Acceptance Test-driven Development (ATDD) is a popular topic these days-everyone’s excited about the idea of writing tests prior to development. Yet many teams run into difficulties as they attempt to implement this practice. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of writing acceptance tests that mostly specify keystrokes and button clicks. Join "Cheezy" Morgan as he offers an overview of ATDD while sharing his experiences and insights gained working with numerous teams implementing ATDD. "Cheezy" will take you on a journey of discovery, demonstrating practical techniques for writing ATDD tests that describe the essence of what they are specifying while hiding unnecessary details that obfuscate their meaning. Because ease of maintenance is a key to ATDD’s long-term ROI, "Cheezy" shows how to structure and layer test code to reduce brittleness and fragility so your ATDD test suite will retain its usefulness well into the future.

Adopting agile is often a difficult proposition with many variables and sometimes uneven results. Recognizing when your adoption isn't working well and taking pro-active actions to put it back on track are essential. So, how do you know if your adoption is proceeding through rough but expected waters or running the risk of failing? Thomas Stiehm describes the signs of serious adoption problems and the steps you can take to fix them. Leveraging ten years of experience helping teams adopt agile, Tom walks through the many successes and failures he’s seen and, more importantly, the mistakes companies and people made that led to those failures. Learn the remediation steps you can take to re-energize and re-center your adoption efforts. Don’t let small missteps cascade into failure. Instead, join in and take back an action plan that’s sure to increase the odds of making your agile adoption a win for you, your teams, and your company.

If you have established an agile or lean development approach and aren’t experiencing meaningful innovations or improvements in your process, this session is for you. Michael DePaoli shares an interdisciplinary understanding of why change initiatives so often fail and what to do about it. Join Michael and your peers to explore the neuroscience behind change and review the patterns of cultural, organizational, and behavioral dysfunction that impede improvement efforts. To address these challenges, Michael explores the kaizen philosophy of change and why optimizing from a current situation is often better than attempting revolutionary changes. Through the use of an innovation game, you’ll have an opportunity to share your challenges with continuous improvement and work with Michael and other participants to map out a new approach.

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.