What happens when you get Agilists together to build an organization within one of the most ill-reputed bureaucracies in the world?

When the Project Management Institute chartered the PMI Agile Forum, it was a huge announcement. However, now the team had to deliver a fully functioning organization to support the Agile-minded members within PMI’s membership…and do so on schedule and under budget. How do we build a business plan? How do we execute a marketing effort? How do we plan a launch event? Come see how this all-volunteer distributed virtual team extended PMI’s reach using Agile.

Is it possible to SCRUM the development of a large software system with contributing teams spread out over three cities, five partners, six sites, and a six hour time difference? It started with vague and ambitious objectives and was built on bleeding edge technologies (grails, flex). By all rights we should have fallen flat on our faces. But a year after its dubious beginning, our project continues. Join us as we present the good, the bad and the ugly of distributed team projects.

As Agile is adopted by large enterprises, the number of transformation success stories has grown. But, transformation is an ongoing process, and maintaining organizational change is difficult. So, what happens after the success stories? What can IT leaders expect once the honeymoon is over? In this talk, Chuck Maples, SVP of R&D at Borland, will address these questions head-on, sharing his experiences in Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll discuss the challenges that can emerge after the initial phases of transformation give way a new stage in the journey.

This is a journey starting in 2005 when establishing a new software company in Bangladesh 7000 km away from Denmark. Hiring 20 people in one week in Bangladesh and start using CMMI processes to integrate development in Denmark and Bangladesh. After some challenging time aborting the CMMI project and switching back to agile and lean techniques to make it work. Experience from implementing global big bang Scrum and building a kaizen culture. From long running projects, technical dept and integration nightmares to small batches, continuous integration and faster delivery of business value.

In 2004, SEP tried adopting Agile practices. However, Agile failed to have the desired lasting impact across the entire organization. Things changed in 2007, when SEP implemented Kanban for the first time. We will explore how Kanban teams at SEP matured through the lens of the Dreyfus Model for Skill Acquisition. We will examine what this pattern has meant for institutionalization of Lean in the organization. We will discuss a counterintuitive technique for higher success and adoption rates of new methodologies. Finally, we will review common pitfalls teams encountered adopting Kanban.

What do you get when two developers try to implement agile without having experienced it? A 90 minute session on all the mistakes that were made.

What can you do to avoid the same fate? We needed an agile coach, but want to help you do without. We’ll present techniques you can use immediately.

In this session, we examine the problems created by implementing an agile process incompletely and describe solutions to those problems. We offer the perspective of developers who learned what commitment really means and that there’s more to agile than TDD and small releases.

This experience report is about a professional services company in Egypt that was able to deliver a project 25% ahead of schedule after the team had adopted agile. The interesting part about this experience report is this company is using the SAMI Roadmap to adopt agile. The SAMI roadmap is a 5-step value based roadmap to help companies adopt agile. In this experience report we want to present the SAMI and show the agile community the real tangible business benefits (early delivery) realized from using this roadmap to adopt agile.

What happens when your organization practices Agile software development for many years? Well, you get pretty good at Agile: you are able to apply Agile with reducing effort on challenging projects. But there is another interesting side-effect which is that your people internalize Agile values, so much so that Agile becomes second-nature to everyone!

In this photo tour, come see how a culture is infected with Agile thinking, you will see how we apply Agile to many activities like training- sessions, recruitment, staffing, office reforms, strategic decisions and more.

As Agile practitioners, a great deal of our time is focused on having targeted, directed impact. But sometimes we miss opportunities to repurpose our efforts into syngergistic, many-pronged effects. Not multi-tasking — multi-EFFECTing, from one piece of effort. This talk will explore this topic, both in theory and in practice. We will examine a particular client case-study, where two disparate 6-person developer teams, with minimal pairing and TDD experience, were developed into highly-productive “gelled” teams, through “Group Pair Programming” — 6 individuals, 1 workstation.

Pragmatics is an agile development shop rated at CMMI Maturity Level (CML) 4 and striving to achieve CML 5. By maturing our agile disciplines, we feel we will not only improve the performance of our agile teams, which will ultimately benefit our agile development practices regardless of our appraisal rating, but will also lead to our being appraised at CML 5. We feel that a mature, highly disciplined agile development company rated at CML 5 will be very intriguing to potential customers looking for contractors that can deliver on time quality products. That is, we feel they will flock to us.