This is a trick question, right? In agile, everyone works on the same items together, at the same time. Yet, the reality is we’re not all interchangeable cogs. Developers and testers each bring their own, unique skills to the table. The key to effective agile is not minimizing our differences, but building upon the strengths each person brings to the team. Join us for this hands-on simulation and retrospective as developers and testers explore how agile teams build quality into their process, how each member contributes to that quality, and how we can avoid traditional testing pitfalls.

This tutorial focuses on the detailed specifics that will make distributed agile meetings effective. We will demonstrate several key agile meetings, run in a distributed fashion, so teams can immediately improve their projects. To do so, I will highlight specific tools available in the market place to facilitate each of these different kinds of discussions (retrospectives, planning meetings, stand ups). I’ll demonstrate the processes to enable more effective communication between remote locations and describe the key roles required on a project to encourage the best exchange of information.

Successful software products deliver a set of features your customers’ value and will pay for. To determine the correct priority and presentation of features, it’s important to understand the different behaviors and attitudes that exist in the audience for your product. Ethnographic field research is very valuable, yet can be expensive, time consuming and require skilled researchers. In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to use collaborative play with customers to discover how they think and what they value, and use this intelligence effectively with your agile teams.

Today’s developers are quick to adopt leading-edge technologies that can accommodate project peaks and valleys, evolve and change, and support agile principles. Using the CollabNet platform, this session will demonstrate the agile best practice of continuous integration (CI) using cloud provisioning capabilities and the Hudson open source CI engine. Attendees will learn a framework that can be used in their environment, including an understanding of the components, tools, set up, and generalized use cases for development in both virtual private clouds and public clouds, like Amazon EC2.

You’re negotiating a project with a client or internal customer, but they balk when you don’t present a fixed budget and a predefined list of requirements. How do you convince them that the benefits of an Agile team outweigh a top heavy and fragile requirements document? Based on Agile experience with government and commercial clients, we will discuss ways to make your customer feel comfortable with process changes that don’t always result in the same set of documents they are used to.

Agile methods are frequently associated with iterations, incremental development, and adding one thin slice of functionality at a time. We have mantras such as YAGNI and “The Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work.” We promote refactoring. These concepts are, however, harder to apply to UI-intensive application code than faceless back end systems. In this tutorial, we will incorporate ideas from user-centered design, discussing how we approach user-facing agile application development at Reaktor through a mixture of presentations and hands-on exercise.

Starting up an Agile team is one of the first things you might be asked to do when a company wants to “go Agile.” What do you need to know before starting up a team? In the start-up, how much do teams need to know about Agile before they “go”? What do they need to know about each other…what the project is all about…who they will become as a team? These and other questions are answered as we walk through good ways to start-up Agile teams.

It is human nature to avoid loss. We make rational decisions to improve our situation and respond to circumstances. But are we always rational? Whether it be the tendency of people to hold stocks that have lost value or teams that continue a death march, this irrational fear of acknowledging a loss can cause people to keep investing in a poor undertaking. This discussion is a brief exploration of how our desire to avoid loss can cause us to irrationally make our situation worse in the hopes of somehow breaking even as well as some techniques to identify and avoid these situations.

Group Coherence (.com): Shared state allowing groups to perform tasks in rhythm and harmony with great energy to overcome obstacles. Evokes memories of fun, success, team bonding, desire to work together on future projects and improved group connection.

Group characteristics are invisible and have to be felt. We are not trained to detect them any more than we could detect radio waves without a radio.

We will Practice using group inquiry to: -Share your Agile GC experience -Identify GC ingredients and obstacles -Chart GC -Transform Agile practitioners to a coherent Agile group

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.