2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Those who attend conferences or read books and articles discover new ideas they want to bring into their organizations—but they often struggle when trying to implement those changes. This session offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. Come and discuss your organizational and personal change challenges. 180 407 Linda Rising Regency C 2 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Increasing gender intelligence strengthens our ability to maximize the contributions of all members of the team while maintaining both equity and uniqueness. New research from neurobiology sheds light on the real differences in male and female brain structure, chemistry, and blood flow. This data underlies the emerging science of gender intelligence, providing a new vision of gender relationships. Gender-intelligent supervision, employee coaching/mentoring and negotiation and conflict management leads to a competitive edge in the toolkit of forward-looking companies. 90 468 Sharon Buckmaster, Diana Larsen Crystal A 5 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z To make lasting changes, we need to visualise the situation, understand the system, know how to improve it and work together. The Theory of Constraints tells us how to do all that. In this game, we apply the ""Five Focusing Steps"" process improvement method from ToC. Step by step we use Agile, Lean and Real Options techniques to make our ""work"" more fun and productive. After the simulation game, you'll be able to apply these techniques to your work. You'll be able to use the open source ""Bottleneck Game"" to share these techniques with others. Max. 28 players 90 503 Pascal Van Cauwenberghe, Portia Tung Grand Ballroom A 3 17 2009-08-13T08:26:50Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z The design goal for Scrum teams is 5 to 10 times waterfall performance yet the majority of Scrum teams never achieve this goal. A pattern is emerging at MySpace in Beverly Hills and Jayway in Sweden, for bootstrapping high performance Scrum teams. Rigorous implementation by an experienced coach creates a total immersion experience akin to Shock Therapy. Unfortunately, management disrupts hyperproductive teams by removing key resources. Velocity data is provided on five teams at MySpace and one team at Jayway where management repeatedly “killed the golden goose.” 45 524 Jeff Sutherland, Scott Downey Atlanta 1 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In 2005, Microsoft’s DevDiv (with 2000 participants and 40 million lines of code) overhauled its engineering practices to improve agility, quality, and customer satisfaction. Four years into the journey, *customer satisfaction has increased dramatically. Product quality improved 10x. Velocity improved 2x, with schedule time for major releases was cut by eighteen months and quarterly releases of “power tools” allowed incremental delivery to external customers.* Practices that change include planning, org, quality gates, branching, testing, tooling, reporting, backlogs, transparency. 90 560 Sam Gucikenheimer Regency D 1 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In replacement projects one of the biggest questions is what strategy to use in replacing the old system. The simplest strategy is to wait until the new system is "at least as good as the old one" before switching. Although this strategy sounds compelling it has many serious drawbacks. An alternative strategy is based on what I call a "Minimal deployable entity". Switch systems when you have just enough to be able to survive with the new system. The concept is similar to "Minimal Marketable Feature" but more focused on deployment strategy. But how do you identify the Minimal deployable entity? 45 736 Niklas Bjørnerstedt Crystal C 4 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Increase Productivity With Large Scale Continuous Integration Iteratively: Reduce Feedback Cycle From Weeks To 100 Minutes Using iterative development – create an continuous integration environment using open source and commercial tooling for hundreds of developers From migration to new environment – the tools and process lessons learned Effects seen in product development – real life experience after 18 months in production 45 782 Hannu Kokko Grand Ballroom E 15 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This hands-on advanced workshop teaches incremental Test-Driven Development, showing how to grow code one feature at a time. It will show: how to use tests at multiple levels to focus on requirements, how to use unit tests to drive the discovery of roles and responsibilities in your design; and how to write resilient tests that express your intent and don't break for irrelevant changes. The workshop is for programmers who want to improve their TDD practice. It has been presented at several conferences, one review from XpDay London was ""Incredibly useful; the best technical I’ve heard"". 180 863 Steve Freeman New Orleans 7 17 2009-08-13T08:26:23Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Most sessions show us how to do various agile practices right. What is sorely lacking is the opportunity to learn how to do the practices wrong. How can we be expected to bring agile into an organization successfully without mastery of that key skill? Pairing isn't controversial, done effectively it: * reduces defects (by up to 86%, according to the 2000 University of Utah study), * improves productivity (up to three-fold, according to the 1975 US Army study) However, learning by doing wrong is actually an effective learning technique, and that's what you'll see here. 90 967 Brett Schuchert Plaza Ballroom B 12 17 2009-08-13T08:26:14Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision-making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with “Planning Poker.” Both short-term iteration and long-term release planning will be covered. 180 1223 Mike Cohn Columbus IJ 12 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Many Java teams want a more modern language that preserves their investment in Java technology. This talk looks at Scala, a new JVM language that fixes many of the limitations of Java. I'll show why Scala is an ideal ""upgrade"" language for most Java teams. Using examples, we'll see that Scala is statically-typed, yet it has a succinct and flexible syntax. Scala _traits_ add _mixin composition_ to Java's object model. Scala fully supports _functional programming_, which is the best approach for robust concurrent applications. All these qualities improve our agility. 90 1307 Dean Wampler Grand Ballroom F 7 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Coaching helps communities produce real value and grow sustainable agility. Successful coaches know the importance and value of treating each community as unique, helping the individuals and the larger community find a “groove” (style) that truly helps them deliver. If you are coaching or getting ready to coach, and you want to learn a pile of pragmatic coaching tools, based on years of coaching agile projects, this session will pass your tests. 