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Agile Metrics: Velocity Is Not the Goal Velocity is one of the most common metrics used-and one of the most commonly misused-on agile projects. Velocity is simply a measurement of speed in a given direction-the rate at which a team is delivering toward a product release. As with a vehicle en route to a particular destination, increasing the speed may appear to ensure a timely arrival. However, that assumption is dangerous because it ignores the risks with higher speeds. And while it’s easy to increase a vehicle’s speed, where exactly is the accelerator on a software team? Michael “Doc" Norton walks us through the Hawthorne Effect and Goodhart’s Law to explain why setting goals for velocity can actually hurt a project's chances. Take a look at what can negatively impact velocity, ways to stabilize fluctuating velocity, and methods to improve velocity without the risks.
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Michael Norton, LeanDog
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Designing Agility Practices that Last Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and compete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, lean, Kanban, or the ways of the emerging Lean Start Up crowd. Rather than stumbling down one path or another, join David Hussman as he shares tools for assessing and designing an agile process with practices that address your specific needs and constraints. David starts by teaching a simple assessment process to help you understand where you are today. Then, he offers ideas for selecting a meaningful set of practices and moves on to teach you how to create a meaningful and measurable coaching plan. David covers the selection of product planning tools, iterative delivery tools, tracking tools, and more. If you want to clear the fog about which agile practice will really help you, come for some answers. Even if you don’t yet know what questions to ask, David can help.
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Transitioning Your Team to Kanban: Theory and Practice You’re familiar with agile and perhaps practicing Scrum. Now, you want to learn about Kanban to see if it is something to add to your development toolkit. Can Kanban help you? How does it differ from Scrum and other agile methodologies? Kanban is quickly being adopted by teams that want to improve their productivity. Kanban focuses on continuous flow and incorporating the theory of constraints which together allow teams to improve and streamline their product delivery. Learn about Kanban-not only the theory, but also practical lessons on transitioning your team to Kanban. Get insight into moving from Scrum to Kanban and pick up techniques that can aid any team. See cumulative flow diagrams, WIP (work-in-progress) limits, classes of services in action, and hear about other ideas from the Kanban toolset. Come and grow your agile repertoire!
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Gil Irizarry, Constant Contact Software
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Adding Good User Experience Practices into Agile Development Whose job is it to ensure that the user has a good experience with a new application? As agile processes are taught today, the user experience (UX) design practice is usually left out or at best described as an optional team role. However, the companies that build useful, usable, and desirable software know that UX is baked into the whole development process. Jeff Patton describes what user experience design is and isn’t, and how every person on the team has something to contribute. Hear concrete examples of how companies have adapted their UX practice to work well in an agile context and, along the way, discovered innovative UX practices that work better in agile contexts. Jeff explores pragmatic personas, guerrilla user research, design sketching, lightweight prototyping, and concept testing. Leave with valuable tips for adding UX practices and thinking to your agile process to help you get good user experience.
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Jeff Patton, Jeff Patton & Associates
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Agile Measures that Matter: What Are You Really Learning? “Speed” describes how fast an object is moving and let’s us compute the distance it has traveled. “Velocity” is different-it defines both speed and direction. So why do I meet so many teams who talk about their velocity but lack direction? Once you can track speed and distance, the real challenge becomes envisioning, validating, and measuring direction and purpose. David Hussman explores what teams typically measure and track in agile projects today, and compares these to what is most important to the business and to the project’s success. Come ready to question what you are measuring and how it is helping you improve. Join David to learn how to use data in more meaningful ways, discover new ways to measure velocity, and identify new tools to help ensure you are doing more of what is really needed. Come away with the answer to the key question: How do your teams know that they are building the right things for the business?
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Integrating Systems Thinking into Enterprise Agile While Scrum and XP have become very popular in agile development shops, most companies adopting them run into problems beyond just a few teams. These challenges often fall into a common set of patterns, which points to a lack of systems thinking-the process of understanding how things influence one another within a larger whole. Alan Shalloway shares his ideas on how the agile community can move beyond its team-centric approach to adopt a more holistic, systems-based approach. Systems thinking creates new opportunities to create substantially larger development teams-Alan calls them “pan-teams.” These teams work interdependently with a common vision and context. Pan-teams enhance the motivations for the teams and individuals to collaborate as a normal part of their daily work thus reducing the amount of forced collaboration.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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Creating a Professional Credo: Aligning Career, Goals, and Personal Happiness In a world where technology is rapidly changing, development practices are quickly evolving, and teams are frequently reorganized, how can you remain steady and true to yourself? Even though things are changing around you, you can build a solid framework of personal beliefs to guide you throughout your professional career. To develop a credo-from the Latin “I believe”-is to take a personal journey through your professional life and the ideas that shaped it, ultimately creating your own statement of core beliefs. This credo forms a stable foundation for personal plans and actions. Marlena Compton shares the framework she’s used to build her professional credo. She examines manifestos and mission statements that have influenced her beliefs about building software and how she uses her credo as a basis to form concrete goals and take action.
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Marlena Compton, Mozilla
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Optimal Project Performance: Factors that Influence Project Duration Speedy delivery is almost always a primary project goal or a significant project constraint. To shorten project duration without sacrificing quality or budget, you need to know where to focus the team’s efforts. Mining the QSM database containing many quantitative metrics and numerous qualitative attributes, Paul Below shares the factors that have the greatest influence on project duration. While he’s at it, Paul debunks a couple of myths. For example, many managers consider team skill to be important in determining duration of software projects-not so. The most important factors are certain types of tooling, architecture, testing efficiency, and management/leadership skills, which Paul explores in depth. Learn a technique for normalizing your projects for size by computing the standardized residual of duration.
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Paul Below, QSM, Inc.
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Why Self-reflection Matters! All of us have experienced situations when we receive feedback. Some we readily accept; some we quickly reject. In a community that should be dedicated to constantly inspecting and adapting, why do we reject some feedback immediately? Tricia Broderick believes that self-reflection is the key to processing feedback in a positive light. In this interactive session, you’ll work with Tricia and other delegates to experience enriching discomfort, practice deep reflection, and ascertain why we can be so quick to dismiss feedback. Gain an understanding of how discomfort and self-reflection can be an IT professional's best friends. Leave with an expanded understanding of self-reflection that includes taking greater responsibility for personal development and tweaking your improvement-seeking process. If you are looking to get out of your comfort zone and grow as an individual and team member, this session is for you.
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Tricia Broderick, TechSmith Corporation
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Lean Product Management: When Phase/Gate Is the Wrong Choice More than 70 percent of new software products fail or perform below expectations. Achieving product-market fit is essential-and doing it quickly and within budget increases your chances of success. However, the methods you should use depend on the problems you are trying to solve. The predominant phase-gate model used today is not always the right choice or fastest path to market. As an alternative, lean product management approaches focus attention on applying the right process at the project level. Greg Cohen describes the four product-market fit challenge types, how to identify the challenge type your project faces, and how to adjust your process accordingly.
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Greg Cohen, 280 Group
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