• Much Ado About Agile VII - 2012
• Registration & Ticket Purchase
• Agenda
• Conference Day 1
• Conference Day 2
• Speaker Biographies
• Sponsors

Tutorials – Wednesday, October 3rd, 2012

Turning Distance into Advantage

9:00am - 4:00pm
Focus Track - Room 1
Shane Hastie

Over the last three years I have worked with teams in 9 different countries, with every possible combination of distributed structure. This talk examines what works and what doesn't work for distributed teams, and presents some practical guidelines on ways to set distributed teams up for success.

Geographically distributed projects are a reality in many organizations today; teams spread across multiple locations -diverse cities, states, countries, cultures and time zones.

Getting the most out of a geographically distributed team is a challenge, one that is brought into sharp focus when Agile methods are used. Agile techniques place an emphasis on close collaboration and working together to deliver business value, but how do you achieve the levels of collaboration necessary when the team is spread across various locations, with testers in Brisbane, developers in Sydney, customers in Auckland and management in Melbourne?

This hands-on course provides you with an intensive and immersive learning experience which will give you an understanding of the challenges facing distributed Agile teams. It will show you how to address these challenges in order to create the most productive and effective team environment possible, enabling your distributed teams to deliver business value faster, better and cheaper!

This course is interactive and hands-on. We run a simulated project in distributed teams, identifying and exploring the challenges and addressing them - you will learn by doing and will come away confident of your ability to put the learning into practice in your project environment.

Intended Audience
Managers, project managers, ScrumMasters, iteration managers, product owners, business stakeholders, designers, architects, business & systems analysts, testers, developers, technical writers and anyone working with or on a distributed Agile team.

Lean (Startup) Product Management

9:00am - 4:00pm
Perform Track - Room 2
Marius de Beer and Dave Sharrock

Lean Startup Applied to Agile Product Management provides a comprehensive toolbox for delivering products, whether greenfield development or the maintenance and extension of an existing product.  Each learning objective addresses specific challenges throughout the whole product life-cycle with practical techniques for balancing contradictory requirements in complex environments.

Summary
How do you manage product development with Agile teams, whether its a greenfield product or maintaining and extending an existing product?  This course combines Agile and Lean Startup practices to support the whole product life cycle.

Intended Audience
Product managers, business analysts, and product owners responsible for the successful delivery of software products and services.

Outline

• Minimal Viable Products / Minimal Marketable Features
• Just-enough, just-in-time product management
• Customer and user involvement
• Product vision
• Power of a vision
• Creating the vision
• SMART requirements
• Product management
• Persona’s - defining the user in user story
• Activation pathways
• Capturing high level requirements through Story Mapping
• Priority of features
• Owning prioritization
• KANO feature ranking
• Cost of delay
• Release planning
• Deciding on the right release cadence
• Planning releases with emerging requirements
• Fixed date vs. fixed scope release planning
• Managing releases under uncertainty
• Applying lean start-up principles to agile product management
• Shortening the feedback loop
• Designing effective experiments
• Uncovering user preferences without building features

What we believe
Agile training is a key to success for every transition to Agile.

Our training team consists of seasoned Agile practitioners with a deep understanding of every element in product and service delivery across a wide range of industries. We have successfully trained thousands of individuals in organizations with a single co-located team to those with large-scale distributed Agile.  

Our courses are designed around key concepts and current thinking on a topic, offering not just new skills and techniques but a glimpse of the future. We aim to change the way you think and act.

We understand the need for application over concepts, mindset over tools & techniques. Our goal is to provide insight into the principles behind Agile, to incorporate the principles of Lean Startup, and to provide the context and practices to successfully work in an Agile/Lean way.

Our training programs are not designed in isolation but as part of a broader journey. We support key roles with a range of training, coaching and certification that allows you to choose the best curriculum for you and your organization.

We believe our training will be a foundational step in your journey to becoming a successful Agile enterprise.

Test Driven Android

9:00am - 4:00pm
Accelerate Track - Room 3
Jeff Morgan  and Christin Wiedemann

There are few topics hotter these days than Mobile Software Development. It seems like every company is rushing to release their own Mobile App, but when it comes to building the actual software it turns out that traditional tools cannot easily be applied to this domain.  Many developers have found out the hard way that it is very difficult to test drive the application, and some even state that it is impossible.  Additionally, traditional testing tools are unable to automate the application in the emulator or on the device, with the consequence that testers are often left with a manual test script approach. 

Join Cheezy and Christin as they take both developers and testers through an all-day Agile exploration of what it takes to deliver high quality Mobile Apps.

Developers will learn the art of test driving an Android application.  Testers will learn how to perform Exploratory Testing on the Mobile Application while the developer is crafting the code.  Both will learn how to collaborate and specify the behavior of the system in acceptance tests and automate the tests using Cucumber.

Following specialized introductions for developers and testers, this workshop will be conducted as a series of one hour, focused sprints where the participants will work through a prioritized backlog and your instructors will play the role of product owner.  Testers will begin by automating the acceptance tests, building an outer loop of functional tests.  While the automation proceeds, the developers will begin test driving the functionality making an inner loop of tests that drive their design.  As the acceptance tests begin to pass, the testers will begin executing their ET charters attempting to reveal unforeseen defects while the code is still being crafted.  Acting as a tightly collaborative development team, the developers and testers will learn how to work together to ensure that the right story is built in the right way.

Besides, it's live coding folks - what could possibly go wrong?

-- Title Sponsors --
-- Supporting Sponsors --