180 1319 David Hussman Regency B 5 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This tutorial is a detailed look at several Agile practices and the HOWTO of Adopting each practice successfully. We will cover the business value delivered and the context where they are most effective. For each practice you will learn what steps can be done to effectively get from ""I want to do this practice"" to ""I'm doing it and getting obvious value"" and, just as importantly, what happen when things go wrong and how you can diagnose these difficulties. A variety of practices will be covered including: Stand Up Meetings, Iterations, Demos, Automate Developer Tests, and Refactoring. 180 2039 Amr Elssamadisy Toronto 2 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Jean Tabaka passionately believes in highly interactive, collaborative conference experiences for helping people new to Agile embrace its practices. This ½ day tutorial drives a quick-paced set of 8 exercises for attendees working in small groups. From unranked backlog items, to fully tasked out stories, each exercise builds on the work of the previous exercise. Through these series of activities, attendees learn to collaborate and create great user stories that turn into tasks, estimates, and commitments. The tutorial ends with a retrospective of how to apply these practices in real life. 180 2318 Jean Tabaka Grand Ballroom B 12 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In this session, we offer a synthesis of several bodies of thought that address processes, people, technology, change and leadership within the context of a large agile transition. While the competencies of agile development are well developed, the exploration and leveraging of other research on systemic change offers real insight to the complex organizational task of sustaining agile processes. We intend to fuse such research with our own experiences leading substantial agile transformations, to help senior leaders gain powerful new tools for leading their own agile transitions. 180 2319 Bud Phillips, Michael Hamman San Francisco 9 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Acceptance Tests elaborate a user story & are essentially behaviour specifications, expressing examples of how the application will actually be used. These should represent customer-intent in terms the customer understands. This session shows developers and testers how to transcribe their understanding of customer intent in a way that makes sense to customers. Using the popular BDD Given/When/Then approach to acceptance tests, participants will learn how to leverage the popular Fit framework to replicate that approach. Alternatives to using Fit, including using code, will also be explored. 90 2522 Antony Marcano, Andy Palmer Grand Ballroom D North 14 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don’t want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? And what do you do to not stifle the team’s creativity, ownership, integrity, and problem solving ability? Come away with tools to both motivate and guide teams and organizations effectively. 90 2817 Pollyanna Pixton Regency A 9 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z We are going to traverse the long and winding history of Agile at Yahoo! – beginning with the period just prior to the introduction of Agile over 5 years ago, to its current (and unfinished) state – all from the viewpoint of the Agilista in the trenches. Whether the adoption is driven from the top down or bottom up, progress hasn't always been in a straight path. We hope that the experiences we share will provide valuable insight for others in their roll-out of Agile in the enterprise, and how the DNA of Agile can survive and even thrive in both supportive and challenging circumstances. 45 2859 Mun-Wai Chung, Brian Drummond Crystal B 10 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Agile development means self-management, collaboration, and working towards shared goals. Agile practices support much of this, but we can still learn more, both to better understand current practices and to develop new ones. This session is an introduction to cultural-historical activity theory, a psychological framework for understand collaborative behaviour. The framework has shown the role of tools in cognition and collaboration, and understanding structural tension between different activity systems: it can also be used to understand and improve agile software development. 90 3098 Robert Biddle Columbus GH 11 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Not long ago the notion of a tool that hides more of the system than it shows sounded crazy. To some it still does. But hundreds of thousands of Mylyn users have made next big evolution of the IDE clear. Stories and tasks are more central than source code, focus is more important than features, and integration with the agile workflow is the biggest productivity boost since code completion. This talk will demonstrate the concepts of the task-focused interface and look ahead at how we are redefining the "I" of the IDE by personalizing the user experience around the agile process. 90 3210 Mik Kersten Grand Ballroom C North 15 17 2009-08-13T08:26:01Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Persona put the user back into your user stories. While we understand that our users are important we may lack language for talking about them. If you already know about persona you may find your approach for performing research and representing user data as a user persona to be time consuming and, what’s more, the persona you create simply aren’t being used. In this short tutorial you’ll learn to create simple _relevant_ persona for your agile project, how to communicate them to the team, and how to use them generate valuable feature ideas, and design imperatives for your product. 90 3229 Jeff Patton Columbus KL 16 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 90 5120 Philippe Kruchten Plaza Ballroom A 13 17 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This report shares the successful adoption of agile practices in redefining the support group in our IT Organization. The report includes a unique organization of a collaborative, team-based approach to handling support requests, benefits achieved, lessons learned, and the next steps towards continual improvements for the customer experience and excellence in software development & support. We describe how an organization can use an innovative approach to transform the culture and the effectiveness of the support organization from an operational cost center to a value-added thought partner. 