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Serious Games: Product Planning and Prioritization Using Innovation Games Perhaps the most vital aspect of building great software is finding the 20 percent of features that represent the 80 percent of functionality your customers really need. The planning and prioritization of these features can truly set a team-and a company-apart from their competitors. Cory Foy presents approaches from Innovation Games® designed around feature discovery and product prioritization. Try your hand at prioritization using the Prune the Product Tree game. Have the opportunity to influence the future direction of a product by aligning existing and new features along branches (functional areas) and canopies (time). During the game, you'll gain insights into the prioritization process and uncover the vital role of the observer for capturing unspoken conversations. See how new market segments appear during the game and learn how to use additional games to filter the results during post-processing.
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Cory Foy, Cory Foy, LLC
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Scaling Scrum: Practical Techniques for Large Organizations Are you looking for tips to help scale your Scrum deployment to the larger organization? Is the "Scrum of Scrums" concept not working out the way you thought it would? Have you had success with multi-team Scrum projects and want to share what you've learned with others? If you answered yes to any of these questions, join Melanie Paquette in this interactive session where she shares the experiences of organizations that have had success-and challenges-in scaling Scrum. The organizations profiled include a large, geographically dispersed team of more than 300 embedded software developers as well as a smaller, mostly co-located team of fifty mobile application developers.
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Melanie Paquette, Research In Motion
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It's the People, It's All About the People As organizations transition to agile, they often notice "people problems" not previously seen in their traditional project structures. Agile team members lose patience with each other. Some team members, rather than moving toward becoming generalists, specialize even more. Managers fail to let go of perceived control and don't collaborate. Team members fail to develop good interviewing skills, so they can't offer valuable insight-and they don't like the candidates who are hired. Join Johanna Rothman to discover approaches for addressing your team's and organization's people issues directly. You'll build powerful teams that know how to self-organize and enable managers to let go of what they can't control. Explore the critical coaching skills and feedback loops you need to lead an agile team. Learn about the barriers to sincere collaboration and practice new ways to break down those barriers.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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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. Instead of relying on open conversation as a primary way of collaborating in brainstorming, design, and problem solving sessions, you can use "silent work" collaboration techniques to level the playing field. Lyssa describes-and you'll practice-novel collaboration techniques you can take home to help your teams achieve better results-and faster too-through their silent work.
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Lyssa Adkins, Cricketwing Consulting
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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! Testers must move from an independent checking role to become the team's key quality advocates across all aspects of development. For example, rather than simply verifying requirements, testers now need to work with business stakeholders to elicit and improve the requirements.
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Robert Galen, iContact
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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. As an experienced agile architect, Robert Baumann shares his real-world experiences and the practices that have worked for him. He explains an agile architect's proper team role-a focus on key requirements and continuously feeding the delivery team's pipeline with a cohesive technology roadmap.
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Robert Baumann, CCH, a Wolters Kluwer business
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Scaling Agile Beyond the Team Agile methods are helping teams deliver software faster and with much higher quality than ever before. Given the success of agile at the team level, many managers are looking to implement these methodologies across the entire product delivery organization. Launching their adoption efforts, these managers discover many obstacles, misconceptions, and myths that can derail their efforts before they even get started. Mike Cottmeyer describes a roadmap for large-scale agile adoption with multiple teams and demonstrates how teams can work together to deliver more complex projects and portfolios. Mike expands beyond the team concept and shows how multi-team capabilities can be organized to optimize value across the enterprise value stream. At each step of the adoption process, Mike demonstrates how to choose the policies, practices, and metrics that create learning and drive sustainable organizational change.
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Mike Cottmeyer, Pillar Technology
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Servant Leadership: The End of Command and Control The switch from traditional, top-down management to agile project practices poses a dilemma for managers and the team. If agile teams self-manage their work, what does a manager actually do? And without strong guidance from a traditional manager, how do teams organize their work? Dale Emery describes how successful agile teams resolve these conundrums-by adopting a seemingly paradoxical way of collaboration called "servant leadership." A servant leader leads by serving and serves by leading. On high-performing agile teams, everyone is a servant leader in one way or another. There are no followers in the traditional sense and no command-and-control managers. Everyone leads-all the time. Everyone serves-all the time. Learn the principles and practices of servant leadership, and how servant leadership helps you to apply your existing experience and skills in new ways to contribute to the success of your projects.
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Dale Emery, DHE
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Applying Lean Software Development Principles Throughout the Organization While first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, the larger organization can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors. Alan Shalloway explores the lean principles of mapping value streams, creating visibility, managing work levels, and more. Together these lean principles and practices can help your organization dramatically reduce the amount of waste in the work teams perform. Alan introduces and explains Kanban, an agile method that has recently come on the scene, in terms of the lean principles it supports.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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Continuous Integration: It's Not About the Tool In the earliest days of agile development Continuous Integration (CI) began as a people practice. Teams focused on finding issues as soon as possible so they could rapidly adapt to change. As tools such as CruiseControl and others became available, the focus shifted to CI server feature sets, build management, and deployment pipelines. Paul Julius explains the stages through which development teams evolve as they adopt CI. All too often, teams allow CI to become the neglected integration server to which no one pays attention. Learn why the maximum benefits to be gained from CI come, not from the tool, but from a team inspired to do the right thing. Recall the Agile Manifesto principle, "Individuals and interactions over processes and tools." Evaluate your team's current maturity level and devise a plan for helping grow from beginner CI practitioners to advanced and then on to extreme.
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Paul Julius, Independent Consultant
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