AgileTour '10 Program

ProgramWorkshops Register

Slides will be added as they are available. The slides can be accessed by clicking on below. Download the printable program here

	Track A	Track B	Track C	Track D	Track E
08:00 am	Registration

08:30 am

09:00 am	Keynote - Martin Fowler Plenary Opening

09:30 am

10:00 am

10:30 am	Break

Room	West Ballroom	Room AB	Room KOMB 3rd Floor	Room CD	National Post Lounge

11:00 am	Introduction to Scrum/Agile Mark Levison & Lawrence Ludlow	How small is too small? Adapting Agile for Mobile micro-projects Gordon Cameron	Common Challenges with Agile implementations in Enterprise environments Colin Doyle & Harsh Sabikhi	Reforming "Billy the Kid" Programmer: How the Best was Done Declan Whelan, Bryan Beecham & Alistair McKinnell	Open for Networking

11:30 am

noon	Lunch

12:30 pm

01:00 pm	Lightning talks
	Using Kanban as a path to Agility Jeff Anderson & Alexis Hui	The Technical Debt Trap Michael Norton	Agile Estimation 2.0 Brad Swanson	"We're great at welcoming change but suck at accommodating it": The need for sound engineering practices in Agile Farooq Ali	Open for Networking
01:30 pm

02:00 pm	One Story's Journey from Conception to Completion Alistair McKinnell	Best Practices for Enterprise Build and Deployment Automation Peter Zhao & Tom Alexandrowicz		Applying Project Management to enable Agile projects (aka. "Do guns kill people?") Mike Edwards	Improv: Building teams through listening and collaboration Todd Charron

02:30 pm

03:00 pm	Break

03:30 pm	Agile Isn't What You Do (It's How You Think) Derek W. Wade	Executable User Story Acceptance Tests with Cucumber, Ruby and Watir John Goodsen	The biggest bang for the buck! Strategies to organize & prioritize your backlog Michael Sahota & Gino Marckx	Case Study: How to effectively bridge Corporate Strategy, Market Requirements and Agile Development Angelique Mohring	Improve Collaboration and Communication with Dramatic Techniques Amy Feinberg, Lee Devin & Greg Selvin

04:00 pm

04:30 pm

05:00 pm	Break
	Highlights of the Day
05:30 pm

06:00 pm	Networking and Drinks

The timetable is subject to change.