45 873 Bhaven Sheth Atlanta 1 18 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This session will introduce and demonstrate some of the free or near free tools available for a functional tester (or developer) to assist with test planning, execution, analysis and test support. We'll look at mind mapping tools, portable applications, firefox extensions, and various other tools including an amazing test data generator. These tools will help organize ideas, look "under the hood", verify compliance to various standards, record test results and assist in breaking software from a functional and security point of view. We''ll also look at some general tools as well. 45 1101 erik petersen Grand Ballroom E 15 18 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Over the life of a product, Product Owners maintain an ever-evolving Product Backlog. As features rise in rank, the PO breaks them down into stories, eventually sized small so the team can deliver increments of valuable functionality in an iteration. In this tutorial, we will explore examples of how to evolve a product backlog from vision to iteration acceptance. Participants will practice breaking stories down, with an emphasis on understanding the considerations that guide that process. We will provide several examples from different types of projects/products. 45 2763 Ronica Roth, Mark Kilby Crystal C 4 18 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z W. Edwards Deming identified performance appraisal as one of the Seven Deadly Diseases of Management. But annual appraisals are currently a fact of life in most organizations, in spite of their negative effects. Many companies are reluctant to give them up, because they don't see what to do instead of the annual review. I'll walk through the assumptions behind performance evaluation and review, and share some of the recent research on the efficacy of annual reviews. Then I'll offer alternatives that actually help people improve and build stronger relationships. 45 3001 Esther Derby Crystal B 10 18 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z The "pomodoro technique" is a simple tracking and feedback process where the unit of work is the "pomodoro", a time slot of 25 mins. In this tutorial I'll give you advanced practical advices on how to implement the daily pomodoro practice, common pitfalls, tools you may find useful and how to read and use pomodoro metrics and answer questions like: what did I do the last week, on which tasks I spent most of the time, how frequent is the context switching. Hopefully after this talk you'll be able to go back to your team and give pomodoros a try with all the practical information needed. 90 246 Renzo Borgatti Grand Ballroom C North 15 19 2009-08-13T08:25:40Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z The software development industry has a poor track record with metrics. Many metrics are tangential to development's goal of delivering business value, and are thus ill-regarded by agile developers. However, good metrics are important to management, in order to understand the status and progress of their teams, and to make projections into the future. In this class we discuss velocity, burndown graphs, EVM metrics (CPI and SPI), and earned business value, including methods for calculation, why they're important, and how they enforce (or fight against) agile values. 90 248 Dan Rawsthorne Crystal C 4 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Agile methods put a great deal of emphasis on trust, empowerment, and collaboration. Agile moves us away from command and control project management toward an approach designed to harness the passion, creativity, and enthusiasm of the team. Mike will tackle the assumptions behind traditional project management and explore a more agile approach to managing time, cost, and scope. He will address the PMI Processes and Knowledge areas and explore how to adapt them to agile projects. Participants will leave with practical tips they can implement today to begin building a culture of agility. 90 333 Mike Cottmeyer Crystal A 5 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Automating your build process with Continuous Integration is certainly a great idea, but why stop there? Why not go the whole nine yards and automate the deployment process as well? Staging and production deployments are typically more complicated and more involved than a simple development deployment, but doing them by hand can be time-consuming, tricky and error-prone. Indeed, turning your staging and production deployments into a one-click affair has a lot going for it. 90 399 John Smart Grand Ballroom E 15 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z How do you scale Scrum to hundreds of people? This presentation will explain a way of organizing your development so that it scales up well. It involves breaking the link between architecture and organization, breaking code ownership and organize the development in a more customer centric way. This has its drawbacks too! These are explained and some techniques for overcoming these drawbacks are discussed. This talk is based on the "feature teams" and "requirement areas" chapters in the recently published "Scaling Agile & Lean Development" by Bas Vodde and Craig Larman. 90 715 Bas Vodde Regency D 1 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z An agile-tester needs to wear many different hats to be effective in their role. Sometimes they have the 'Detective' hat on, sometimes the 'Scientist' and others the 'Police Officer'. Working in small groups we will create a taxonomy of the hats testers wear. Once a the list is produced we will then see which are the most common, enjoyable, frustrating, Agile and a number of other attributes. 45 839 Adam Goucher Grand Ballroom D North 14 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Most of the software world has realized that BDUF (Big Design Up Front) doesn't work well in software. But lots of developers struggle with this notion when it applies to architecture and design. Surely you can't just start coding, right? You need some level of understanding before you can start work. This session describes the current thinking about emergent architecture & design. This philosophy allows you to specify only the critical items up front and allow the important architecture and design criteria emerge once you understand the problem better. 90 1146 Neal Ford Grand Ballroom F 7 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In 2007, OpenView Venture Partners decided to adopt Scrum as best practice in software development in its portfolio companies and Scrum as the standard practice in all internal operations. The OpenView Scrum teams aggressively remove all impediments (take no prisoners). Attached is a reference model that supports best practices in management, sales, marketing, finance, development, and customer support in OpenView portfolio companies. After over 52 weekly Sprints, OpenView is the first non-software Scrum to provide a working manual on how to do Scrum outside of software development. 90 1230 Jeff Sutherland, Igor Altman Crystal B 10 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z One of the core values expressed in the agile manifesto is "working software over comprehensive documentation" because working software is what delivers value to our customers. Agile development requires a sofware development team have working software ready to deploy at the end of each iteration; but accomplishing this can be harder than it seems, especially when first starting with agile. In this highly interactive session you will understand how a team definition of "Done" is necessary to making agile delivery possible, and what you can do to make it happen while avoiding the pitfalls. 