An Exercise in Agile Facilitation - http://agilejournal.com/articles/columns/articles/1233-the-invisible-pro...

This session focuses on an approach taken by Agile Project Managers to develop empowered and effective teams using a series of techniques focused on trust, transparency, team dynamics, and agile facilitation. More so, ensuring that the Project Manager does not end up as the central figure dominating the project is equally critical, highlighting that it takes an unselfish personality to create a truly self-organizing team.

Different testing approaches are needed because quality has many aspects besides functional requirements, such as making sure the code is reliable and secure. How do you know you’ve done the kinds of testing and quality processes are necessary for your product, especially on an agile project?

The Agile Testing Quadrants help you categorize tests and plan for different testing activities needed over the life of a project. It can be used by the team as a base for this common vocabulary about testing, and as a mechanism to start discussions and encourage collaboration.

There is no better way to gauge an organization’s culture than to watch its meetings - usually dull and lifeless. Meetings are often cited as one of the most wasteful activities in business - yet Scrum demands more meetings more often. Engineers find themselves micro-managed with little time left to get “real” work done. This session provides leaders a whole new perspective and techniques for Scrum Meetings in building high-performing disciplined teams through focused, active, engaged, visual and time-boxed facilitation techniques to take teams from DOING Scrum to OWNING Scrum!

Of the many benefits of agility, none is more transforming than the power of self-organizing teams. Yet, building such teams remains one of the most elusive goals. This is due to the challenging transition functional managers must make to develop the right organizational environment for teams to mature. This session is for managers who are challenged in building strong self-organizing teams. This session will develop your agile organizational leadership awareness and competencies to build committed, disciplined and self-organizing teams who share responsibility.

Lack of good release planning is endemic. Teams seem caught up in iteration-at-a-time development and not planning for releases. Even those who create initial release plans often fail to keep them current. This approach enables teams to resist request for “spurious” information such as “how much is this project going to cost,” or “how long is this project going to take?”

This session will address why release planning is so important and then cover a series of release planning topics such as value-driven planning and multi-level planning

Traditional development emphasizes “following a plan with minimal changes,” whereas agile stresses “adapting successfully to inevitable changes.” If agility is delivering customer value by being flexible, then how can measuring agile performance by adherence to schedule, cost, and scope be valid? We need to modify project success measures in order to build effective agile organizations. The session will build a case for changing performance measurement from the traditional Iron Triangle of cost, schedule, and scope to an Agile Triangle that focuses on value, quality, and constraints.

Agile Project Management (APM) addresses the challenges of embracing change, encouraging innovation, and delivering continuous customer value through a set of agile principles and practices.

The session will present the conceptual framework of agile methods, how agile processes are Envision-Evolve rather than Plan-Do, stories from agile projects both small and large (600 people) and from different domains such as software and medical instruments, and how the “flow” of an agile project differs from more traditionally managed projects.

Those who attend conferences or read books and articles discover new ideas they want to bring into their organizations—but they often struggle when trying to implement those changes. This session offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. Come and discuss your organizational and personal change challenges.

In this talk Ola Ellnestam explains the differences between push and pull in a software development context.

The difference between push and pull is described and discussed. Followed by examples from other industries. Mentioning Toyota and Dell. After this rather brief introduction follows a simple and easy to understand exercise.

After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have been applied to different knowledge areas, such as software development. However, many people haven’t been introduced to the concepts that made Lean successful. In this interactive session, the participants will work in a small Lego production line, experiencing the problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them. 8 to 20 participants, divided in 4 teams, will learn about: systems thinking, push vs. pull systems, waste, etc. We will also compare the production line scenario with the software development industry.