Martin Fowler	Keynote About Martin Fowler Martin Fowler is an author, speaker, consultant and general loud-mouth on software development. He concentrates on designing enterprise software - looking at what makes a good design and what practices are needed to come up with good design. He's been a pioneer of object-oriented technology, refactoring, patterns, agile methodologies, domain modeling, the Unified Modeling Language (UML), and Extreme Programming. For the last decade he's worked at ThoughtWorks, a really rather good system delivery and consulting firm.
Mark Levison Lawrence Ludlow	Introduction to Scrum/Agile Want to learn about the basics of Agile/Scum? Bored of the standard PowerPoint/lecture? Would you like to try a more exciting way to learn? This workshop will feature a series of Simulations to help you understand the basic principles of Agile Software Development. The outcome will be fun, but you’ll also learn something along the way. About Mark Levison Mark has been an Agile practitioner since 2001, introducing Agile methods one practice at a time inside a small team. From 2006 - 2009, as an employee of a large ISV, he introduced Scrum to the organization and coached a number of teams. As part of that process he designed a Test Driven Development adoption strategy and introduced of a number of practices to support it. As an independent Agile/Scrum Trainer and Coach (Agile Pain Relief Consulting) he has introduced Scrum to a number of organizations. Mark's research interests include the application of neuroscience to agile software development and training. 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. 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.
Gordon Cameron	How small is too small? Adapting Agile for Mobile micro-projects Clients are demanding smaller projects for a number of reasons, including: Capital investment for larger projects is harder to procure. Smaller prototypes or proofs-of-concept can be very useful to establish consumer interest or market need. Mobile apps - ROI is tough to establish, markets are still forming / evolving and hardware / platforms are still maturing. Micro-projects are forcing developers to modify how we think about Agile development. A client budget of a few person weeks challenges many of the core Agile concepts. If the entire project needs to be completed in a little over a pair-week, how does the client incorporate feedback? For this to have any chance of success, do't all the details have to be pinned down before the project starts? Aren't we back at waterfall for projects this size? We don't have answers to all of these questions, but we'll discuss some of the things that have worked for us, and some of the things that are on-going challenges. About Gordon Cameron Director, Solution Delivery at Intelliware Development. Gordon has worked in an Agile environment since the mid-nineties. He delivered projects for a wide range of clients in a number of industry verticals including telecommunications, retail, automotive, healthcare, publishing and education. Has worked on premise at customer locations, in project rooms with a customer on our site and with customers only available via video-conferencing. Projects have ranged in size from teams of 20 developers for months to 1 developer for a week. His roles have spanned development, project management, sales and business development.
Colin Doyle Harsh Sabikhi	Common Challenges with Agile implementations in Enterprise environments Agile frameworks such as Scrum, XP and Kanban are sets of relatively simple practices that can be surprisingly hard to implement well. As members of a software tooling vendor, both presenters have worked with a number of customers to help them implement Agile practices within enterprise contexts. In this session, with the help of the audience we will identify a list of common challenges, prioritize them for discussion, and work collaboratively to identify ways in which the challenges can be addressed. Examples of challenges can range from "how to get the business involved", or "how to deal with a project management office that wants to dictate what and how things shall be done", to "how do we avoid testing falling behind" or "how to provide a stable build environment while also implementing continuous integration". About Colin Doyle Colin Doyle and Harsh Sabikhi work for MKS Inc., one of the premier vendors of Application Lifecycle Management tools. Colin is a Customer Requirements Manager at MKS, where he works with both customers and R&D to guide the development of MKS Integrity, and is the Agile practices lead for the company. Colin has almost three decades of experience in systems engineering and software development across a wide variety of industries. He has worked on both traditional command and control projects and agile projects, ranging from DOD-STD-2167A to Scrum and Extreme Programming. About Harsh Sabikhi Harsh is a Customer Solutions Engineer at MKS, where he helps enterprise companies solve their most critical software development issues, including the implementation of agile practices. Harsh is the main technical point of contact for the customer, and is involved from initial problem identification through to deployment of the MKS solution. He is a Certified Scrum Master and a leading expert in the MKS Agile solution, which helps organizations manage their software development using the Scrum framework.
