Scott W. Ambler |
 Agility at Scale: Agile Software Development in the Real-World
Agile software development techniques are being adopted within the majority of organizations around the world and are now being applied "at scale" in very complex situations. This presentation overviews agile software development, shares data from recent industry surveys as to the adoption rate and success rate of agile techniques, and explores scaling issues such as distributed development teams, regulatory compliance, governance, large teams, complex environments, enterprise issues, cultural challenges, and leveraging legacy assets. Agile approaches enable you to achieve greater quality, improved return on investment (ROI), reduced time to market, and significantly easier governance although require greater collaboration, teamwork, and discipline on the part of IT professionals and business stakeholders.
About Scott W. Ambler
Scott W. Ambler is Chief Methodologist/Agile with IBM Software Group, working with IBM customers around the world to help them to improve their software processes. He is the founder of the Agile Modeling (AM), Agile Data (AD), Agile Unified Process (AUP), and Enterprise Unified Process (EUP) methodologies and creator of the Agile Process Maturity Model (APMM). Scott is the (co-)author of 19 books, including Refactoring Databases, Agile Modeling, Agile Database Techniques, The Object Primer 3rd Edition, and The Enterprise Unified Process. Scott is a senior contributing editor with Information Week.
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Alistair McKinnell |
Open Space
Have you ever wanted to create your very own conference filled with fascinating sessions focused on the topics that most interest you? Have you ever hoped to find a safe place to engage in a deep discussion with experts on a topic that you are just starting to learn? Have you ever wanted to wander a room sampling from a smorgasbord of tasty insights, juicy debates, and satisfying conclusions?
You can do all these things at an Open Space. Come. Join us. Engage.
About Alistair McKinnell
Alistair McKinnell has been writing software since the days of punch cards. After reading Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change in 1999 he realized he had found his tribe. Alistair is constantly on the lookout for tools, techniques, and insights that help teams to create valuable software. His personal mission is to share all that he discovers. You'll find him doing just that at work, user groups, study groups, and conferences.
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Michael Sahota |
A Gentle Introduction to Agile
There are a lot of choices and alternatives for getting started with Agile. It can be confusing. This talk will give you a brief guided tour of Agile methodologies so that you have some understanding of how they are similar and how they differ. We'll cover some of the history of iterative development and waterfall as well as the Agile Manifesto to provide context. At the end of this, you will have an understanding of key principles and the Agile landscape.
Agile Executive Briefing - Situational Assessment and 50,000ft view of Agile
The first part of this presentation is a situational assessment of typical challenges in IT project delivery using the SCRAP (Situation, Complication, Resolution, Action, Proof) model. This is essentially a business case for Agile. So if you are looking for ways to get buy-in for Agile, this is the place to be.
The second part of this presentation shows you what Agile is from 50,000 ft. From this high up, we'll be covering the essential elements from a business and management perspective. We'll cover what Agile is, what it does, how it works and what it achieves.
If you are interested in learning or communicating the value of Agile, then this is the talk for you!
You can watch the video on DZone.
About Michael Sahota
Michael Sahota helps businesses to accelerate delivery of value by working with them as a Coach, Consultant and Trainer through his company Agilitrix. Michael has been adopting Agile and Lean practices for over 8 years including leadership roles such as V.P., Director and team lead. Michael has a B.A.Sc. from University of Toronto in Engineering Science and a M.Sc. from U.B.C. in Computer Science. Michael lives and works in Toronto.
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Adam Goucher |
From Start to Success with Web Automation
Automation of the GUI has a bad reputation in the market, and for good reason. Too often a team starts using a tool that worked wonderfully while the champion was around, but later don't live up to the promise.
This presentation will leverage many lessons learned about web automation learned, often painfully, through a number of implementations in the enterprise.
Using Selenium as the reference tool, the following areas will be discussed.
- The roles of both Technical and Non-Technical testers in automation and how to accommodate both
- The characteristics of a successful automated test
- How a successful automated test evolves
- The role metaframeworks in cross-functional adoption
About Adam Goucher
Adam Goucher has been testing software professionally for over 10 years. In that time he has worked with startups, large multinationals, and those in between, in both traditional and agile testing environments. A believer in the communication of ideas big and small, he writes frequently at http://adam.goucher.ca, teaches and speaks on testing and automation skills and co-edited the Beautiful Testing anthology. In his off hours he can be found either playing or coaching box lacrosse — and then promptly applying lessons learned to testing. He is also an active member of the Association for Software Testing.
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Gil Broza |
A Product Backlog Is Not Enough
Hopefully, your project has been approved and funded, your team is skilled and confident, and your product owner (customer) is knowledgeable and empowered. All are adept at XP/Scrum and are now starting to write great stories.
