Amy Lee

Wicked Problems, and How To Solve Work Through Them

We’ve all run into problems that were more than just complicated—no matter what you do, the problem shifts and there seems to be no perfect, or maybe even right, solution. Those are a special class of problem, called wicked problems, and they crop up in pretty much every field, from business to urban planning to public policy. The bad news is, wicked problems can’t truly ever be solved. The good news is, they can be addressed, or treated. Being able to address wicked problems in way that is both sound and legitimate is a practice that can save your team or organization lots of unexpected conflict and working at cross-purposes. Warning: it’s not just about generating buy-in and definitely not just getting to yes, but about surfacing crucial underlying tensions that have to be faced and worked through in order to take action that will be consistent with your organization’s identity, values, and mission. The Kettering Foundation’s Amy Lee specializes in wicked public problems, and has worked with Luke Hohmann of Conteneo to create a decision making structure that will allow your team or organization to frame and deliberate on any wicked problem, either in-person or online. Amy will be explaining both what wicked problems are how to address them, focusing on the tendency to try to avoid the tensions and hard choices that are an intrinsic to these kind of problems.

Brandon Carlson

Test Automation: Yes, you need it. Yes, you're doing it Wrong

Cat Swetel

Lean Portfolio & Roadmap Planning

Traditional, schedule-based roadmaps got you down? Never feel like you’re getting any traction? Does a misaligned portfolio make prioritization nearly impossible? Consider a product-driven approach and stop using construction-oriented models and start using development-minded methods instead!
In this session, you will be provided the tools to begin crafting a comprehensive product-driven roadmap aligned to an investment-style portfolio. These tools will show how to include plans for development as well as organizational readiness activities and infrastructure impacts. Additionally, you will learn techniques to manage and measure the delivery of roadmap items as well as how communicate the new approach with your business partners. Your speakers will also share observations on common implementations and evolutions of these basic tools and common concerns associated with product-driven roadmaps.

Cecil Williams

Todd Brunia

BDD Explained Through Real World Examples

In this session you'll hear how real software engineering teams have delivered exceptional value to their customers using Behavior Driven Development(BDD). We'll start by demystifying BDD. Then, we'll introduce you to best in class BDD tooling and explain BDD techniques your team can use to take collaboration to the next level. Come see Java and .NET examples applied to desktop, web, infrastructure and micro service contexts. Following our session, you'll have the knowledge you'll need to start incorporating BDD into your software engineering practices today.

Doc Norton

Agile Metrics: Velocity is NOT the Goal

Velocity is one of the most common metrics used-and one of the most commonly misused-on agile projects. Velocity is simply a measurement of speed in a given direction-the rate at which a team is delivering toward a product release. As with a vehicle en route to a particular destination, increasing the speed may appear to ensure a timely arrival. However, that assumption is dangerous because it ignores the risks with higher speeds. And while it’s easy to increase a vehicle’s speed, where exactly is the accelerator on a software team? Michael “Doc" Norton walks us through the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law to explain why setting goals for velocity can actually hurt a project's chances. Take a look at what can negatively impact velocity, ways to stabilize fluctuating velocity, and methods to improve velocity without the risks. Leave with a toolkit of additional metrics that, coupled with velocity, give a better view of the project's overall health.

Geoff Wilson

Barely Manage to Lead: How Agile, Teams, and Iterative Thinking Transform Leadership

A few years ago, Geoff Wilson was in a tough spot. His digital product development agency, 352 Inc., was growing quickly but was barely managing to keep up with the workload. Projects were disorganized. Employee morale was low. Customers were frustrated. Geoff needed to do something fast.

Geoff and his leadership team restructured the agency into cross-functional agile teams and turned managers into servant leaders. Teams were taught Lean Startup techniques and traditional processes were thrown out the window. The changes dramatically increased innovation, quality, customer satisfaction and employee morale - almost overnight.

Geoff will share his story and belief that every organization can achieve similar results when its leaders learn to barely manage at all.

Jason Little

Culture Follows Structure

You want to be Spotify because you saw those fancy videos about how awesome they are. The problem is, Spotify was built that way from the ground up and you need to undo years, or sometimes decades, of organizational debt to get there. The Agile community likes to say you must adopt the agile mindset or 'be more agile', but what the heck does that mean? In this session I'll show you how to figure out how to build a bridge from where you're at to where you want to get to.

Kent McDonald

The Product Owner Value Game

Are you a product owner seeking to be more value-driven? Do you work with product owners who you would like to be more value-driven? Are you struggling with ways to make that happen? Do you like to play games? If so, come play the Product Owner Value Game and experience what value driven backlog refinement look like.