90 1236 Paul Rayner Plaza Ballroom B 12 19 2009-08-13T08:25:22Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This is a highly participative workshop for delegates to learn more about collaborative and organisational storytelling. Personal stories will be told, retold and analysed, to investigate underlying values, through a series of collaborative story-games. Collaborative storytelling will be explored as an activity for team building, coordination and problem-understanding. Attendees will participate in generating ideas for a set of story-cards that could be used to help teams explore their own values, beliefs and concerns through collaborative storytelling around software projects. 90 1989 Johanna Hunt, Rachel Davies Columbus GH 11 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Changing the way individuals and teams work is one thing. Changing organizational culture is quite another, especially when so many of us (yes, even us at this conference) have little idea that the assumptions we make, the language we use, the structures we are bound by are the direct antithesis of Agile. Our thinking is locked by the patterns of years and needs to be unleashed in order to make inroads towards cultural change. Using a simple yet effective collaboration game from the Improv tradition this session will challenge our assumptions and open up new neural pathways. It is a beginning. 90 2450 Alan Cyment, Tobias Mayer Atlanta 1 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z It was back in '97 that these presenters first opined that: while much attention had been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture had seldom been discussed: the Big Ball of Mud. Somewhat to our astonishment, since then, no one has ever undertaken to dispute this premise. A Ball of Mud is, of course, a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle. Is Agility's utilitarian focus on process rather than design its secret weapon, or its Achilles heel? 90 2470 Brian Foote, Joseph Yoder Grand Ballroom A 3 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Developers on an Agile project depend on fast, accurate user feedback to guarantee that you are solving the user’s problem. But often Agile projects have to operate without real, current customers on the team and need to build up the design and research skills to get good user feedback. This session is for anyone who has the job of getting user feedback. We'll teach best-practice techniques for working with users in the situations that matter to an Agile team: understanding customer needs, getting feedback on design concepts and testing baselevels, and we'll practice key skills. 90 2751 Hugh Beyer Columbus KL 16 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z How do you do sprint planning meetings when you have, for example, 60 people and 8 teams working on the same product? One neat way is to get them all into the same room and do them together. This is a great way to stimulate collaboration and resolve dependencies - but there are some important practical aspects to take into consideration. Having done this with several different companies over the past few years I'd like to share some experiences and lessons learned. I will focus on the practical aspects of getting this to work, with photographs and examples from real cases. 45 3075 Henrik Kniberg Regency A 9 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 90 5122 Laurie Williams Plaza Ballroom A 13 19 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z There is much information available about how to *begin* automated UI testing projects. There is little information available about how to *maintain* successful, effective, long-term, large-scale UI testing projects. Over the course of more than two years, my company Socialtext was able to grow a test automation project from a proof of concept of 400 test steps, run on demand, to nearly 10,000 test steps run automatically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This talk will cover test design, test architecture, test creation, test maintenance, and the project's future steps. 45 111 Chris McMahon Grand Ballroom D North 14 20 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Transitioning 25,000 developers to agile development processes is a challenge on its own—and making the transition during a global recession is even more ambitious. Join Sue McKinney as she discusses her experiences leading the move to agile at IBM, how their agile teams often struggled, and ways leaders provided support and understanding at many levels. As the global recession set in, Sue looked for tools leaders could use to increase productivity—even after cost cutting—and unleash the talent and innovation agile teams need to continue succeeding. 45 2004 Sue McKinney Regency A 9 20 2009-08-13T08:24:49Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Continuous Integration means different things to different people. This workshop will demonstrate a set of best practices that allow a software delivery team to derive the most value out of their software development dollars, by adhering to the Agile Manifesto principle that states “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” That is, we will see how software can be delivered that allows rapid change, monitors that the changes do not adversely affect quality, and delivers potentially shippable code from easy to implement open source tools available to the community at large. 90 161 Howard Deiner Grand Ballroom C North 15 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z When adjectives and adverbs appear in User Stories, they can be easily overlooked and seen as simple adornments to the story. There are a couple schools of thought on how to handle non-functional requirements on Agile projects. Mike Cohn recommends writing a User Story for each non-functional requirement, while others recommend creating task cards to drive out specification using Thomas Gilb's approach. In this session, examples of various techniques for handling non-functional requirements will be demonstrated, with a discussion of pros and cons of each technique. 45 173 Ken Howard Crystal C 4 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don't get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we're teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like. 90 174 Mark Levison, Linda Rising Columbus GH 11 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Dean Leffingwell describes how agile methods are being successfully applied to enterprise-class development. • Part I describes team practices that scale to the enterprise, including: structuring agile teams, mastering the iteration, concurrent testing and continuous integration. • Part II describes additional practices necessary to achieve full enterprise benefits. Topics include: intentionally emergent architectures, lean requirements at scale, coordinating releases with the agile release train, agile training and rollout strategies and measuring business performance. 