Read Notes from a ...ok I'm running out of steam here, this one will have little in the of extra notes sorry.
8:30 - 10:00
Using Agile engineering tools and practices to achieve Organizational Change: Christian Gruber "Christian will examine these practices, their effects, and provide examples where such a grass-roots approach helped convince management to support or pilot fully agile approaches. He will also provide counter-examples and anti-patterns which can often lead to such an effort being blocked. Attendees should leave better armed to start practising “stealth agile” but with a mind to ultimately demonstrating its value and shifting the organization." Been there, tried that.
Creating Cultures Where Agile Emerges: Pollyanna Pixton - "Agile practices emerge in a collaborative environment. As the leader on several projects, I saw the emergence of iterative development, test first, evolving functional specs, pair programming, minimal documentation, and customer involvement at every step of the way. Successful tools to create this environment cover creating an open environment, bringing the right experience, skills, and thinkers together, how to stimulate and foster the free flow of ideas, and letting people to decide what they want to do and by when (self-accountability). Tools to lead collaboration will also be introduced." Its three hours.
Refactoring of Cultural Smells: Orit Hazzan and Yael Dubinsky - "The participants become familiar with patterns of cultural smells and appropriate refactoring activities, and are guided to check their fitness for their organizations as well as to develop new ones." As many will know this is right up my Alley.
Beginner's Mind--The Zen of Agile: David Hussman and Jean Tabaka - "We believe that if teams don’t stay in the moment, look below the surface at the here and now, and maintain openness and wonderment, they will ultimately adopt a fake Agile and fail in their adoption. They will kill the whole intent of Agile for software teams; that is, they will miss the maturation and growth born of team and self inspection and adaption without judgment and without adherence to pre-conceived notions of some gross-level Agile practices." Its three hours.
10:30 - 12:00
From High-performing to Hyper-performing Agile teams Facilitator: Gabrielle Benefield - Panel: Jeff Sutherland, Rob Mee, Jason Titus
Measuring Agile in the Enterprise: 5 Success Factors for Large-Scale Agile Adoption Michael Mah
Good Virus / Bad Virus: How Organization Culture Impacts Agile Adoptions (and Vice Versa) Michael Spayd "Research shows culture is the single most important factor in organizational success. Four culture types have been identified: Control, Collaboration, Competence, and Cultivation. This session explores how Agile fits within each, including when it synergizes with the culture’s natural tendencies, and when like a virus it spreads unwanted “germs”, undermining the natural balance. With this context, we explore how Agile can change cultures, when it is advisable to try to do so, and how to make the best of the corporate culture you find yourself in."
The Road from Project Manager to Agile Coach: Lyssa Adkins a workshop "We will reveal and discuss the essential mindset shifts a Project Manager must undertake to become an effective Agile coach. We will talk about how that leads to changes in actions and changes in conversations and decision-making — both within your team and with the external world. We will look at the latest thinking on highly-collaborative and high-performing teams and consider our own actions relative to fostering such teams"
I'm leaning towards David and Jean's workshop - my thinking I learned a ton from Jean last year with "Why I don't like Monday's".
14:00 - 15:30
"We suck less!" Isn't mediocrity great?: David Douglas and Robin Dymond - "There are two fundamental problems with the current state of Agile adoption: 1: Companies suck less than we did before and that is acceptable 2: Most companies are blind to the game changing benefits of pursuing excellence in Agile organization"
Use-Case Recording: Testing a rich client UI by recording in a domain-specific language: Geoff Bache - "Which is all very well, but how can we get around the brittleness that has plagued automated UI tests in the past? A key is to address the form in which the tests are recorded - how they identify what is being done with the GUI. Once upon a time this was the screen mechanics - click on pixel 124,21 - and the tests broke as soon as you ran with different monitor settings. Now it’s usually the GUI toolkit mechanics - find this JTable and click in the third cell of the second row. But what if we ended up recording intent instead of mechanics - in a domain language?"
Artful Making for Agile Teams: Lee Devin and Stacia Broderick "We all know folks who seem to be naturally creative, outrageously productive, somehow able to do things we can’t do. We call them “talented,” “artistic,” “super intelligent,” or some other word that means they’ve got an inherent ability that we don’t have. Thing is, most of what we call talent is actually skill, and can be learned. Not only can it be learned (by you), but it can be practiced, and you can get better at it with practice."
Probably Use Case recording - since this might be a valuable technique for a team I know
16:00 - 17:30
Touchy-feely Impediments to Agile Adoption: Amr Elssamadisy - why do some Agile Adoptions fail? Amr explores.
Colossal, Scattered, and Chaotic (Planning with a Large Distributed Team): Wes Williams and Mike Stout
For Agile Leaders Only -- Exploring the "Hard Bits": Bob Galen - "This session is for any Agile coach or leader who is facing challenges and looking for creative ways for facing them. In this practical session we hope to do two things. First, mine some of the hardest, real-world problems that attending Scrum Masters and other Agile Leaders have faced within their teams."
What Are They Doing? What A CIO Wants To Know From An Agile Development Team: Niel Nickolaisen
I'm going with Amr's and will have to ping Wes and Niel for their slides/notes.
Friday 8:30 - 10:00
Acceptance Testing Clinic: FitNesse: Micah Martin
Style and Taste in Writing FIT Documents: Mike Hill and Steve Freeman
Dude, Where's Our Release Plan?: David Hussman
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