Declan Whelan Bryan Beecham Alistair McKinnell	Reforming "Billy the Kid" Programmer: How the Best was Done Billy the Kid reputedly killed 20 projects with his shoot-from-the-hip cowboy coding. And yet he was an affable, even gracious guy. But when Sheriff Garret wandered into town with his new agile program Bill needed to adapt quickly. In this session Sheriff Garret attempts to reform Billy the Kid. The reformation introduces Billy to the fundamental new skills that Billy will need: paired programming iterative progress in small steps red, green, refactor naming and renaming extract method composed method DRY - Don't repeat yourself Billy and Pat will pair up by attempting to round-up some legacy code. They will attempt to improve the code base with Billy fighting every inch of the way voicing typical challenges to agile development practices. Pat will be doing his best to coach Billy through this tough transition without getting shot. Will Pat be successful in reforming Billy or will he go down at high noon? You are on the jury so you decide! About Declan Whelan Declan Whelan, CSP, is an agile developer and coach and a professional engineer with twenty-five years of experience in a wide range of software industries. He is also the founder or Waterloo Agile/Lean User's Group and host of Agile Coach Canada 2010. About Bryan Beecham Bryan has been designing and developing software for 14 years in various roles. He enjoys writing code, playing soccer and Japanese gardening. He is actively involved in the Ottawa Agile community and spoke recently at Agile 2010 in Orlando. Working as an Agile Coach, ScrumMaster and software developer he applies Agile techniques to provide more value to his clients. Currently Bryan has taken a break from the consulting world and is working full time with a private company. About Alistair McKinnell Alistair McKinnell has been writing software since the days of punch cards. After reading Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained in 1999 he realized he had found his people. These days Alistair works as an Agile Coach, helping others to create valuable code.
Jeff Anderson Alexis Hui	Using Kanban as a path to Agility This presentation will outline how Deloitte has been using elements of the Lean/Kanban approach to: support the case for software process improvement develop sustainable path to higher maturity for software delivery professionals provided measurable framework that enables governance, without sacrificing the need for different delivery teams to be unique A number of case studies will be used to show how the lean/kanban approach has been used to provide better software delivery outcomes for our clients: limiting work in progress visualizing work empowering staff to make changes necessary for improvement modeling and measuring the system of work This session will also discuss how these techniques can be used to enhance existing "traditional" agile delivery methods to extend agility across the enterprise About Jeff Anderson Jeff has over 15 years experience in running software delivery engagement of various shapes and sizes. He has led and participated in the entire software delivery lifecycle, leveraging a range of agile and lean techniques. Recently Jeff has lead the creation of the Deloitte LEAN toolkit, an improvement framework focused on helping clients achieve better software delivery related business outcomes About Alexis Hui Alexis is a Senior Consultant for Deloitte with a focus and passion in applying innovative solutions to help organizations implement large-scale IT transformations, complex system implementations and IT process improvements. He has played a wide range of technology roles including lean IT consultant, agile coach, architect, development lead, developer, and systems analyst for Canadian and US clients in various industries spanning from financial services to the public sector. Over the past two years, he has have worked with various IT organizations in applying lean thinking to their delivery model, large-scale programs and complex projects to help them deliver better, faster and cheaper.
Michael Norton	The Technical Debt Trap Technical Debt has become a catch-all phrase for any code that needs to be re-worked. Much like Refactoring has become a catch-all phrase for any activity that involves changing code. These fundamental misunderstandings and comfortable yet mis-applied metaphors have resulted in a plethora of poor decisions. What is technical debt? What is not technical debt? Why should we care? What is the cost of misunderstanding? About Michael Norton Michael Norton (doc) is an Agile Coach and Code Activist living in Wadsworth, OH. Michael's experience covers a wide range of development topics. Michael declares expertise in no single language or methodology and is immediately suspicious of anyone who declares such expertise.