90 201 Dean Leffingwell Toronto 2 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z I propose that the larger issue with Agile Contracts is not that we don't know how to write them. After all we know how to deliver Agile projects, so a contract can simply describe that process. The problem is with making Agile Contract commercially competitive; against suppliers who are offering the promise of delivering the perfectly predicted dream - offering the certainty that people crave. This is a prisoners dilemma, with organisations driving themselves towards a sub optimal solution. Through game theory we will explore ways in which to improve the appeal of the agile offering. 90 238 Simon Bennett Grand Ballroom A 3 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Flirting is about connecting. A German university now requires their IT engineers take a flirting class—not to attract a partner, but to learn how to interact more effectively in the workplace. We will explore how flirting techniques translate to use in a business setting—inspiring us to create stronger connections with our customers. Our 8 Steps to connecting with your customers will help teams better understand customer requirements and build business value. “Flirting” With Your Customers creates the connection that can make a significant difference in a project’s success. 90 573 Jenni Dow, Ole Jepsen Columbus IJ 6 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Over the last ten years, Test-Driven Development has grown from something exotic, that only a handful of people knew about, to near- commodity. So there's nothing left to say, right? We don't think so. In this talk, we'll review some of the landmarks in the history of Test-Driven Development and what they tell us about how to develop software; the ideas, techniques, objections, and misunderstandings. We'll talk about our experiences of discovering TDD and what we've learned about how to do it well, how to adopt it, and how to bring it into existing code. 45 864 Steve Freeman, Michael Feathers Crystal B 10 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Join Esther and Diana, the authors of *Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great!*, on an interactive journey of __*Adventure*__. Follow the trail of a flexible framework for Retrospectives, a map for designing and leading Retrospectives. Retrospectives offer the greatest lever for project or process improvement—based on the solid data of a team’s immediate past experience of success and failure. The Adventure lies in holding Retrospectives throughout the project--capturing, managing, and disseminating technical knowledge and process wisdom to improve current and future projects. 180 975 Diana Larsen, Esther Derby Grand Ballroom B 12 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In this session, we'll test some real small to medium size applications for quality and bugs. Through three main activities of collation, investigation and prediction, we'll move through our explorations understanding applications then experimenting with discovery and failure situations, utilizing tools when relevant. While Erik will guide the session and explain the context, a large part of the testing will come from the audience, either as ideas or driving the keyboard. While this is accessible as an introductory session, it will also show how to perform industrial strength ET. 90 1099 erik petersen Grand Ballroom D North 14 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Agile designers need to quickly see the essence of a problem and shape reasonable solutions. When things don't go according to plan, they must react, readjust their thinking, and try again. Seasoned agile designers strike a balance. They know the difference between core and revealing design tasks and plan accordingly. When unanticipated difficulties crop, they adapt their work rhythms. This tutorial introduces techniques and vocabulary for articulating design solutions and simple measures of technical debt and different kinds of development work. 90 1140 Rebecca Wirfs-Brock New Orleans 7 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Anyone who's seen a user trying to get to grips with their application knows what a humbling experience it can be. No matter your design experience there's no substitute for testing with actual users. But the whole user testing process can seem daunting & costly in terms of time, effort & materials. Seeing this Jakob Nielsen proposed a lightweight approach, 'Guerilla User Testing', in the mid-nineties. It emphasized what could be done on limited resources by a team committed to providing a decent user experience. Marc & Luke share over 20 years of experience applying this type of technique. 90 1252 Luke Barrett, marc mcneill Columbus KL 16 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Field-tests about how personal responsibility works in the mind (i.e., how we avoid it and how we take it) now make it possible for coaches to understand and teach the mental processes, language, and keys to personal responsibility. Cool huh? Doing so inspires your charges to demonstrate far greater ownership behavior as individuals, teams, and even as entire enterprises. You add more value as your charges take ownership and learn, correct, and improve more easily, directly, and quickly. Come acquire the basic tools and practices for coaching success with personal responsibility. 180 1377 Christopher Avery, Ashley Johnson Regency B 5 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Test Driven Development (TDD) is not just about the tests. Test Driven Development is also a design discipline. In fact, many TDD veterans prefer using the acronym to refer to Test Driven Design. So, how exactly does TDD improve design? TDD improves design by making the developer more aware of fundamental design principles. TDD does not force good design. TDD rewards for good design and punishes for bad design. Through test-first development, design principles are moved from abstract, academic concepts to concrete needs. 90 1708 Eric Anderson Plaza Ballroom B 12 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z We talk about collaborating to get great results from Agile, yet so few teams do it well (if they even try it at all). Sure, they cooperate, but collaborate? That's a different story. My teams couldn’t collaborate, even when they explicitly tried. This failure led to such an epidemic of mediocrity that I turned to a professional for help. I turned to an actor. Come to this session to learn what I learned from the world of theatre and to practice the exercises that helped my teams build their collaboration muscle so that you can do the same with yours. 