Brandon Carlson

Continuous Improvement: What Can't You See?

Slides

You've probably heard that You can't improve what you can't measure sible visible. From value stream mapping to burndown charts, making things visible is a core component of the continuous improvement process. Brandon Carlson says that even with all this visibility, much of the data surrounding how your teams work is either not captured or not visible, and thus represents a great opportunity for improvement. Imagine your management team tells you that your velocity is too low. Why is it too low, and what can you do about it? Brandon shares one team’s surprising answer to that question when they analyzed previously invisible data. How do you know what the highest risk areas of the system are for enabling the most cost effective regression test strategy? You'll get that answer, too. It's all there, tucked away where no one can see.

Jason Kline

10 Surefire ways to kill your Agile Transformation

Slides

No one sets out to fail when they embark upon an Agile transformational journey. Far too often however, the same failure patterns are visible, especially to practitioners who work with many organizations. In this interactive session, we will discuss the top ten most common anti-patterns that threaten the success of enterprise Agility. We will also generate insights about the root causes - why these patterns emerge over and over again. Following our session, you'll have the knowledge you'll need to diagnose these patterns, and some strategies for avoiding these ten mistakes you shouldn’t make.

Jeffrey Davidson

Fast Food vs. Homemade Agile: Uncovering Better Ways To Deliver Software

Slides

Are you hungry? Eat this pre-processed, fast food hamburger!
Still hungry? Add a large order of French Fries!

New to iterative software? Use Scrum!
Tired of Scrum? Use Kanban!
Got lots of teams? Use SAFe!

We know a healthy diet values natural foods over the simplicity and ease of fast food. Similarly, many agile techniques are much more valuable than the simple, fast food version of software development everyone is teaching.

Over the last 15 years we started relying on other people's best practices instead of developing better ways of delivering software. We are using solutions developed for a different team, in a different decade, in a different company, in a different industry. There is such a rich tapestry of ways to build software and we are stuck eating software's version of fast food.

This interactive session discusses a bunch of different Agile techniques and when they are useful. Then we will look at just how different agile might be if we picked only the most appropriate items. Lastly, you will work with a few peers to determine if you need to swap a few techniques, or even build a personalized version of Agile, specially designed to help with your situation.

Jodi Jones

Kent McDonald

What do Scrum Masters Really Do? And Do We Need Them?

Slides

The Scrum Master role is a foundational concept of Scrum, yet like everything else, the role and it’s value should not be fixed. As with everything else related to agile, the nature of the Scrum Master role, and whether it is needed or all, depends a great deal on context. As teams discover this, it leads to some common questions:

What do Scrum Masters Really Do?

Do we even need Scrum Masters?

Join Jodi and Kent as we examine the Scrum Master role and attempt to answer the above questions. We’ll share our experiences and give you a chance to share your perspectives with each other. By the end of the session, you'll have more insight into the Scrum Master role and how it applies (or not) to your situation.

After all, the only consistent answer to the above questions is “it depends”.

Joshua Carson

Demos that Don't Suck

Slides

Are you dreading your demo days? Have you seen more slides about 'working' software than you thought possible? Is everyone just checking their emails?

Demos can and should be a valuable part of your projects feedback loop. They can let you know when you've discovered something great. They can let you know when you went too far into a bad idea. They can let you know just how far away you might be from something your customers need.

How often are demos something that add all that value? What about even adding any value? This session will give you the tools you need to make demos that don't suck. Learn how to spot bad demos, what key things you need in your demos, and even a bit about how to make demos that can wow your stakeholders.

Julie Chickering

Modernizing Agile

We are not practicing the same Agile we did 15 years ago. Agile at scale is mainstream. Thousands of companies are actively seeking information on how to scale agile effectively. There are many frameworks and techniques but they all boil down to a set of common principles. Agile done well involves teams, programs and portfolios in a way that aligns strategy and execution. It's important to apply a proper team foundation to build things right but without agile applied at the program and portfolio level all we may end up with is the wrong things built faster. In this talk Julie will discuss how to effectively apply Agile to your portfolios and programs to ensure you are also building the right things. Learn to create value, not just process.

Julie Urban

How Our Leaders Transformed to Lead Agile (or How I Learned to Shut Up…)

Slides

One of the major success factors in an agile transformation is helping teams take ownership: the teams own the solution. This requires Leaders learning how and when to step back (and when to step up.)

The Veritas NetBackup organization has tried agile transformations three times in the last seven years with the first two not succeeding and the third one going much better. The key difference has been the transformation of the Leaders to help teams take ownership as opposed to focusing only on the scrum artifacts and ceremonies. Moving from managers to Leaders is not an easy task. How did these Leaders learn? What did they learn? Join us to hear about NetBackup’s transformation story and some of the concepts and techniques that made the difference such as learning to be an enabler, how to ask questions and not give answers, and other tools.

Keith Dahlby

All Teams Are Distributed

We hear it all the time: face-to-face communication is best. Co-located teams are more collaborative, more productive, more manageable. Pair programming is more efficient than code review. Mob programming—literally the whole team around one screen—may be even more efficient. This session won't try to argue that these statements aren't true in the moment, but rather that these optimizations achieve a local maximum. We will explore the limitations of co-location, and discuss distributed communication patterns that can help even mostly co-located teams achieve their global maximum.