Brad Swanson	Agile Estimation 2.0 Planning poker has served us well, but it's nice to have a few more estimating tools in our toolbox. In this interactive session, you will learn and practice the Team Estimation Game and Dynamic Team Estimation. These techniques leverage visual and spatial thinking to make estimation very fast and effective. Teams start by considering only the relative size of items, rather than choosing a baseline item, its associated story point value, and the story point value of each item in sequence; numeric values are assigned only after estimating the relative sizes. In small groups, we'll estimate a backlog of items using these techniques. Finally we'll compare the methods, discuss the pros and cons of each, and talk about ways to effectively facilitate the sessions. About Brad Swanson Brad Swanson is Founder and Principal Consultant of Propero Solutions LLC. Brad started programming at age ten on the Apple IIe, and is now a Certified Scrum Coach (CSC), Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP), and Certified Scrum Master (CSM) with 16 years of experience in project and program leadership, product management, and software development in both start-ups and large companies. Brad has led the adoption and implementation of agile and Scrum methodology at many organizations, leading successful agile projects with teams in the US, Europe, and Asia. He has deep experience with agile software development, starting with eXtreme Programming (XP) in 1999, and also Scrum, Lean and Kanban methods. He is active in the Agile and Scrum communities as a Director of the Agile Denver user group, and as a speaker at Agile user groups and international conferences.
Farooq Ali	"We're great at welcoming change but suck at accommodating it": The need for sound engineering practices in Agile This case is all too familiar in the software world, especially since Agile went mainstream. For organizations adopting an iterative development approach, it isn't enough to constantly re-prioritize their backlogs and welcome changing requirements. In fact, it can be a recipe for disaster if developers and QAs can't accommodate those short cycles and changing requirements. You might not buy the "Scrum is useless without XP" argument, or maybe you don't care. Either way, you're kidding yourself if you think any Agile project can be successful without sound and pragmatic engineering practices. The presentation will make a case for and discuss those practices, some of which are: Continuous integration Build, test and deployment automation Test-driven development Refactoring, emergent design and evolutionary architecture Multi-layer testing (unit, functional, integration, acceptance) About Farooq Ali Farooq brings a broad mix of experiences building lean and Agile solutions at ThoughtWorks. As an Agile consultant, he has helped organizations in the US, UK, Canada and South Asia successfully adopt Agile and maximize business value quickly and consistently from their projects. More recently, Farooq has been involved in coaching ThoughtWorks' clients in Eastern Canada, leading their teams from project inception to release, and delivering innovative software solutions to their challenging business problems. Farooq is particularly interested in innovative requirements collaboration techniques, bridging companies' business and IT departments and implementing just-in-time solutions.
Alistair McKinnell	One Story's Journey from Conception to Completion Stories are used to coordinate all software development activities for teams using Scrum or XP. Can something so simple really do that? Yes, it can. However, I have seen teams transitioning to Agile struggle to use stories to coordinate their development effort. I have seen experienced Agile team realize that they need to deepen their understanding of Story Driven Development to succeed. It seems that using stories effectively is not so easy. In this session we'll follow one story from conception to completion. We'll see how a story coordinates the software development activities of developers, testers, business analysts, and product owners. If you're new to Agile this session will let you experience Agile end-to-end. If you're an Agile practitioner, this session will let you experience Story Driven Development: a practice that I believe is ready for wider adoption. About Alistair McKinnell Alistair McKinnell has been writing software since the days of punch cards. After reading Kent Beck’s Extreme Programming Explained in 1999 he realized he had found his people. These days Alistair works as an Agile Coach, helping others to create valuable code.
Peter Zhao Tom Alexandrowicz	Best Practices for Enterprise Build and Deployment Automation Build and deployment automation is more and more critical as a health metric in today's fast changing IT projects. However, implementing such automation for large projects with many dependencies is much harder than for small and isolated projects. We present several key techniques which will greatly increase your success in such environments: - using an enterprise level build library - allowing and encouraging build script refactoring - selecting the right deployment style for each project - extracting configuration management - automatic database deployment strategies - project integration environments for project teams within a program About Peter Zhao Peter Zhao, senior software development consultant in Thoughtworks. Worked on multiple projects focusing TDD and Build and Deployment Automation. About Tom Alexandrowicz Tom looks forward to the day when computers do what their users want them to do with little effort. He has been working towards this goal daily for over 10 years by designing and implementing software. He believes that agile methodologies combined with conscientious and masterful craftsmanship represent the best-known path towards frustration free computing. Tom has spent a good chunk of his life implementing and supporting build-test-deploy pipelines. Most recently, he has been working on a large agile program with more than 10 project teams as a consultant with ThoughtWorks.
