Agile
Agile Retrospectives

Building on PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) and other continuous improvement tools and techniques, Diana Larsen will lead an interactive workshop on how to focus and lead retrospectives for daily, incremental and milestone progress toward improving software team processes, methods, teamwork and practices. 

Agile
Agile Software Development for Distributed Teams

A lot of people still believe that agile software development is for small and co-located teams only. However, the agile value system and the principles as stated in the agile manifesto don't argue about project size and distribution. In this course attendees will learn about the key success factors for distributed (and maybe even large-scale) software development. The focus will be on how to apply agile processes in a distributed setting and how to establish a common development culture

Agile
Practitioner's Guide To Kanban

Agile
Agile is dead, long live Agile

Companies are incredibly disfunctional. Most managers have no idea how development works or how to make it better. No matter what process they try to use, many of them fall back into chaos. Jeff will, in this talk, highlight the most common failures in Agile projects and how to avoid them in your project and organization.

Agile
Design For Testability – Isolating the ugly stuff

Agile
Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban

It’s just a white board! How can it possibly work? Kanban’s simplicity belies its power. In this session, Jim Benson will demonstrate how kanban’s visual and narrative structure:

  * Creates an observable narrative of work;
  * Enables clarity of purpose, action, intent, outcome, process, responsibility;
  * Promotes shared understanding among people with different learning styles (visual, auditory), cognitive styles (ADHD / Asperger’s), cultural styles;
  * Recognizes individual input;

Agile
The possible future of Agile

Mike Beedle will present where Agile comes from, what Agile is, how Agile evolved since its inception, and what the possible futures of Agile might be.

Agile
Agile Release Planning

Stories, epics, minimum marketable features, kanban, iterations, story points, burn-up charts... the cacophony of Agile planning terms is enough to drive anyone crazy! In this session, James Shore silences the noise with a straightforward description of the breadth of Agile release planning. From discovering value to making commitments, this session covers everything you need to know to plan beyond the next iteration

Agile
The Burning Man

Using real world examples of failed projects, this 50 minute talk will explore what caused the failure of proven methodologies and collaboration models on specific projects. In working through each scenario, the attendees will be engaged to evaluate potential problems and solutions for these points of failure. The lessons learned from each scenario will then be presented as takeaway lessons which can be applied to working with teams in either an Agile or a traditional model.

Agile
Delivering What's Right

'In Programming, the hard part isn't solving problems, but deciding what problems to solve'. In this famous quote, Paul Graham sums up one of the great challenges of software development, namely, how do we pick the right problem to solve, the right feature to deliver, the right bug to fix? In this session, Cory Foy will cover what it means to deliver the right thing, and how to use several models to quickly filter the features in your backlog into a sharply focused profit-making machine.

Agile
Creating a Climate for Success

Physical space, cultural climate, information flow, & organizational “soup”- All play key roles in creating an environment where project teams deliver value to their customers. Learn to create the optimal environment for the teams you join or manage. In this session, Diana Larsen will explore four critical influencers that help projects succeed and help you discover new ideas for shifting current environmental conditions and impediments to improve project outcomes.

Agile
Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder

Personal Kanban promotes the individual effectiveness intrinsic to team success. Participants will explore how individuals and teams can use work-in-progress limits, value streams, backlogs, flow, and continuous improvement to build visual time management systems. Constraints, bottlenecks and collaborative opportunities then become clear. Individual understanding allows team members to make better decisions, effectively implement tasks, help other team members and have more successful release

Agile
Architecture in an Agile World

Tension often surfaces between process and execution, as with agility and architecture. Yet, each side needs the other to exist. The architecture you create depends on your attitude, perception and degree of agility. You can reach varying degrees of agility, depending on your attitude, perception and knowledge of the problem and it's architectural solution. In this session we will turn this tension into a powerful force that you can use for keeping the problem and it's solution under control

Agile
Visual Management

Join Visual Management blog author Xavier Quesada Allue as he explains basic patterns and introduces dozens of original ideas for building great taskboards and visually managing your work and that of your teams.
In this hands-on session you will learn...
- What makes a great taskboard and how to really use one effectively
- Patterns of taskboard design: Scrum boards, XP boards, Kanban boards and more
- Tips, tricks and original ideas to easily improve every taskboard

Agile
Kanban and Scrum - making the most of both

There's a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is "so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?" Let's clear up the fog. What are these things? Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts? The purpose of this session is to clarify Kanban and Scrum by comparing them, so you can figure out how these may come to use in your environment.

Agile
Knowledge Management in Scrum

This presentation describes four solutions used in an in-house program for knowledge management.
Our experience shows how a development department can increase knowledge sharing, encourage improvement and facilitate employee growth.
Additionally, one solution describes a model used to encourage continuous improvement in a multi-team scrum implementation.

Agile
Emergent Design

This session covers the current state of the art in agile design and architecture. It defines emergent design, shows enablers and blockers, and demonstrates how to discover, harvest, and leverage design elements lurking in code.

Agile
Distributed Agile at Microsoft P&P

Most agile methods assume the team is co-located in a single team room. They give little guidance as to how to address team distribution although proven practices are emerging within the community. The Microsoft patterns & practices team has experimented with distributed teams for years, mining practices from the community and experimenting them out on numerous agile projects. This talk summarizes those learnings and gives examples of their application – both good and bad–within our teams

Agile
Real Options

This session introduces Real Options and shows how it can help in running both your projects and your life. Real Options is a decision-making process based on Financial Option Theory and Applied Psychology that can be used to manage risk. Applying Real Options to software development explains why many of the Agile practices are so successful.
This session will help people discover options where they haven't seen them before. After this session making decisions will never be the same again.

Agile
Large-scale refactorings using the Mikado Method

It's nearly impossible to shield yourself from changes to a code base. If the changes are extensive, it’s easy to get lost in a jungle of dependencies, or on a sea of broken code. Ultimately, you might give up, label the code 'legacy' and start lobbying for a rewrite.

Don't do that, come learn The Mikado Method instead. Learn how this systematic approach can be used to reclaim your code. See how you can visualize, prepare and perform business-value-focused changes without breaking stuff.