Are these ingredients enough for the project's success?
Actually, what will make the project successful -- and how will everybody know that? What will guide the product owner's priorities now, next week, and later, when push comes to shove? And come to think of it, are you funding the right project?
The missing link between project execution and business objectives is a project charter. Neither Scrum nor XP require one, unfortunately, so it goes unnoticed in many implementations.
Come to this session to learn Agile Project Chartering: Test-drive your project at the management level. You will practise the most important techniques that will simplify and streamline your projects -- and in some cases, save your projects.
About Gil Broza
Gil Broza helps organizations, teams and individuals implement high-performance Agile principles and practices. His coaching and training clients - over 1,000 professionals in 20 companies - have delighted their customers, shipped working software on time, boosted their productivity and decimated their software defects. Beyond teaching skills and methods, Gil helps people overcome limiting habits, fears of change, blind spots and outdated beliefs, and reach higher levels of performance, confidence and accomplishment. Gil has an M.Sc. in Computational Linguistics and a B.Sc. in Computer Science and Mathematics. He lives in Toronto, Canada with his wife and twins.
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Lawrence Ludlow |
Strategic Management Using Stories
The standard definition for a Story implies that Stories are normally used as tokens for new features to be developed. The case study featured in this presentation shows how Stories were used in different ways to establish a baseline for existing functionality, organize new requirements and then support the recommendation for a preferred plan by allowing existing functions to be easily reconciled against new requirements.
About Lawrence Ludlow
Lawrence has been using Agile techniques since 2000 to help development teams deliver successful software solutions. Day to day he focuses both on helping project teams deliver better software faster and also project definition and planning. Lawrence's specialty is using Stories for scoping and developing strategic development plans for projects of all types and sizes. Lawrence is a Professional Engineer with over 20 years experience in project management and delivery in multiple technical fields. Lawrence is very active in the local Agile Community, for the last 6 years he has run the XP/Agile Toronto Community Group and has presented at a number of meetings.
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Gino Marckx |
The Pomodoro Show: Plan Your Free Time
Now you finally found a way to select the tasks that really bring value, you want to tackle them as focussed as possible. The Pomodoro technique teaches you how to do exactly that, without losing track of a healthy work/play balance! Whether you're a developer or a manager, a student or a mother of 3 children, this technique will help you to plan and track your tasks in a simple and effective way. The Pomodoro technique uses agile practices on a small scale to accomplish a significant increase in personal productivity. Attend this session and leave the conference with a ready to use, private agile process!
About Gino Marckx
In 2002, Gino started working with some of Belgium's most prominent Agile promoters. Very soon after that, he joined the Belgian XP/Agile User Group and became actively involved in promoting Agile techniques and practices, because he believes in their effectiveness. As a consultant he has shifted his practice to coaching individuals and organizations as they embrace Agile. Gino strongly relies on his passion for team dynamics, his experience in leadership positions, and his technical expertise. Gino is co-organizer of XPDays Benelux, and is actively involved as a participant and speaker in a number of Agile user groups in Belgium and Canada. He likes to spend his spare time with family and friends enjoying cycling, travel, art, music, poetry and bragging about the supreme quality of Belgian beer.
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Thanou Thirakul |
Large Scale Testing In Agile Time - Experience Report
What do you do if you have over 1200 integration tests and over 8000 unit tests that takes over 11 hours to run on a single machine? What's worst, these tests are fragile which caused many build failures. Change is not simple when there are over 1 million lines of code, over 300 database entities and feature rich. Converting integration tests to fast unit tests is a long term objective (in years) and there is resistance to this idea because of the conversion cost and many developers and clients are not convinced that unit tests can replace these tests.
If you have similar issues or interested in the solution the team I worked on came up with, please join me. This is a report on my experience working on a testing initiative to reduce test time down to an hour and half, make it highly scalable and increase test run reliability.
About Thanou Thirakul
Thanou was introduced to Agile over 9 years ago, and quickly embraced it as a great way to meet clients' needs more easily. More personally, he saw how it could help him become a more productive developer and better communicator. It must have had some effect, as he has since created and facilitates a full-day Agile workshop for all new developers at Intelliware Development Inc. (where he also works as a senior developer). He is also a regular presenter at the XP Toronto Group's monthly meetings. Outside of the Agile world, his passions include helping children through the education charity he co-founded--Jai Dee Children's Fund--and helping the environment, as both a High Park steward and as lead for Intelliware's "Green Team."