Mike Edwards	Applying Project Management to enable Agile projects (aka. "Do guns kill people?") Project Management Institute (PMI) advocates seem to have a deep distrust towards agile practices as it is often viewed as being an uncontrollable way of working. Agile practitioners seem to believe the PMI framework is too rigid and only adds unnecessary overhead within a project and should be avoided at all costs. PMI & Agile experts are both attempting to reach the same goal of delivering high strategic value and it's time to stop discounting each other. During this interactive session we will explore these two worlds demonstrating how together the agile and PMI practices enable the strategic value we all work hard to deliver. We will explore how the PMI framework serves to increase the success of an agile project if the PMI framework is approached in an agile manner itself. I will use three project experiences as the backbone of this presentation to demonstrate how we can maximize the best of both worlds in delivering high value to our customers. About Mike Edwards Mike Edwards has nearly 25 years experience in the Information Technology field, 10 of which are on the Project Management career path. Mike holds his PMP and was amongst the first 150 to receive the PgMP designation (Program Management) from PMI. Mike continually seeks better ways to enable those around him to be very successful and gets satisfaction from their success. In the past couple years Mike has explored the fields of Agile and Lean and is excited by the these domains as they can have a strong role in the success of projects. Mike is the Senior Program Manager at Home Hardware with experience in numerous fields including aviation, retail, distribution, municipal, insurance, finance and others. Mike spends his time enabling the project teams within Home Hardware by coaching the entire team to embrace the lean & agile principles in their work.
Todd Charron	Improv: Building teams through listening and collaboration Improvisors work together to produce successful shows by building agreement amongst themselves. They do this through listening, acceptance, and trust. We will explore these ideas through play and discuss how they can be applied in the workplace. About Todd Charron Todd often lives what appears to be a double life. On the one hand, he has over 10 years experience in the software industry where he has played such roles as developer, team lead, software development manager, ScrumMaster and Agile Coach. On the other, he spends considerable time performing as an actor and improvisor in the city of Toronto, performing with such teams as Action Slacks and Charron and Norman. By combining these two worlds, he works with teams to help them become more aware of how they listen and interact with each other. Helping them build on their ideas and form true teams that can act in the moment.
Derek W. Wade	Agile Isn't What You Do (It's How You Think) I will use the Scrum framework as a specific context for attaining diverse types of results-based goals. The workshop takes the form of a "mini boot camp:" first challenging attendees' views of Agile as "a process that we do," and then giving them (brief) experience in applying "Agile thought" to their goals - whether developing software, delivering products, furthering business development, achieving personal goals or taming some other unknown endeavors. About Derek W. Wade Derek W. Wade is a collaboration expert and team coach at Kumido Adaptive Strategies. His passion for helping teams apply group-centered models - and his 14 years of experience across a broad range of industries - has enabled him to improve many group efforts, especially those leveraging distributed teams. Derek is the author of "Multidimensional Management: Avoiding Calcification or Fragmentation on Distributed Teams" (with J. Puopolo) and "Emergent Design: Leveraging Agile Retrospectives to Evolve Your Architecture" (with Scott Barnes). Derek is a Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP), Innovation Games(tm) Certified Facilitator, Core Passion Authorized Facilitator, serves on the Board of Directors for the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN), and is a founding member of the APLN-Chicago. He has spoken at numerous public forums, including Agile2008, the Chicago APLN, the Tulsa Area Agile Group (TAAG), CITCON, Ignite! Chicago, and OOPSLA. Derek is also a licensed Commercial Pilot and Flight Instructor; these have more relevance to the Agile world than he ever expected.
John Goodsen	Executable User Story Acceptance Tests with Cucumber, Ruby and Watir During this interactive workshop, participants will be introduced to the notion of writing a Domain Specific Language with Cucumber that uses Watir to remote drive a web browser for automating User Story Acceptance Tests. Participants should have a basic understanding of HTML. Previous experience with Ruby is handy, but not required. Participants will receive a quick introduction to enough Ruby to enable them to automate a test. About John Goodsen John Goodsen is a Senior Lean/XP/Kanban Coach and Developer for RADSoft. He currently lives in Manhattan and works with a number of global clients coaching Scrum/XP/Kanban. John is also a passionate software developer and when he's not coaching organizations on their process, you'll find him working alongside and teaching developers how to build great software as they master the technical practices of Agile development .
