With the popularity of Scrum, ScrumMaster has become a de facto role on many agile projects.

In this thought-provoking session, we’ll explore the ScrumMaster role and its key challenges. We’ll discuss why teams end up with dysfunctional ScrumMasters, and how that hurts agile projects. We’ll explore common ScrumMaster anti-patterns, and why they occur. We’ll challenge the ScrumMaster role, compare it to other models, and address if agile teams really need a ScrumMaster.

This promises to be a lively and interactive session that may change your views on how to structure a Scrum team.

In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments with incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? This session explores ways that leaders create cultures of trust that fosters the free flow of ideas. While we can’t make people trust each other, a culture of trust gives empowerment and provides a safe place to explore and discover new and innovative solutions and new ways of implementing and reaching results. It also encourages healthy risk taking to fail early and correct faster.

So much of moving traditional test teams towards agile methods & testing is focused towards the individual tester and testing techniques. As often is the case in agility—directors, managers, team leaders and test-centric project managers are sort of marginalized. But not in this session! Here we want to focus on agile testing from the perspective of the Test Leader. We’ll pair off into groups and examine some of the greatest challenges when it comes to leading a testing team from traditional towards agile testing and emerge real-world strategies for surviving and thriving in agile testing.

Agile project teams in any large corporation are put together by drawing resources from various organisational silos where they report to line management. What’s the role of this line management in relation to the Agile project teams? Who is ultimately responsible for delivery?

This talk is based on the two year Agile journey in a large financial services organization in Australia and will outline the challenges, pitfalls and experiences of positioning line management to add value to Agile teams. What leadership role do they play and are they the bane or boon of Agile teams.

Clear definitions of Role, Task and Authority are essential when people assemble to do work.

Unclear definitions of these items leads to all sorts of waste.

Scrum’s very clear Roles and associated Tasks and Authority are a big part of what makes actually Scrum ‘tick’.

A Boundaries ‘collection’ is an attribute of the Role, Task and Authority ‘objects’. This session deconstructs Role, Task & Authority in terms of associated Boundaries. Note that boundaries can come in many forms, including: boundaries of time, boundaries in terms of access to resources, etc.

In a large agile organization (more than three teams or 30 team members) with self-organized empowered teams, R&D leadership roles still exist to support these teams through topics including resource management and strategic vision. This talk will highlight these R&D leadership roles, describe several example R&D organization structures, and then describe the behaviors (good and bad) stimulated by these structures, the challenges, and their impact on the teams. The talk concludes by describing the key attributes of leaders who will thrive in a large agile organization.

Imagine yourself with a team that flies in from AU, the UK, and US in bi-weekly shifts to work with a telecommunications giant. Mix in inexperience, a shared resource model, bad behaviours, and a mandated intro to Agile in a silo-ed non-agile environment. Couple this with a capability driven / satellite team who’s focus is to assist other teams to drive out SOA: and you have a recipe for a Team in Flux. Working to find a system that worked for this team was a long and arduous journey full of misdirection, poor choices, and learning around structure, Agile methodologies, and people in general.

Are you thinking about trying agile approaches? Do you have an agile transition underway? Is your team or organization trying to become agile, but been less than successful thus far? A foundational implication – and the biggest potential roadblock – of the agile manifesto is culture change.

Therefore, to be successful with agile approaches and especially to scale them, you must go beyond agile technical practices and simultaneously tackle culture changes. This session shows why this is so, introduces a simple culture model, and gives you an opportunity to try out a culture tool.

In 2005, Microsoft’s DevDiv (with 2000 participants and 40 million lines of code) overhauled its engineering practices to improve agility, quality, and customer satisfaction. Four years into the journey, customer satisfaction has increased dramatically. Product quality improved 10x. Velocity improved 2x, with schedule time for major releases was cut by eighteen months and quarterly releases of “power tools” allowed incremental delivery to external customers. Practices that change include planning, org, quality gates, branching, testing, tooling, reporting, backlogs, transparency.

The Agile Alliance states that “The Gordon Pask Award recognizes two people whose recent contributions to Agile Practice make them, in the opinion of the Award Committee, people others in the field should emulate.” This panel brings together some of the previous winners so that they may share their contributions and help encourage others to participate in building the body of Agile knowledge. For the intermediate practitioner, it should reinforce the notion that as we practice Agile and learn how to adapt for the best outcome, sharing what we learn helps the whole community.