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Michelle D'Souza
Brandon Byars
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Life Cycle of an Agile User Story
The flow of user stories defines the rhythm that agile teams march to, and in this session, we hope to demonstrate how stories can be tracked, estimated and completed. The session will begin with a presentation on what a typical agile story looks like and how a development team takes the story through the following steps:
- Converting requirements to stories
How to take features that a customer wants and write them from a user's perspective
- Estimation
Taking a set of user stories and estimating using relative sizing. We will touch upon useful estimation techniques and have break-out groups play a round of planning poker
- Planning
How an agile team uses estimated stories to commit to how much value they hope to deliver in an iteration
- Defining acceptance criteria
Using simple techniques to help determine whether a given story is "Done"
About Michelle D'Souza
Michelle joined ThoughtWorks as a software developer in 2008 and has been helping clients deliver enterprise-level software in the Calgary area ever since. As a matter of sheer coincidence, she also moved from Texas to Calgary recently.
About Brandon Byars
Brandon has been a software developer and consultant at ThoughtWorks since 2000 and has recently made the move from Texas to Calgary. He spends most of his time developing enterprise web applications.
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Yves Hanoulle |
How to make your retrospectives the heart of your agile process
The best meeting I had last year was 2 people in my team that written one post-it about everyone in our team with what they liked about them. It’s an example of team members taking over a retrospective to put attention to what is needed.
When you implement only one aspect of agile: let it be a retrospective. If you would use retrospectives every 2 weeks with your team, I’m convinced you will try everything in XP, Scrum, Lean, TheCoreProtocols, etc.
In this session I talk about the basics of a retrospective.
- What is a retrospective?
- Set the stage
- Gathering data
- Generating insights
- Decide what to do
- Closing and debriefing
About Yves Hanoulle
Yves Hanoulle started working in IT in 1994. He worked as software support, developer, team lead, trainer, agile coach. Yves believes that IT is mainly about working with people. A skill that can never be learned enough. Yves is a Certified Core Coach by McCarthy Technologies. Yves spends 20% of his revenue on training and books.
When Yves does not work as an agile project coach optimizing teams in EMEA, he uses agile ideas to raise his 3 kids. You can find him on social media as YvesHanoulle.
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Stelios Pantazopoulos |
Project Vital Signs
To foster credibility and trust between a team and its stakeholders a project has the responsibility to be able to clearly express the state of its delivery. Teams need to choose key quantitative metrics that they can use to monitor, track, and communicate where the project is now and where it is headed. As a project's leaders, we can apply the metaphor of medical care - the patient's vital signs are the indicators that doctors and caregivers use to evaluate the health of the patient and make informed decisions on ongoing care. Attendees to this session will learn about the different vital signs that can be used on projects to bring near-real time visibility into their project's health, so their teams have the information they need to make informed opinions on corrective action.
About Stelios Pantazopoulos
Stelios is a Lead Consultant with ThoughtWorks. He has 12 years of IT professional services experience on 17 different projects. His project roles have included Project Manager, Iteration Manager, Quality Management Lead and Developer. As a project manager he has a reputation for bringing order to chaotic situations. He has delivered an experience report on automated functional testing to the Agile 2008 conference and has been published in a book titled 'ThoughtWorks Anthology' on the subject of this talk.
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J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger
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An introduction to Agile Through the Theory of Constraints
Agile has all these weird, expensive-looking practices: pair programming, test-driven development, regular planning meetings, moving the programmers and business people closer together, focusing people on a single project, multi-disciplinary teams. We can’t afford to go agile!
In this session, J. B. Rainsberger introduces agile practices by relating them to core business matters: compounding early earned value and reducing unnecessary costs. Learn why practice and learning are really profit centers. Maybe you can’t afford not to go agile!
You can find an excerpt from this presentation at XP Day Manhattan 2007 at YouTube.
Understand how agile practices relate directly to core business concerns.
Feel more comfortable with agile practices as an investment, rather than a sunk cost.
Understand how to present agile practices in a compelling way to business people.
See a more concrete, relevant justification for agile practices than “you’ll like it, and people will feel better”.
About J. B. Rainsberger
J. B. (Joe) Rainsberger helps software organizations better satisfy their customers and the businesses they support. Expert at delivering successful software, he writes, teaches and speaks about why delivering better software is important, but not enough. He helps clients improve their bottom line by coaching teams as well as leading change programs. He helps software organizations off the treadmill of over-commitment and under-delivery, addressing all aspects of software delivery including understanding the business, gelling the team and even writing great code. Learn more about how Joe will inspire your software organization at jbrains.ca, at conferences world-wide, or by writing him directly at get.started@jbrains.ca. J.B. is also board member of the Agile Alliance.
