Agile Development Practices East 2010

PRESENTATIONS

Tapping the Source: The Lean Principles Behind Agile Methods

When applying agile practices, organizations often have problems because they do not fully comprehend the underlying lean principles. Simply going through the motions of daily standups, sprints, and retrospectives may not be enough to build an adaptive, high performance organization. Join Sanjiv Augustine and Roland Cuellar to learn the lean foundation of agile practices and how to apply them when faced with organizational obstacles to agile methods.
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed, LLC
The Good, Bad, and Puzzling: What Agile Data Is Telling Us

Strategic software development successes-and failures-happen every day, sometimes delighting customers and other times having devastating consequences. At the same time, many development organizations are taking on agile methods-a major paradigm shift from traditional development processes. So, what's working and what's not? Drawing from recent industry data and statistics, Michael Mah answers vital questions about agile's effectiveness.
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
The Mind of the Agile Tester

The move from traditional tester to agile tester can be "extreme" (bad pun intended). Join experienced agile coach and tester Bob Galen to explore the key skill areas, both hard and soft, that testers need to adjust in order to thrive on an agile team. Previously learned techniques need to be re-honed or adapted while testers acquire new skills and participate in adapted processes. And another fundamental change is required-the very mind of the agile tester must change!
Robert Galen, iContact
The Product Champion

If you look at the history of software failures, the vast majority can be attributed not to technical mistakes but to mistakes in understanding what should be built, what customers will pay for, and what the system really needs to do. When there is a difference between the mental models of the customers and users of the software and those who develop it, a system will never achieve its full potential. It is the product champion-also known as product manager or product owner-who is responsible for building the right thing.
Mary Poppendieck, Poppendieck LLC
The Role of the Agile Architect

With the emphasis on leaving decisions until the "last responsible moment," the need for a coherent architecture in agile development is sometimes overlooked. Confusion surrounding the architect's role and how to identify an effective architecture often leads to bottlenecks in delivery. When the architect's attention is divided between guiding the team's future direction and supporting the deliverables for the current iteration, problems inevitably arise.
Robert Baumann, CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business
The Twain Shall Meet: Incorporating User Experience Design in Agile Development

Traditional user experience (UX) design methodologies are often seen as too slow and not flexible enough for use in agile software development. Scott Plewes explodes this myth by showing how to avoid dogmatic practices that undermine the value of UX design. Learn how to involve users, experience designers, and other UX design assets directly into your agile development process-without giving up the value of sprints, Scrums, minimalist documentation, or anything else that makes a well-oiled agile process work.
Scott Plewes, Macadamian Technologies
The Value of Value Story Cards

Many agile team members never reach their potential because they have no way to link their company's values with their day-to-day development work. The use of value story cards (VSCs), which provide executive management a tool to set high-level direction and tie it to the team's activities, is one step toward solving that problem. Jared Richardson describes VSCs, how to use them within your team, and how they can become a transformational tool.
Jared Richardson, Logos Technologies
Using Silent Work Techniques to Achieve Astonishing Results

Because diversity of ideas yields astonishing results, team members should respect each other by openly listening to ideas from everyone on the team. In fact, the word "respect" tops the list of values of both Scrum and XP. Lyssa Adkins has found that every team she has coached that is divided into two camps-the dominants and the quiets-seems to build products that are just so-so. Maybe it's because the same few "dominants" offer the same ideas while the "quiets" remain silent.
Lyssa Adkins, Cricketwing Consulting

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