The software development industry has a poor track record with metrics. Many metrics are tangential to development’s goal of delivering business value, and are thus ill-regarded by agile developers. However, good metrics are important to management, in order to understand the status and progress of their teams, and to make projections into the future.

In this class we discuss velocity, burndown graphs, EVM metrics (CPI and SPI), and earned business value, including methods for calculation, why they’re important, and how they enforce (or fight against) agile values.

Bob Scoble Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan are about to embark on a new technology start-up venture when a mystical figure with a fondness for beagles and the Galapagos Islands appears before them, promising great prospects for their new business if they first agree to accompany him on a unique adventure. They accept. Spotting a theme common across the many amazing conversations they have subsequently, Bob and Ted decide to follow the XP principle of doing extreme amounts of the practices that work: they implement the world’s first completely Darwinian complex systems risk management program.

So what is Scrum anyway? And what is Scrum not? How do I apply Scrum in practice?

Scrum seems to be the most popular agile method at the moment and Scrum jargon is used everywhere. This session is for those of you who have perhaps heard the word Scrum, but never really received a proper introduction to what it actually is. Hopefully you’ll feel less alienated afterwords :o)

Agile development has taken a number of concepts and principles from the study of complex adaptive systems. But since the birth of the Agile Manifesto, the study of complexity has not stopped. In this talk I give a number of ideas copied from complexity experts, and I will review what fitness landscapes, patches, power laws, and incompressibility could mean for agile software development.

Do you mentor, coach, teach or just help other people? Do you wonder why after your greatest teaching moments people just don’t get it? In recent years neuroscience has started to provide us with a number of insights in what happens when we’re teaching. These insights make it clear that learning is really about building and reinforcing existing neural networks. Instead of providing lots of new ideas out of the blue, we need to understand the learners existing context and work with that. Instead of focusing on mistakes and errors, we need to focus on what good solutions look like.

Traditional product managers have broad inbound and outbound responsibilities including segmentation, requirements, positioning and pricing - often shortchanging their teams. Product owners are always available and own backlogs/stories - but often lack real market experience. Both roles have challenges. PO/PM discussions are short on context and clarity. How can agile address the broader product mgmt challenge? How to agilize waterfall PMs? Do technical POs need marketing/sales/pricing skills? We’ll look at roles and organizational models that work for commercial software companies.

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.

This talk will look at the product owner role on an Agile team from a Pragmatic product management perspective. Many software development companies rely on their product management organizations to represent the needs of customers and the market. Concentration on problems, the people who have them, and the circumstances under which they experience those problems is what makes the marriage of Pragmatic product management and Agile so valuable. This presentation will describe how the Pragmatic approach to the MRD gives the Agile product owner a headstart and the entire Agile team an edge.