Conference Day 1

Conference Day 1 – Monday, October 1st, 2012

Minimum Viable Design: Lean/Agile system & software architecture

10:00 - 11:00
Focus Track - Room 1
Matt Walters

The yelling is over, the features are prioritized, the experiments are designed. Now it's time to implement. How do you transition from idea to MVP (or beta) without (1) having to throw everything away when your user base explodes or (2) getting stuck in design and architecture hell?

I'll take you through an experience-based, platform-agnostic approach to creating lightweight architecture and design that is equally useful for large, scalable applications and simple, low-load systems - with focus on practical solutions that can be adapted and applied to the problems we all face every day.

Agile, Tragile, Fragile - smells I have smelt and how to prevent

10:00 - 11:00
Perform Track - Room 2
Shane Hastie

In my work with teams and organisations around the world, I have come across a number of anti-patterns in Agile implementations. This talk will identify the common patterns, likely root causes and ways to prevent/overcome them.

Without giving away too much of the talk, here are some of the smells. For each anti-pattern I will give an example of what I have seen, the likely underlying cause, a discussion of the context where I saw it, and suggestions on preventing or tackling them if you are unable to prevent them.

Unavailability of the sponsor or key stakeholders
Difficult to organise workshops due to agendas and time constraints
Estimates or plans imposed on the team
Inability to agree within the team on estimates
Everything is Critical!
Estimates treated as quotes
Lack of a competent facilitator
Dominant personalities in the group
Hidden agendas
Lack of empowerment
Being too polite to tackle real issues (sweeping things under the carpet)
Pressure to increase velocity resulting in unsustainable pace
The bleeding story wall
A proliferation of "ready for" columns on a story wall
Give me back my noo-noo blanket!
Reverting to silo behavior and blame games

Knock Down the Organizational Culture Barrier

10:00 - 11:00
Accelerate Track - Room 3
Jennifer Bleen

You have successfully coached a team or two, but seem to have lost momentum in spreading agile beyond your local division. The organization’s culture seems to be pitted against you. What efforts can you take to overcome this barrier? Do you know how to assess your current organizational culture? How about manage the changes to it?

According to State of Agile Survey, for two years running, the ability to change organizational culture is the #1 barrier to further agile adoption. In this presentation, we will discuss tools, techniques and practices that have been used to effectively identify and manage the changes to an organization’s culture. We will discuss the application of various organizational change management practices applied to an agile transformation.

Practical Prioritization

1:30 - 2:30
Focus Track - Room 1
Marius de Beer

Description: The prioritized product backlog is core to being agile. A well prioritized backlog allows us to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Lean and Kanban may call it something else, but there too, prioritized work is key.

At the same time, prioritizing work is an extremely difficult activity. Internal customers, non-functional requirements, investigations, proof of concepts, and technical dependencies are just some of the types of work that a backlog can contain. How do you know what the business value is of each.

This session will equip novice and experienced Product Owners with the tools to prioritize any backlog, focusing on four key concepts; currencies, opportunity cost of delay, classes of service and types of work.

Each technique will be demonstrated at the hand of real-life examples, gathered through years of Agile Coaching. The same techniques will even help you prioritize that never-ending to-do list at home.

A Hands-On Introduction to Lean

1:30 - 2:30
Perform Track - Room 2
Noel Pullen

Doing > Talking. This exercise will introduce concepts of Push vs. Pull, Kanban (bottlenecks, cycle time, work-in-process limits, idle/slack time, flow), Continuous Improvement (Kaizen), and Waste

In this session you will work on a small Lego production line, experience production problems and apply Lean practices to overcome them. This session will just scratch the surface of Lean and is best suited for Lean/Agile beginners or intermediates. Those currently practicing Scrum, Waterfall, or any other non-Kanban method of software development will benefit.

Lean concepts covered: Waste, Push and Pull Systems, Kanban, System Thinking, Work Cells, Kaizen

Note: The class is limited to 24 participants

Continuous Design and Architectural Reversibility

1:30 - 2:30
Accelerate Track - Room 3
Jeremy Miller

From a purely technical perspective, you can almost say that Extreme Programming was a rebellion against the traditional concept of “Big Design Upfront.” We spent so much time explaining why BDUF was bad that we might have missed a better conversation on just how to responsibly and reliably design and architect applications and systems in an evolutionary way.

I believe that the key to successful continuous or evolutionary design is architectural “reversibility,” the ability to reverse or change technical decisions in the code. Designing for reversibility helps a team push back the “Last Responsible Moment” to make more informed technical decisions.

I work on a very small technical team building a large system with quite a bit of technical complexity. In this talk I’ll elaborate on how we’ve purposely exploited the concept of reversibility to minimize the complexity we have to deal with at any given time. More importantly, I’ll talk about how reversibility led us to choose technologies like document databases, how we heavily exploit conventions in the user interface, and the testing process that made it all possible. And finally, just to make the talk more interesting, I’ll share the times when delaying technical decisions blew up in our faces.

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