agile

Does it seem like your team is the antithesis of agile? Being negative or fearful, resisting change, or hoarding information are common pitfalls that impede progress and can sink an agile team. How can your team adapt to each other, avoid these patterns, and find its greatness? All teams have people with talents and untapped abilities, but it can be difficult for a team to figure out what works for them, what they have, and what they lack. If your team is struggling to unify, find its stride, or revel in the fun of working together, then this session is for you. Michelle Vician will reveal methods to build collaborative behavior, reduce fear of failure, and increase generous knowledge-sharing within a team. She will present some key steps to identify everyone’s strengths and to fuel investment in—and passion for—the team's success.

The Great Continuous Delivery Debate There is a lot of debate about whether continuous delivery is a boon or a curse. Proponents will sing the praises of being able to deliver software into production very frequently with no manual intervention. Skeptics will highlight the challenges delivering quality, working with legacy code, and the need for intensive system-wide assurance activities prior to deploying into production. So which is it? Can most organizations benefit from continuous delivery and, if so, how? Or is continuous delivery a pipedream and only reachable by the select few. These issues (and more) will be debated in this session. Join a star studded group of Agile and DevOps expertise as they duke it out discussing the merits and challenges adopting continuous delivery. Take home a better understanding of the pros and cons of continuous delivery.

Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking advantage of emergence, and how to fully engage everyone in the creative process. Working within the constraints of the physical meeting space, you'll use two or more interactive activities to drive home agile concepts in a more fun and concrete way.

In agile, everything we do is an experiment. Product development is no different. We think we know what the customer wants, and the customer thinks they know what they want, but it turns out we're all wrong! To get to validated discoveries about our features, we must understand how to write a better hypothesis for our development experiments. This session focuses on challenging the mindset that we are validating options during our experiments. Natalie Warnert will show you how to eliminate options that don't work with data and feedback by looking at your product hypotheses as tests that cannot be proven. This way of testing your product design preserves options and helps to eliminate choosing the wrong thing because of your confirmation and customer biases. Natalie will present key metrics you can use to help guide your experiments and practical ways to look at your ideas as something to test, rather than validate.