Track: Agile

This year it was 10 years since we were first introduced to Agile. Practices such as TDD and pairing has become the default way of working for many developers and Scrum has become common practice in many organisations. And still there is a lot happening in the agile community. This year the agile track will focus on what's happening in agile. What's hot and what's not. You will get some good pointers of what you should be focusing on next, and maybe even a bit of controversy.

Friday

10:00-10:50

Agile Portfolio Planning: Managing Your Project Portfolio

Whether you’ve been Agile for a while or still thinking about it, you have one thing in common with all other software teams. You have too much work to do. One of the valuable aspects of moving to an Agile approach for projects is the choices you have in managing the portfolio. You can use a kanban approach, a first-come-first-served queue, or one of several evaluation approaches to select which project to do next.

Johanna Rothman

Johanna Rothman works with companies to improve how they manage their product development--to maximize management and technical staff productivity and to improve product quality. Johanna is a leader in the Agile community, having most recently chaired the Agile2009 conference. Johanna is the author of several books: - Manage Your Project Portfolio: Increase Your Capacity and Finish More Projects - The 2008 Jolt Productivity award-winning Manage It! Your Guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management - Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management - Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People She writes columns for Stickyminds.com and on “extreme project management” for Gantthead.com, and writes two blogs on her web site, jrothman.com. She is a host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness conference.

11:10-12:00

Agile metrics – how to preserve and promote collaboration

Large organizations are using balanced scorecards and dashboards to measure, monitor and forecast the performance of the organization and connect those to its vision, goals and objectives. Metrics is important for management, but how do you design metrics for agile teams? How will the metrics affect the behavior of the teams? In this seminar, you will get an insight into different types of agile metrics that preserves and promotes collaboration of agile development teams.

Klas Skogmar

Klas is a PMP certified project manager and management consultant with an extensive background in both software and business development. He regularly holds courses and seminars in both agile development and other areas, such as PMBOK and ITIL. Klas has worked as a project manager, teacher, coach, mentor, deployment manager, problem manager and developer. He is also an entrepreneur with experience from founding and managing companies in various industries over the years.

13:00-13:50

Healthy Projects

A healthy project requires clarity of project (what are we building), the customer (for whom are we building), the purpose (why are we building it), and of release schedules (when are we building it). But it doesn't stop there, a healthy project requires a collaborative contract and structure, an understanding of what quality means, constant communication between the team and all other stakeholders, and an appreciation of the project's trajectory. Agile and lean give us a highly configurable (and re-configurable) toolkit with which to build healthy projects. Jim Benson will discuss healthy projects with very different management structures and processes to illustrate that process is only healthy if it results in satisfied stakeholders.

Jim Benson

Jim Benson incorporates his background in cognitive psychology, government, and management to build community through policy, technology, and collaboration. His management consultancy Modus Cooperandi helps organizations change and develop sustainable teams through the application of lean principles, agile methodologies, and social media.

14:05-14:55

Large scale agile – how to make it happen

Building the case for and transforming a large organization with huge legacy in product, process and culture in an agile direction is not for the faint-of-heart. However, if you are successful there is a promise for performance at a much higher level.• How to build the case for of the transformation• Why and what kind of pilots you should run• Preparing for the big leap and handling the consequences• What to deal with upfront and what to leave for later• Potential pitfalls to beware of

Svante Lidman

Svante has deep experience of building high performance software development teams delivering the results that the business needs and has more than 25 years experience in software development. He has held positions as development manager, program manager, project leader, consultant and trainer. In his current role he is coaching customers around the world to boost the results from their software development investments. Since 2000 Svante has worked for Ivar Jacobson Intl and Jaczone (acquired). Prior to that Svante has held management positions in software development at Microsoft, Rational Software, and Objectory and other companies. Svante has a Master of Science degree in Engineering Physics from the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.

15:15-16:05

Patterns of Effective Delivery

Some teams are orders of magnitude more effective than others. Over the last year or so I've been working with, and observing, some very good teams with quite exceptional - and rather surprising - habits. In this talk Dan introduces the idea of delivery patterns - patterns of effective behaviour in delivery teams - and describes some of the more unusual but effective patterns he's been collecting.

Dan North

Dan has been writing software for over 20 years, and was a principal consultant with technology consultancy ThoughtWorks. Now a recent transplant to Chicago, he spends his time helping teams become more effective at delivering software, and presents at conferences such as JAOO, Agile and OOPSLA on topics ranging from learning theory to behaviour-driven development. He has published articles in the Java Developers' Journal and Better Software, and for CIO newsletters and the DSDM consortium.