90 1808 Lyssa Adkins Crystal A 5 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Bad build practices take a hidden toll on teams. It is not uncommon for a new developer to take days or even weeks to establish a functioning workspace. Good build engineers can make all the difference. By treating the build framework with the same respect as other source code they can help prevent these problems. In this clinic we will show how to refactor your build approach to end up with sustainable practices that get new people up and running quickly and set the stage for long term productivity. While the workshops are in Ant, the concepts are portable. 180 2043 Paul Julius, Jeffrey Fredrick Grand Ballroom F 7 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Agile teams and organizations need to embrace a "See the Whole" mentality as they adopt and adapt Agile practices. Systems thinking is a great guide in how to evaluate this whole from an external perspective. In this tutorial, we will conduct a series of games to help participants understand fundamentals of systems thinking with regard to delayed feedback loops, external pressures, and more, and see how these change our perspective on effective Agile practices. Our goal is to help participants bring guidance back that can improve their cultures. 180 2320 Jean Tabaka, Bill Wake Atlanta 1 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z One quality of an effective agile team is its capacity for team learning. Research shows that learning behavior is positively correlated to team effectiveness. And though Agile processes provide powerful mechanisms for team learning, creating the right conditions in large bureaucratic organizations is not always straightforward. In this session, we will leverage research in organizational behavior, as well as the presenter’s years' experience coaching teams, to examine the organizational conditions which managers need to understand if they are to empower team learning behavior. 90 2416 Michael Hamman Regency A 9 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Agile project teams in any large corporation are put together by drawing resources from various organisational silos where they report to line management. What’s the role of this line management in relation to the Agile project teams? **Who is ultimately responsible for delivery?** This talk is based on the two year Agile journey in a large financial services organization in Australia and will outline the challenges, pitfalls and experiences of positioning line management to add value to Agile teams. *What leadership role do they play and are they the bane or boon of Agile teams.* 45 2575 Philip Abernathy San Francisco 9 21 2009-08-13T08:23:06Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments with incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? This session explores ways that leaders create cultures of trust that fosters the free flow of ideas. While we can’t make people trust each other, a culture of trust gives empowerment and provides a safe place to explore and discover new and innovative solutions and new ways of implementing and reaching results. It also encourages healthy risk taking to fail early and correct faster. 90 2800 Pollyanna Pixton Regency D 1 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Testing can be a complex and thankless task. The technologies change so fast that your tools don't work as they should. Your tests become brittle and are hard to relate to customer requirements. This talk looks at the latest techniques and tools for easing some of these burdens. Topics include behavior driven development (BDD), domain specific testing languages (DSLs), scripting languages (Groovy) and a range of web, SOAP, database, Ajax and performance testing libraries (including EasyB, JUnit 4, WebTest, HtmlUnit, Tellarium, DbUnit, SoapUI, JMeter, AllPairs, model driven and others). 180 2826 Paul King, Craig Smith Grand Ballroom E 15 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Leading an Agile adoption? This tutorial will give you guidance, fresh perspectives, and a real deliverable. Distilling 7 years' experience leading large-scale Agile implementations, we will examine patterns, anti-patterns, techniques and case histories from 7 different perspectives (or layers): Individual, Team, Management, Program, Business, Strategic, and Organizational. Using a template, your class team of 5 will help you create your adoption plan covering selection, sequence, sponsorship, culture, org change, job change, role of customers & management, training, methodology and metrics. 180 2957 Michael Spayd Regency C 2 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 90 5121 Orit Hazzan Plaza Ballroom A 13 21 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z By now, your company has made the transition to Agile. "Sprints", "backlogs", and "retrospectives" are everyday words, but you’re also discovering the serious challenges that software agility brings to product management. The Product Owners, who have been scattered across multiple teams, are not cohesively aligned around the same prioritized set of corporate initiatives and strategies. In addition, there are cross-product dependencies that are not being effectively recognized and addressed. My company's solution was to build a single, enterprise level, Unified Backlog. 45 551 Marie Kalliney Crystal C 4 22 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Imagine yourself with a team that flies in from AU, the UK, and US in bi-weekly shifts to work with a telecommunications giant. Mix in inexperience, a shared resource model, bad behaviours, and a mandated intro to Agile in a silo-ed non-agile environment. Couple this with a capability driven / satellite team who's focus is to assist other teams to drive out SOA: and you have a recipe for a Team in Flux. Working to find a system that worked for this team was a long and arduous journey full of misdirection, poor choices, and learning around structure, Agile methodologies, and people in general. 45 969 Sharlene McKinnon San Francisco 9 22 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Given the size and scope of Google's code base, and speed of development, typical off-the-shelf continuous integration are unable to meet our needs. So, we decided to create a continuous integration and testing system as a centralized service on an unprecedented scale. When fully completed and operational, it will probably be the world's largest continuous integration and testing system, running millions of tests every single day. In this talk, we will report on our experience running such a program in an agile manner and will also describe the basic design and features of the CI system. 45 1606 Mark Striebeck Crystal B 10 22 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Bob Scoble Esq. and Ted "Theodore" Logan are about to embark on a new technology start-up venture when a mystical figure with a fondness for beagles and the Galapagos Islands appears before them, promising great prospects for their new business if they first agree to accompany him on a unique adventure. They accept. Spotting a theme common across the many amazing conversations they have subsequently, Bob and Ted decide to follow the XP principle of doing extreme amounts of the practices that work: they implement the world's first completely Darwinian complex systems risk management program. 