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Joseph Little |
An Introduction to Business Value Engineering
Definition: BV Engineering is about the values, principles and practices we use to identify and deliver business value.
Note: While in theory they might be included, we generally exclude the Engineering practices inside the Implementor team.
One initial notion is that BV Engineering in Scrum is not defined (prescribed), but Scrum has a key imperative: You must improve your engineering practices.
A second key notion: As with value stream mapping, it is important to do a simple map of the flow, identify the weakest parts, and improve them.
So, it might be said that BV Engineering is an approach to improving the delivery of Business Value.
BV Engineering looks at the end-to-end delivery holistically.
BV Engineering insists on some metrics, but does not become obsessed with them.
About Joseph Little
Joe Little is an Agile Coach and Trainer at Kitty Hawk Consulting, Inc and LeanAgileTraining.com. He is a Certified Scrum Trainer and an MBA. Joe has 20+ years in consulting and new product development in New York, London, Charlotte and elsewhere. Clients have ranged from Northrop Grumman to JP Morgan Chase to small software firms in Winston-Salem and Rochester. Joe has twice spoken at Agile200x, and works regularly with Jeff Sutherland and the Poppendiecks. He was once a Senior Manager at Ernst & Young and at KPMG Consulting. He has an MBA in Finance and International Business from NYU and majored in English at Yale. He considers that 90% of his job is translating from geek to bizspeak and vice versa. And the other half is easy: getting people to want to completely change their paradigm of the world. He started Agile-Carolinas and the yahoo group AgileBusiness. His two favorite topics right now are "Business Value Engineering" and "Build no more Technical Debt".
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Michele McCarthy |
Getting What You Want: Communication Protocols That Get a Team to a State of Shared Vision
Come to this interactive workshop ready to learn effective communication protocols that are used to create self-organizing teams. The Core Protocols were developed in the McCarthy Leadership BootCamp teamwork laboratory. These protocols have been tested for more than a decade on thousands of participants and hundreds of teams in the laboratory and at work. We'll cover the primary protocol for creating a state of Shared Vision on your team: The Personal Alignment Protocol. Plus others.
About Michele McCarthy
Michele is co-author of "Software for Your Head," Addison-Wesley, 2001, and "Dynamics of Software Development," Microsoft Press, 2006. She and husband, Jim McCarthy, began a teamwork laboratory in 1996 called "BootCamp" where they continue to iteratively discover the best practices for interpersonal communication and development of Shared Vision (called The Core Protocols). Michele consults and coaches for several executives and their teams worldwide, writes, podcasts, and is the primary trainer of McCarthy BootCamp and the primary consultant for in situ practice of The Core Protocols.
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Declan Whelan |
Building a learning culture on your agile team
"Tell me and I'll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I'll understand." - Chinese Proverb
In this session you will learn about agile learning! Discover effective learning patterns tuned to your situation and how to build and sustain an effective learning culture on your agile team.
During the presentation I will draw upon the Satir Change Model and Peter Senge's five disciplines. From this, I will build a learning map as a take-away that you can use to establish and nurture a learning culture on your agile team.
We will then engage in a "Ping-Pong Ball Passing" simulation game where teams will baseline their team performance in passing ping-pong balls. They will then attempt to improve their performance. We will then retrospect this exercise at multiple levels:
- What did you learn about team productivity?
- What did you learn about how you gained these new insights?
About Declan Whelan
Declan is an agile software developer and coach. He is also a professional engineer with twenty-five years of experience in a wide range of software industries including the financial, medical, educational, and manufacturing sectors. Declan has started three technology companies and has consulted with many technology organizations in Canada and the US.
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Mark Levison |
Code Smells -> Refactoring -> Unit Tests
We will start off with a discussion of what code smells are, followed by a walk through of some good/juicy examples. The audience will identify the smells that they find at each stage. Code smells will be followed by refactoring with hands on exercises - either on attendees own laptops or pairing with me. Finally we will introduce the concept of unit testing and how to do all of this safely.
Due to time limits (both prep and execution) I need to know whether the audience would prefer Java or C#? The problems and solutions are largely the same in both.
About Mark Levison
Mark has been an Agile practitioner since 2001, introducing Agile methods one practice at a time inside a small team. In the past three years, as an employee of a large ISV, he's been responsible for introducing Scrum to the organization and coaching a number of teams - including the design of a Test Driven Development strategy and introduction of a number of practices to support it. Mark is an Agile Editor at InfoQ and has written dozens of articles on Agile topics. He also publishes a blog - Notes from a Tool User. When not in front of a computer, Mark spends his time with his wife and two daughters.
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