Michael Sahota Gino Marckx	The biggest bang for the buck! Strategies to organize & prioritize your backlog Selecting and delivering the most important work is a critical success factor in Agile projects. But how do you know what is important? Unless you are psychic, some help would come in handy. Get a guided tour to a variety of strategies and tools to manage your backlog. Understand the benefits of each approach using a model that puts them in context; learn how to make informed decisions on which to use in your situation. E.g. Innovation Games, Story Map, Software By Numbers, Kano Analysis. About Michael Sahota Michael has 15 years experience in software development and 10 years of proven leadership skills including leadership roles such as V.P., Director and team lead. Over the last 9 years, Michael has been helping companies adopt Agile and Lean practices. Michael became a Certified Scrum Master (CSM) in 2004 and is huge advocate of better (XP) engineering practices since discovering unit testing in 2001. He is a fan of Lean practices such as A3, Value Stream Mapping, and Kanban. 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 as an independent Agile and Lean coach, consultant and trainer at Agilitrix. 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.
Angelique Mohring	Case Study: How to effectively bridge Corporate Strategy, Market Requirements and Agile Development Whether working with local teams or regionally dispersed teams, Agile brings benefits and immediate rewards to the enterprise - to product development - that are often understated, rarely celebrated - and yet, tremendously effective and simple. Interactive discussion. Challenges and wins: Effectively bridging Corporate Strategy, Market Requirements and Agile Development. Gain a shared understanding of how to successfully and effectively evolve agile in the enterprise. Empower Executives and management to understand how heir planning translates into agile execution - the right product in the right place at the right time. About Angelique Mohring Working within the office of the CTO, I am the Senior Director, Global Operations, Products at Open Text. I manage and support how we take investment decisions for our entire portfolio throughout the lifecycle of each product. My oversight and support continues from the PLM Executive (and very much waterfall approach to) strategic planning through to how we then decide to build new products /features; in other words, how it then becomes an agile development project. Responsible for the operations of our Global Product Management organization and our Products PMO, I support how product decisions are translated from the strategic level into business and product requirements that are then driven through our internal Agile / Scrum R&D organization via the leadership and guidance of the Product Management organization.
Amy Feinberg Lee Devin Greg Selvin	Improve Collaboration and Communication with Dramatic Techniques The phrase "working together" is based on a team collaboration metaphor. However, most teams don't actually collaborate - rather, they consist of modular parts that are steeped in competition and oriented to reward the "stars." DramaTech draws from theatre which requires collaboration, encourages interdependency, eschews competition, and emphasizes the project rather than any particular member of the group. Go from simply "working together" to "innovating collaboratively." Learn advanced team collaboration through trust, individual buy-in, effective and efficient communication, and creative management approaches that are traditionally used in the theatre rehearsal process. About Amy Feinberg Amy Feinberg is an Associate Professor, Head of Directing Playwriting and Production at the University of the Arts, Producing Artistic Director of The Hypothetical Theatre Company, Inc. in New York City, professional freelance director and developer of new plays nationwide. About Lee Devin Lee Devin is the co-author of ARTFUL MAKING: WHAT MANAGERS NEED TO KNOW ABOUT HOW ARTISTS WORK, Certified Scrum Master, and Consultant for the Cutter Consortium. Professor Emeritus at Swarthmore College and dramaturg for the People's Light and Theatre Company. Lee has more than 30 years of experience in the theater. He has won prizes and grants for playscripts, librettos, and translations that have been published or performed worldwide. As an Equity actor, his roles have ranged from Malvolio in TwelfthNight to Mitch in A Streetcar Named Desire. He has been a visiting consultant or artist in residence at Columbia University, the Folger Library, Ball State University, the Banff School of the Arts, University of California San Diego, Bucknell University, and the Minnesota Opera. Dr. Devin holds a Ph.D. from Indiana University. About Greg Selvin Greg Selvin is a senior, CSM and PMP-certified Technical Product and Program Manager who combines business experience, deep technical knowledge, strong interpersonal skills, and creative intelligence. With 20 years of experience working across many areas in the financial services and software industry, his roles have included Project Management, Product Management, Management Consulting, Operations, Support, Engineering, Pre-Sales, Client and Vendor Relations.