45 236 Julian Everett Grand Ballroom A 3 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z We want to deliver maximum business value. Prioritising is easy if someone assigns business value to each story. How do you estimate business value? How should you prioritise between stories, projects or clients? The aim of the game is to deliver maximum value. Your development team only has a finite capacity, so you're going to have to make some tough choices. We provide the clients and their requests. We suggest techniques for estimating business value. The rest is up to you. The game teaches you how to build and use a Business Value Model to deliver maximum value. Max. 28 players 90 257 Portia Tung, Pascal Van Cauwenberghe Plaza Ballroom B 12 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Spending more time maintaining your tests than your code? Started to write tests only to be discouraged by the complexity involved? Imagine if you could implement robust automated testing on even your most complex projects by simply writing one extra line of code… Now you can! Regardless of which testing framework you use, Approval Tests allow you to painlessly capture tested output in a visible, verifiable, and automated way. Particularly useful in the context of writing tests for legacy code, GUIs, databases and web pages, this open source solution is as pretty as a picture! 90 346 Llewellyn Falco, Daniel Gilkerson Grand Ballroom C North 15 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z A Continuous Integration system is often considered one of the key elements involved in supporting an agile software development and testing environment. As a traditional software tester transitioning to agile environment, it became clear that we would needed several changes to make the transition to agile testing possible. This experience report discusses a continuous integration implementation I led last year. The initial motivations, technical specifics of the implementation, perceived benefits to the team, and retrospective results are all discussed. 45 406 Sean Stolberg Grand Ballroom D North 14 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z The power of the placebo is based on our brain's belief system. Because we believe the medication can work it does. I wonder if there is some of that placebo effect in our successes with agile? Could it be that all our successes are really a matter of proper expectation? It often seems that the software industry is seeking one magic potion after another. We embrace the latest and greatest and hope it will cure our ills. Is agile just the latest elixir? 90 408 Linda Rising Regency D 1 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Of the many benefits of agility, none is more transforming than the power of self-organizing teams. Yet, building such teams remains one of the most elusive goals. This is due to the challenging transition functional managers must make to develop the right organizational environment for teams to mature. This session is for managers who are challenged in building strong self-organizing teams. This session will develop your agile organizational leadership awareness and competencies to build committed, disciplined and self-organizing teams who share responsibility. 90 438 Pete Behrens Crystal B 10 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z An Exercise in Agile Facilitation - http://agilejournal.com/articles/columns/articles/1233-the-invisible-project This session focuses on an approach taken by Agile Project Managers to develop empowered and effective teams using a series of techniques focused on trust, transparency, team dynamics, and agile facilitation. More so, ensuring that the Project Manager does not end up as the central figure dominating the project is equally critical, highlighting that it takes an unselfish personality to create a truly self-organizing team. 90 487 Mack Adams Regency A 9 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Many agile methodologies assume a customer (or product owner) walks into the room with a swack of money and a pile of story cards and tells the development team to start building the functionality described on the top few cards. This tutorial provides an overview of what needs to go on “behind the scenes” between when a project is conceived and when development can start in earnest. It identifies the artifacts that may need to be produced, whether and when they should be produced, which activities can be used to produce them and who should be involved in those activities. 90 543 Gerard Meszaros Crystal C 4 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z As individuals we work in transient isolation to reduce the impact of work in progress on each other. Organizations isolate WIP by using only official versions of 3pty sources and by producing official releases for customers. Multi-stage continuous integration (MSCI) scales CI to large distributed environments by isolating work in progress at the team level. Changes move from individual to team to mainline as fast as CI allows, but stop on failure. MSCI is particularly important in a distributed environment where fixes to problems exposed by CI can be delayed by a full day. 45 872 Damon Poole Plaza Ballroom A 8 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Integrating customer feedback into an agile process is a challenge. Iterations are short, and finding time for research, design & development means making sacrifices. In this session we'll talk about finding organizational allies who can become collaborators in customer feedback tasks, getting effective & timely results, & potential pitfalls. Enlisting your organization in these efforts builds a customer-centric culture and provides the team with critical input. Examples will be drawn from our experience at Viget Labs re-designing the international web presence of a global hotel chain. 90 1161 Jackson Fox Columbus KL 16 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Want to improve your team? Take a drama class! Want to measure how your agile adoption is going, take a business course!! This session explores the often overlooked practices in other industries for inspiration on improving agile practice in software development. From waste management and lean manufacturing to understanding motivational and sustainable development with NLP, I want to help people begin to look at things differently and perhaps find their own fixes from the rich variety of disciplines in everyday life that they can apply to agile software development. 90 2014 Mike Sutton Toronto 2 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z What do you get when two developers try to implement agile without having experienced it? A 90 minute session on all the mistakes that were made. What can you do to avoid the same fate? We needed an agile coach, but want to help you do without. We'll present techniques you can use immediately. In this session, we examine the problems created by implementing an agile process incompletely and describe solutions to those problems. We offer the perspective of developers who learned what commitment really means and that there's more to agile than TDD and small releases. 