agile

In this economic downturn, is your company looking beyond knee-jerk cost cutting to focus on creative ways to solve business problems? When businesses tap the innovative capabilities that agile development teams possess and scale up through adaptive governance, they can produce game-changing solutions. Sanjiv Augustine shares how leading businesses are using agile to jumpstart and scale their new product development by incorporating user-centered product design and a user story “maturity progression” to support the creative evolution of system development. To optimize their project investments, these businesses are adopting incremental funding and portfolio-level feature prioritization, reducing team churn by creating stable teams with embedded specialists, and tracking and monitoring project portfolio progress across multiple teams in a visual, agile fashion.

In Scrum, the product owner manages the product backlog-seems simple enough. But what principles are required to make seemingly straightforward agile practices really work? Mitch Lacey suggests courage, trust, commitment, and simplicity are those principles. Courage: Do I have the courage to say no to this stakeholder for the overall benefit of the product? Trust: Can I trust the team to sustain their velocity? Commitment: Are all team members working everyday to improve? Simplicity: Are we doing only the things that bring value to the product? These are real-life questions that agile team members face daily. It's not enough to just say you're agile because you work in iterations. Truly being agile weaves these principles into the fabric of our projects. Join Mitch to learn how he has applied these principles in his projects and the failures that have occurred when the principles were misaligned or absent all together.

Agile software processes vary in detail, depth, impact and endurance as much as painting styles like graffiti differ from Baroque or Impressionist art. What can artists teach us about successful agile transitions? And what can past agile transitions teach us about styles that endured or faded away? Joshua Kerievsky will map agile transitions to art styles and identify elements that lead to success or failure. We will look at palettes of principles and practices, how and when agile styles may be effectively blended, when or how to do a sketch before jumping to the canvas, how initial transitions can morph into wholly different styles and whether to spread a consistent or varying style across a department or organization. Joshua will focus on four fundamental agile transitions styles as he walks you through case studies from the past decade.

A recent Business Week article proclaimed, "There is no more Normal." With businesses in the throes of pervasive change, the traditional emphasis on "following the plan with minimal changes" must be supplanted by "adapting the plan to inevitable changes." If agile development practices are about focusing on and delivering customer value, then how can adherence to traditional scope, schedule, and cost be a good way to measure performance? It can't. Jim Highsmith explains the need to move beyond the classic Iron Triangle measures to instead focus agile software development success on value, quality, and constraints. Even today, many agile teams are asked to be flexible and adaptive and then are told to conform to planned scope, schedule, and cost goals. They are asked to adapt-inside a very small box. If we are to truly bring agile values to our organizations, then we must change our performance measures.