Wednesday, November 3rd, 2010 – Conference Sessions

Registersoon before the conference is sold out.

Continuous Delivery

9:00am – 10:30am Chris Turner, ThoughtWorksBusinesses need to deliver new features to users as frequently as possible in order to make money. In order to do this, releases must be stable and well-tested. In this presentation we discuss how to deliver features rapidly and reliably through an automated build, deploy, test and release pattern called the deployment pipeline. We take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible.

How to Develop Your Innate Leadership Gift Daily: An Agile Approach to Growth

9:00am – 10:30am Christopher AveryYour mind offers two alternate—and generally unconscious—responses when things go wrong. One response solves problems with snap judgment, hasty advice, and evident policy. The alternate response expands the problem space for new awareness and new-found truth. You are completely equipped for both. The first is fast and solves anxiety about the problem. The second is slower, produces learning and growth, and addresses the real problem. In this session you’ll explore a life-long practice developed from 20 years of field studies for choosing the appropriate leadership response. LEARNING OUTCOMES I call this the Leadership Gift. It rests on Albert Einstein’s famous quote “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.” Leaders attending this session will learn:

• A framework based in natural human processes for intentionally and continually developing your leadership power, choices, and degrees of freedom
• The 2 natural (generally unconscious) choices and paths we follow in our minds to address upsetting problems
• Which path keeps us stuck in our Control Prison
• Which path leads to the Leadership Gift
• How to recognize when you are trapped in the plush cell of your Control Prison
• How to consciously choose to breakthrough upsetting problems to expanded levels of awareness and leadership power
• Why and how this process incrementally builds tremendous courage, integrity, and the ability to face — and tell — the truth (noted areas where leadership development has been historically ineffective)
• How to tap into resources that will help you master the Leadership Gift

Attendees will leave with personal awareness and application of how and when they find themselves in the Control Prison, how and when they have used the Leadership Gift, and inspiration for catching and switching their mental pattern from the Control Prison to the Leadership Gift.

Sufficient Design

11:00am – 12:30pm Josh KerievskyIf your software product were a film, which of its features would be a movie star, a supporting actor or an extra? Should we invest more in the software design of star features, especially if they generate the most revenue? And if so, what level of design quality is sufficient for our features that are supporting actors or extras? Doesn't Software Craftsmanship tell us that we need to write clean and simple code, regardless of its role? Or, if we are Lean and focus on increasing the speed of concept to cash, will quality suffer? Sufficient Design answers these questions and points the way towards how to blend Lean processes with Software Craftsmanship.

Picking Your Poison: Integrating the OO and Functional Styles in Design

11:00am – 12:30pm Michael FeathersObject-orientation is today's dominant pervasive design style. Yet, there seems to be a sea change toward the functional paradigm. Fully functional languages like Clojure are getting notice. Hybrid languages like Scala and F# are gaining mindshare, and even old standbys like C# are adopting more and more functional features. In this session, we'll explore what this means for design. We'll discuss how we can design in a hybrid world. What the hallmarks of functional design are, and how we can pick and choose among the OO and functional styles to build resilient applications.

Experience Reports

11:00am – 12:30pm

Deploying is just the beginning...

Owen Rogers For the past 2 years, we have been deploying new releases of our product to production every week. The latest and greatest version of the software is continuously available for users to use and benefit from. But who's using it? How do they know about it? Are they deriving the expected value? This presentation is about what happens after the release. It is about tightening the feedback loop between a feature and its value potential and building a better product as a result. Slides

Managing Urgent Requests: When does “embrace change” become churn?

Heather RegehrA key benefit for organizations that adopt Agile is to be able to change course; to have the flexibility to adjust priorities rapidly and to deliver business value quickly. As a leader in an Agile organization how do you make sure your organization gains these benefits while still maintaining velocity, quality and the continuity required for larger initiatives? In this action packed session we will explore Agile approaches and tools for dealing with unplanned urgent requests. Benefits to the audience:

• Understand the connections between iteration size, strategic planning, User Stories, and the lead time for satisfying a request.
• Learn about: the complexity catalogue, iteration horse-trading and a graphical release calendar as tools to accommodate the changing needs of your customers.
• Come away with some techniques that will help you tailor a planning approach to suit your organization.

Slides

Uncomfortable Truths About User Stories

1:30pm – 3:00pm Jeff Patton User stories are a deceptively simple concept. Identifying a small bit of “software to build” as a user story seems easy enough, but agile teams everywhere struggle to really get the value out of them. User stories are simultaneously simple and sophisticated. They’re full of paradox and contradiction. This class is about that. In this short class you’ll see how user stories were built for conversation and how those conversations affect the details we write down. You’ll learn why requiring more details in your stories don’t help them get better. You’ll learn how stories both shrink in size and grow in detail over time. You’ll learn how stories can be “done” without software being finished. And finally, you’ll learn how stories need to both be independent, and part of holistic map describing your product. You’ll leave with a deep understanding of why user stories are one of the best inventions of the agile community and how you can use them more effectively on your agile project.

