to resist change and how you can side step that tendency. He describes a case study in which continuous integration was successfully introduced to a very large, established software company. Highlighting the principles he extracted from that success and other projects, Jared explains the eight practical steps that you can use to start or accelerate your plans to "go agile." Learn how to identify a pain point, solve a problem, make it easy, speak the language, and more. Begin your first--or next-step transitioning to agile practices with new confidence and tools.
|
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
|
|
|
The Gentle Art of Pair Programming Based on their experiences as software developers and the pair programming practices they use at Oxygen Media, Wendy Friedlander and Oksana Udovitska describe the principles of pair programming, explain why it is a worthwhile practice, and show you how to get started. They share ways to take full advantage of pairing and how to cope with its challenges. For those new to pair programming, this class serves as a good introduction and includes concrete first steps for getting into a new way of programming. For those already working in a pairing environment, Wendy and Oksana include some novel viewpoints and interesting discussions on familiar topics. Additionally, everyone will benefit from the interactive and fun games for improving and enhancing communication skills. Being women in a male-dominated profession gives Wendy and Oksana unique perspectives and insights into pairing which they are eager to share.
|
Wendy Friedlander, Oxygen Media
|
|
|
Introduction to Agile for Traditional PMI Project Managers You are a classically trained Project Management Institute (PMI) project manager. But now you've been assigned to manage an agile project. What do you do? Stacia Broderick explains how to relate PMI best practices to their equivalents in the agile world. By relating the agile philosophy to things with which you are already familiar, you can quickly develop a shared lexicon and clear knowledge of agile principles. In addition to mapping PMBOK areas to agile practices, Stacia focuses on how the job of the traditional project manager is re-defined into a new-and often more important--role in the agile development process. Learn about the changes you must make to lead and support an agile team.
|
Stacia Broderick, Agile Evolution, Inc
|
|
|
Automating Builds: Bringing Quality and Testing Forward Many software teams do not have continuous visibility into the ongoing quality of their software releases. Although agile practices emphasize the value of bringing testing forward in the development process, many teams lack the infrastructure required to make this a reality. Testers often depend on development or operations to produce, install, or deploy builds. Zach Nies discusses how build automation provides an effective platform to bring quality and testing earlier into the development process. Zach shows how automated deployments give testers many more opportunities to do meaningful testing during each release iteration. At the same time, testers will greatly enhance the quality feedback loop for the entire organization. During this class, participants will work through an exercise to provide insights into ways to improve their development process and infrastructure.
|
Zach Nies, Rally Software Development
|
|
|
The First Thing To Build: Trust on Agile Teams Trust is the bedrock of self-organizing agile teams. Trust allows agile teams to communicate quickly and respond rapidly to changes as they emerge. Without sufficient trust, team members can waste effort and energy hoarding information, forming cliques, dodging blame, and covering their tracks. A climate of trust provides the foundation for effective team processes, adaptability, and high performance. How can we help this essential trust to emerge and shatter the deep-seated cycle of distrust in many organizations? By paying attention to membership, interactions, credibility, respect, and behaviors, team leaders can both stimulate and accelerate trustworthiness and the resulting trust that is essential among team members and between the team and its stakeholders.
|
Diana Larsen, FutureWorks Consulting
|
|
|
Balancing Emergent Design with Big Design Up Front Big Design Up Front (BDUF) is a design technique that has been part of the development cycle for decades. Unfortunately, fully specifying a software design in the presence of change without a crystal ball is rarely effective. Agile principles and practices leverage feedback-oriented techniques such as emergent design to embrace change and design “just-in-time.” By balancing BDUF and agile emergent design practices such as test-driven development to avoid “cowboy coding,” we can develop just enough design documentation to guide our development toward the project’s big-picture goals. This balanced approach has been employed successfully at Microsoft to develop large software systems. James Waletzky discusses the pitfalls of BDUF and how agile methods help you reduce design risk. Learn what emergent design is and is not, how refactoring keeps designs clean, and ways to document your design with “just enough” detail.
|
James Waletzky, Microsoft Corporation
|
|
|
Guerilla Agile: Stop Playing Schedule Games Chances are good that if you've worked on a project, you've encountered a schedule game or two (maybe, three or four). As part of a team, you may have seen Schedule Chicken played by management or Ninety Percent Done played by team members. If you're a project manager, you've probably pushed back against games such as: We Gotta Have It–We're Toast Without It, Queen of Denial, We'll Go Faster Now, or Split Focus. Using time-boxed iterations and other agile practices will help you stop playing-and even avoid-these schedule games. However, you can't do it alone. First, you need to help your team and your management understand they are playing schedule games. Once they understand that games are being played, enlist their help in solving the underlying problems that lead to this dysfunctional behavior.
|
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
|
|
|
Five Practical Solutions to Agile Myths The results are in-many ideas in the agile canon can actually decrease your velocity and slowly poison your code. James Coplien examines five of these common practices, why they can be harmful, and how to avoid their pitfalls. [1] TDD: Avoid architecture rot with a lightweight architecture and an appropriate level of testing. [2] YAGNI: Avoid being blind-sided by unexpected requirements by employing use case slices and lightweight architecture. [3] On-Site Customer: Avoid burning out the customer by adding a product owner. [4] User Stories: Instead of deferring detailed scenario development, employ use cases to bring the analysis out to the person who matters-your market constituency. [5] Domain-Specific Languages: Building a domain-specific engineering environment buys you only more costs and more headaches; so take the value from the analysis and run with it.
|
James Coplien, Nordija A/S
|
|
|
Toward a More Agile Culture Culture is all about values and beliefs in action. Every team and organization has a culture that shows up in the way people are treated and promoted, how rewards are allocated, and even what's considered an acceptable topic for conversation. Esther Derby examines four common corporate cultures-cultures where power is the currency, cultures which control through policies and procedures, cultures that define clear goals and attract people to achieve them, and cultures where people are motivated by close relationships with co-workers. Agile methods flourish in some cultures and are quashed in others. If the values that underlie agile practices are at odds with established cultural norms within your team and company, what can you do personally to begin making changes? You’ll learn a simple method to "see" culture and begin to consciously create a more agile micro-culture within your team.
|
Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
|
|
|
Looking Toward the Future of Agile Agile methodologies are enjoying increased adoption and relevance. Will they continue to do so as time goes on? We understand that business needs change over time-sometimes quite rapidly. However, change isn't limited to the business or the requirements. Markets will wax and wane. Developers and business owners will experience a change in their own views, become older, and slowly be replaced by the next generation of workers and thought leaders. In this future world, will agile continue to prosper, or will it flounder? What might agile be replaced with or evolve into? Andy Hunt peeks into the future and considers some possible answers, including lessons from previous generations. He examines the effects of generational archetypes and how they affect adoption of core values.
|
Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers
|