90 2080 Brian Victor, Noah Jacobson New Orleans 7 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z It is human nature to avoid loss. We make rational decisions to improve our situation and respond to circumstances. But are we always rational? Whether it be the tendency of people to hold stocks that have lost value or teams that continue a death march, this irrational fear of acknowledging a loss can cause people to keep investing in a poor undertaking. This discussion is a brief exploration of how our desire to avoid loss can cause us to irrationally make our situation worse in the hopes of somehow breaking even as well as some techniques to identify and avoid these situations. 45 2270 Brian Bozzuto Columbus GH 11 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Peter Coad's Color Modeling method is a simple, effective technique for building robust, elegant object models. One of the best ways to learn the Color Modeling approach is through an interactive demonstration. In this session, Daniel Vacanti and David Anderson will solicit examples from the audience and--with no preparation and using the Color Modeling approach--build a real, working model for each selected problem domain in the short time given. Both David and Daniel have used this demonstration technique with great success at previous conferences, tutorials, and commercial engagements. 45 2506 David Anderson, Daniel Vacanti Columbus IJ 6 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z An Intuit process “Agile Done Right” (ADR) was created to ensure agile is used properly to maximize business results & minimize process problems. It requires an agile coach like those used in Intuit’s successful SEI’s Team Software Process (TSP). Coaches ensure the process is “done right” & help fix any problems. Internal coach training was created to develop project-embedded coaches & to raise the overall level of agile maturity. We look at that training program including the agile syllabus, brief ADR overview, coach’s “dirty dozen” meetings, learning methods, etc. 45 2614 Alan Padula Crystal A 5 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Leading an agile development team; what is the role, what’s important, what to do, and how to lead. This is based on my experience in leading a large (600+ people) application development organization that has been practicing Agile since 2001. Over the past eight years I’ve observed, coached, and developed Agile leaders. In my talk I’ll cover the attributes of the successful Agile leader. I will use real life examples that illustrate and validate the attributes that can help or hinder the process of leading an Agile team. Leadership versus management will also be discussed. 45 3085 David Endicott San Francisco 9 23 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Maintaining a good working relationship while also staying true to Agile principles can be extremely challenging at times. Over the last two years we have been using William Ury's "Yes! No. Yes?" approach to confronting anti-Agile behavior to great success. This workshop will train participants in the approach and go through several role playing examples to help practice the technique. 45 154 Bruce Eckfeldt Crystal A 5 24 2009-08-13T08:22:54Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z This session covers a successful transition to a new business model in a limited time span. Typically, Iowa Student Loan (ISL) sells bonds to fund the creation of private student loans. As financial markets deteriorated in 2008, the potential of successful bond sales diminished to the point of nonexistence. Heretofore, our systems assumed ISL as the only lender. Collaborative bank relationships changed this assumption to one of multiple lenders. A redesign of the loan program/loan type structure of our software followed to make the funding model very configurable. 45 522 Justin Davis, Tim Andersen Columbus IJ 6 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z The introduction of Scrum at a CMMI Level 5 company doubled productivity and cut defects by 40% compared to waterfall projects in 2006 by focusing on early testing and time to fix builds. Systematic institutionalized Scrum across all projects and used data driven tools like story efficiency to surface Product Backlog impediments . This allowed them to systematically develop a strategy for a second doubling in productivity. Two teams have achieved a sustainable quadrupling of productivity compared to waterfall projects. We discuss here the strategy to bring the entire company to that level. 45 545 Carsten Jakobsen Columbus GH 11 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z I've been on teams with way too little and (heresy) way too much testing. There have been lots of talks about how you should test more, but I'm going to dare to talk about when you should test less. Too much testing can lead to backlash, gridlock, morale problems, and poor velocity. Of course lack of testing can lead to bad design, gridlock, morale problems, and poor velocity. The level of testing a team can support depends on many factors including: team size, developer buy in, managerial approval, company size, IT support, and testing experience. 45 1394 Jake Scruggs Grand Ballroom D North 14 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z In these turbulent times, businesses need people with specific characteristics and attitudes to enable survival and success. It turns out these attitudes and are very similar to what is needed on an Agile project team. This talk examines what attitudes and perspectives team members need to be successful on Agile projects, how these can contribute to overall organisational success and how to encourage and instil these attitudes in a team. 45 1521 Shane Hastie San Francisco 9 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z What can programmers learn from the thought of Aristotle, Kant, and Mill? More than you might think. Find out what three of the greatest minds in history think about things like craft, art, virtue, and happiness, and how they would run a software project. We'll link philosophical ethics and ideas to the processes, tools, and methodologies of software development as we discuss a critical question: is successful development primarily a matter of finding the right rules, creating the right outcomes, or cultivating the right virtues? 45 2368 Jon Dahl Grand Ballroom A 3 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z Tim and Tim discuss tools and techniques and observations for remotely pair-programming. Various remote desktop-sharing applications and services are discussed, dissed, and recommended along with pointers and practices for logistics. Learn the downside of distant partners. How do you have a flash architecture meeting? How do you collaborate with the team? When do you take breaks? Is it really just like being there, without the smells? 45 2399 Tim Gifford, Tim Ottinger Plaza Ballroom A 8 24 2009-08-13T03:46:00Z