Fixture-free Automated Acceptance Tests

1:30pm – 3:00pm Mike StockdaleAgile teams define acceptance tests collaboratively to uncover assumptions and build a shared understanding. By automating these tests, they become executable specifications. By limiting the 'fixture' code required for automation, we can improve transparency, reduce effort and increase flow. This session will combine lecture, code demonstration and participant discussion to uncover the challenges of the acceptance test practice and to explore some approaches to increase its effectiveness.

Learning is key to Agile Success: Building a learning culture on your Agile team

1:30pm – 3:00pm Declan Whelan “Tell me and I’ll forget; show me and I may remember; involve me and I’ll understand.” – Chinese Proverb If your agile team is able to rapidly and effectively learn they will become increasingly adept at embracing change and delivering value. They will feel more fulfilled, motivated and valued. And they will have way more fun! In this session you will learn about learning in a hands-on way. We will explore a range of topics from Peter Senge’s ideas on learning organizations, Virginia Satir’s change model, social psychology, the theory of constraints, neuroscience to Gever Tulley’s tinkering school. Along the way we will learn by doing with several interactive exercises. This is a very fun, and for some, moving experience. You will be challenged to think differently about learning. You will leave equipped with both insights on how to foster a learning culture on your agile teams along with practical tools, tips and references you can use right away. Slides

Applying Project Management to enable Agile projects (aka. "Do guns kill people?")

3:30pm – 5:00pm Mike Edwards PMI advocates seem to have a deep distrust towards agile practices as it is often viewed as being an uncontrollable way of working. Agile Practitioners seem to believe the PMI framework is too rigid and only adds unnecessary overhead within a project and should be avoided at all costs. PMI & Agile experts are both attempting to reach the same goal of delivering high strategic value and it's time to stop discounting each other. During this interactive session we will explore these two worlds demonstrating how together the agile and PMI practices enable the strategic value we all work hard to deliver. We will explore how the PMI Project-Portfolio management framework serves to increase the success of an agile project if the PMI framework is approached in an agile manner itself. I will use three project experiences as the backbone of this presentation to demonstrate how we can maximize the best of both worlds in delivering high value to our customers. A project cannot succeed if only the Project Manager is Agile. This session will touch on the PMI framework, but the learnings and thoughts are intended for all domains! Slides

Fixed Price Agile Contracts

3:30pm – 5:00pm Dan RawsthorneMany people think that agile development is for open-ended, ambiguously-defined, projects – but not for fixed-price, fixed-time, fixed-feature ones. Nothing could be further from the truth! I have seen successful agile fixed-price contracts for over 25 years, and believe that agility is required for fixed-price to succeed. I have learned many lessons: some of them bad, most of them good. In this talk I present some guidance about how to do these projects successfully: how the organization works in an agile way; how to develop a strategy for the project; and how to monitor its progress. Process/Mechanics The talk starts off by describing the problems: large requirements documents thrown over a wall, few interactions with clients until it’s too late, a moribund Change Management System, etc. It then describes a large “government type” contract and shows that there is actually lots of buffer to play with if the original budget was “enough” and that aggressive, layered, inspect and adapt mechanisms (managed by appropriate Product Owner Teams) will make it straightforward (but not necessarily easy) to succeed. Then, the class moves to a much smaller, and more understandable, example, the Catalina Airlines Website example. A “Shopping” metaphor is introduced, where Release Planning (the core technique of this sort of development) is seen as getting a Budget, a Shopping List (with estimated prices), having a Strategy for shopping, and being aggressively agile to stay within your budget and still have successful results when things aren’t what you wished they were. After this example and a walk through a Release Plan developed in this way, the group is also shown various metrics for viewing feedback throughout the release itself. There are a number of topics discussed along the way, including:

• Layered agility
• Mixing client and developer
• Co-opting the Change Control Board (CCB) to be about “change” and not “control”
• Three types of Release planning and the “going shopping” metaphor
• Overall strategy for “costing out” a fixed-price contract by leveraging the Function Size Measurement (FSM) community’s 30 years of study
• Earned Value Management (EVM) metrics (CPI and SPI) and Earned Business Value

And, yes, this can all be done in 90 minutes… NOTE: this is marked Intro because many folks will be new to agility, not because they’re new to software… Learning outcomes

• Realize that successful fixed-price contracts require constant contact between the Team and stakeholders who are empowered to make decisions with little or no delay
• Understand that getting a complete set of requirements is a “bad” thing
• Understand the different layers of agility, and how they are managed
• Be familiar with the notion of software functional size and how it fits with agility
• Understand that agile release planning is straightforward and the basics of how to do it
• See some powerful metrics for monitoring Releases and fixed-price work

Slides

Open Retrospective on "Project: Much Ado About Agile 2010"

3:30pm – 5:00pm Join your conference organizing committee as Linda Rising facilitates a live retrospective of the conference. The retrospective will cover both the perspective of the organizing committee, and the perspective of the attendees – some come prepared to see how a retrospective is conducted, and to partipate in the process.