I had the opportunity to play the Product Owner Value Game created by Dajo Breddels and Paul Kuijten, at Agile2015 and wanted to share it with the Agile Iowa Community.

We’ll play the Product Owner Value Game, and then discuss what playing the game tells us about backlog refinement, sequencing and value based decisions.

Leslie Morse

Analysis Across Five Levels of Agile Planning

An Agile approach for delivering value means you’ve got to abandon the idea of “big design upfront.” That can be a scary proposition though, especially if you’re not familiar with how to apply analysis and design techniques within an Agile framework.

During Analysis Across Five Levels of Planning, you’ll learn about a planning model for progressive elaboration, The 5 Levels of Agile Planning, as well as proven analysis and design techniques that apply to each planning horizon.

Lisa Shoop

How to Sustain Agile: Teams and Organizations

“We have mastered the agile principles and are thriving….wait our team members just changed and the business unit just reorganized! What do we do now?” Sound familiar? Often a team goes through training, becomes adjusted to the new way of working, and starts moving along well using agile principles to guide them through software development. This snapshot-in-time does not always last past one or two projects; then something affects the team—team members being added, leaving, moving to other teams; new management, new users. What should you do? How do you adjust? Should you consider training, role adjustments, look to team members to be accountable for knowledge transfer? Lisa provides insight to help you explore ways to address change, whether it is on your team or at the enterprise level, to assist in sustaining agile practices and momentum. She shares successes through personal experiences in a large, ever-changing organization.

Matt Barcomb

Evolving Team’s through Cadenced Flow

So you’re on a team that “went agile” (whatever that means) and you’ve been using Scrum or Kanban or some other method for a while. But for some reason you’re either not seeing things get better, can’t get traction or the improvements have slowed down or stopped. And it seems every time a new change is suggested, there is an over focus on process and the people are forgotten as well as actually delivering something useful and maintainable. If this sounds like your situation, it may be due to the approach, not the method.
Here, Cat & Matt introduce Cadenced Flow, which is a principled approach for evolving teams no matter what methods they are using or how far along they are on their journey of becoming more lean or agile. Participants will learn the basic principles that drive team cadence and workflow and then cover practical approaches for improvement, such as how to define and measure work as well as how to coordinate and deliver product.

Ryan Bergman

So what do we do with the architects?

You’ve made the switch to agile. You stopped doing comprehensive documentation and you have self directed teams that value emergent design right?. Then you notice that you forgot to give the architects something to do. Architecture is an activity that all teams need to perform and you might just have some experienced individuals around to help lead and guide them. In this presentation we will talk about what software architecture is, how teams accomplish it, and where the people traditionally called “architects” fit in an agile world.

Scarlett Sidwell

UX in the Real World

That's right. The Real World. This is not a high level, philosophical lecture about the ideal implementation of UX. I will share real stories of how I've convinced project stakeholders and managers to take UX seriously, and integrate UX into their project lifecycle. This session will take an in depth look at field studies you can begin to implement at your place of business, tomorrow, including dos and don'ts, how to get participants, and how to be successful in the implementation of each field study.

Scott Kubie

Communicating Change

Stop me if you've heard this one:

Q: What did the developer say to the users in the changelog? A: Minor bug fixes and enhancements.

Whoops, sorry, that's not a joke. It is unfortunately common, though. Far too often, changes in software and websites are communicated to users with a cavalier attitude — if it all. In this workshop, you'll learn why it's important to communicate clearly about change, why we often don't, and how to do it better.

Attendees will learn a three-step framework for communicating about change with users and customers. We'll also explore three advanced techniques to ease user concerns—and even turn them to your advantage—during substantial or controversial changes to your sites, apps, and services. We'll walk through design exercises that help us learn to think chronologically and contextually and communicate change with greater clarity.

You'll leave with a greater appreciation for how UI, UX, content, and copywriting interconnect in the delicate art of moving someone's digital cheese.

Sean Dunn

Building a Sustainable Agile Organization: A Leadership-Driven Approach

Great attention has been placed on transitioning organizations towards Agile values, principles and practices, but what are we doing today to ensure that these gains are sustainable well beyond our own tenure? How do we ensure that “Agile” values become a part of the identify of our organization, more than just a passing fad? Sean leverages his 13 years in the Canadian Army to translate lessons in building sustainable organizations – and along the way, questioning some common Agile practices.

Todd Little

7 Sins of Scrum and other Agile Anti-Patterns

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile. In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins”; I aim to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.