agile

If you are managing your portfolio using projects, and not products, you may be missing opportunities to deliver more business value to your organization. Product and portfolio roadmaps are a strategic tool that you can use to align business goals and value to product delivery plans. Ellen Gottesdiener explores the why's, what's, and how's of product roadmaps including the different types of product roadmaps, steps for building and sustaining product roadmaps, key planning inputs, who should be involved, and techniques for exploring and evaluating features along the roadmap. Roadmaps articulate how your products will achieve their vision, help uncover technology requirements, communicate to internal and external customers, and provide a sound foundation for planning. Learn how roadmaps can help you deliver the right products, address customer needs, and make tough choices that will deliver strategic value.

You're familiar with agile and, perhaps, practicing Scrum. Now you're curious about Kanban. Is it right for your project? How does Kanban differ from Scrum and other agile methodologies? From theory to practice, Gil Irizarry introduces Kanban principles and explains how Kanban's emphasis on modifying existing processes rather than upending them results in a smooth adoption. Instead of using time-boxed units of work, Kanban focuses on continuous workflow, allowing teams to incrementally improve and streamline product delivery. Explore how to move from Scrum to Kanban with new, practical techniques that can help your team quickly get better. Discover the use of cumulative flow diagrams, WIP (work-in-progress) limits, and classes of services. In a hands-on classroom exercise, you'll help create a value stream map, determine process efficiency, and experience techniques from the Kanban toolset.

Although many of us want to use only agile practices, we often work alongside teams with strong waterfall traditions. If you’ve had trouble finding ways for your agile ideas to co-exist peacefully with traditional lifecycles, this session is for you. Jared Richardson describes key integration points between waterfall and agile teams, and demonstrates the best ways to work together-or to perform clean hand-offs, if necessary. He shows how to use adaptive planning while still providing accurate progress status to traditional PMO counterparts. Jared reviews popular agile practices and discusses how they best function in a hybrid environment. Together, you and Jared will build a common vocabulary, examine two project models-one traditional and one agile, and then combine them in a hybrid that keeps the best of both worlds.

Automating regression testing on large-scale agile projects with multiple independent Scrum teams is not a cake walk. Because there is no single "test team" that performs all the testing-each Scrum team develops and runs independent tests, gaps arise as different automation implementations spring up. One team adds a new function which breaks automated tests, setting back the progress of other teams. Scott Schnier reviews one organization's journey developing a "test community of practice" to coordinate test development and maintenance across Scrum teams. Scott shares the lessons they learned, particularly selecting tools compatible with other developer and tester needs. Learn how Scott extended the JUnit framework to support automated functional testing and how his teams keep the standard that a user story is not really done until all its tests are "green" in the continuous integration, regression test pipeline.