Kevin Seidl

Pablo Escobar - drug king pin or prototypical Product Owner?

Slides

Have you also been binge watching Narcos on Netflix? From this portrayal we see that much of Pablo Escobar's success can be attributed to the relationships that he built and his ruthless nature. These are qualities also key to the success of the modern Product Owner. This session attempts a humorous comparison as well as offers an in depth discussion about the key relationships of a Product Owner and how to build them.

Llewelyn Falco

Knowing what bad code looks like

You don’t need to be a mechanic to know something is wrong with your car. And you don’t need to be a programmer to know if something is wrong with the code.

This session will focus on training you to have a ‘sense of smell’ for bad code. So you can increase the serendipity in your explorations by having insights into which sections of code are particularly error prone.

Let’s take a look at how quickly we can instill some design sense into fresh minds using Sparrow Decks. Sparrow decks are a rapid succession of 50-100 examples in a 3 minute burst. They allow the pattern recognition portion of the brain to spring in gear and do what it does best.

Matt Heusser

Agile-Test Evolution: Changing Test Strategy Over Time

Slides

After years of consulting and conferring with teams from Activate to Zappos, Matt Heusser has seen more that how teams test - he has seen how test strategy changes over time to support more ambitious development approaches.

That vantage point gave Matt the opportunity to put together a playbook - a guide to the recurring patterns of success, and failure, that he has for teams on the page of continuous improvement. Teams that moved from heavily documented process to light, to executable examples and exploration, and, for some, one-piece flow and continuous delivery tend to experiment with technique — some techniques seem to work, and others, not so much.

Come benefit from the experience of others as we discuss a move to a fluency model for Agile-Testing, with real examples. Take home ways your team might evolve … and perhaps a few things to avoid.

Melissa Perri

Designed to Learn

Over the past few years there’s been a push in the product development world to “make products that people love”. While many companies focus on having the best design and the greatest experience, they are still missing the most important step in product development – learning about their customers.

The popularity of Agile and Lean has sparked discussions about getting software out faster to users. At the core of this has been the Minimum Viable Product. Unfortunately, many people still do not understand the MVP. Some see it as a way to release a product faster. Others are scared of it, viewing it as a way to put broken code on your site and ruin products.

The sole purpose of Minimum Viable Product is to learn about your customers. This step that has been so overlooked and yet it is the most essential part to creating a product your customers will love. The more information you can uncover through experimentation, the more certainty there is about building the right thing. In this talk, Melissa will go over how to design the most effective product experimentations to learn about your customer, their problems, and how to solve them. She’ll explain how to get the rest of the organization on board with this method of testing, and how to incorporate it into overall Product Strategy.

Key Learnings
What are the misconceptions of an MVP
What the goal of an MVP really is
How to do effective product experimentation
How product leaders need to change their styles to coach experimental teams

Nivia Henry

First You Build the Team, Then They Build the Thing

Slides

Behind every awesome product is a team who trusts one another and works well together. This is the positive case of Conway’s Law, in which a system is a reflection of the organization that built it. At the other extreme is a system built by a team whose members are distrustful, do not collaborate, and are ultimately dysfunctional. The resulting product will inevitably fail its customers. Adding and revamping features to such a product would be dressing up a rotten egg.

Rather, we must form a healthy team in order to have a healthy product. How do we do that? How do we find the “right” people; bring them together and ensure the outcome is a great product?

In this talk, we’ll explore 5 (not so easy) tips about doing just that. We’ll inject thinking from past and present leaders; and leverage Lean & Agile principles, to build and sustain a healthy team.

Tim Gifford

DevOps on Day 1 with Operations First Delivery

Slides

DevOps lore tell legendary tales of “Unicorn” companies. We’re told these mythical companies continuously deliver software to production with nary a blemished aura or mussed mane. Can it be so? Is this but a fairytale?

In this talk, we will dispel the fantasy and show you how to get similar results. Spawning the first unicorn is the most difficult, so I will show you the specific steps, tools, techniques and architectural patterns of Operations First Delivery to create your first “Unicorn” project.

Tim Ottinger

Intro to 4 Values of Modern Agile

We have at the seen teams evolve in line with original agile principles and modern technologies to be more exciting, more capable, more helpful, and ever more lean.

At the same time, other organizations have evolved their agile practice away from the original values and principles through a series of compromises, until it has become a lifeless set of formalities.

We realized that the most deeply, impressively agile teams we know seem to have connected on four values.

They make people awesome, deliver value continuously, and experiment and learn rapidly. These challenging changes are only possible because of the safety that permeates their practices and culture.

Come for a re-think of agility and a challenge that may transform your experience of software development.

Zach VanMeter

Kevin Knowles

Pair Programming: Tales from the Trenches

Slides

Pair programming often recommended as a fix to software projects, but why send two people to do the job of one? We'll talk about why pair programming is not a scam to double the cost of a project and deliver half the value.

Zach and Kevin work daily in an agile environment that embraces the practice of pairing. We'll share the value that pairing brings to the business, the team, and the individual. We'll discuss the right and wrong ways to implement pairing and provide pragmatic ways you can make it work for your organization. We'll share our lessons learned from real life projects and experiences and what can be done to overcome common issues that affect the success of pairing. You will be able to walk away with answers to common questions and solutions to ensure pairing is successful in your organization.