James Shore (coauthor of The Art of Agile Development) and Rob Myers of Agile Institute help you examine the role of metrics on Agile teams. We take a broad survey of metrics being used on Agile projects, both traditional and innovative, and look at the value and dangers to the success of the team. We look at how the simple act of measuring, itself, can be harmful, and when it is well-justified. Metrics at every level of the Agile organization will receive scrutiny: Measuring value, team performance, progress, quality, and even code design attributes will be taken into consideration.

One of the core values expressed in the agile manifesto is “working software over comprehensive documentation” because working software is what delivers value to our customers. Agile development requires a sofware development team have working software ready to deploy at the end of each iteration; but accomplishing this can be harder than it seems, especially when first starting with agile. In this highly interactive session you will understand how a team definition of “Done” is necessary to making agile delivery possible, and what you can do to make it happen while avoiding the pitfalls.

How can mock objects help you design your system better? Want to know how mocking saved hours of work? We focus on establishing best practices based on examples with mock objects. We cover design of classes, using mock objects to understand and test interaction between objects of the system. By the end of the session it should become clear how mocking,when applied correctly helps with system design, improves testability by reducing cost of change. An explicit part of this session is dedicated to the Mocking top offenders. We talk with examples about bad usage of Mocks, and its consequences.

Scheduling should be done independent of and orthogonal to workflow. In fact, you don’t have to create a schedule for a flow system. It will flow all by itself, and work will flow much faster and much more reliably than it could possibly follow a schedule. But take a closer look at that workflow: Just when you thought it was obsolete, the V model reappears. This talk will step through systems design, approval processes, and scheduling, development workflow, depolyment, from a completely different angle.

One of the most common questions asked of practicing Agile teams is:

How can we increase velocity?

Many teams have had to answer this question, but is it the right question? Velocity is an excellent measurement for determining project timelines and progress towards them but doesn’t give us any indication about the overall value of the features being delivered. All too often poor prioritization and solutioning are ignored because velocity is the KPI for the team. This session shows how to use value as a tool to ensure that you get more of the right things done.