David Hussman

Agile, Smagile: What's Working? - What's Not?

With the growth of agile comes the need to add a new line to the Agile Manifesto: Success over Dogma. The number of people who can say agile is growing faster than the number of people benefiting from agile practices. There are now many successful agile projects, yet there are also a growing number of projects claiming to be agile but not seeing any of the benefits agile methods provide. This session will discuss successful adoptions of agile, dumb things you can do to muck it up, and more.

Agile Management & Managing Agility

Management and agility are not mutually exclusive. Many managers are already working in an agile manner as a means to improve, produce, or simply survive. Other managers hear about projects using agile methods and struggle to find a place in the project community.

This session provides a new way to think about managing projects. Some managers will find that their existing practices and skills are supported and enhanced by the forums and metrics provided within an agile project while others will be challenged by some of the principles and practices.

Coaching and Leading Agile Projects

Successfully coaching agile communities involves using a wide variety of skills. Coaches help guide coding and design, collaboration and communication, the writing and telling of user stories and much more. The coach needs to continuously show and teach the varied interactions that connect and support the entire project community.

This session will explore and teach coaching skills. The session will reference a wide variety of agile coaching as well as drawing from cross disciplinary techniques like those used by music producers to help foster creativity while helping to ensure products are delivered and challenges confronted.

Automating Customer Acceptance

Why should the value of test driven development (TDD) stay stuck in the realm of coding? The ideas behind TDD are now being successfully applied to the automation of business value. While this has been going on for some time within the agile community, it is not starting to spread to main stream development.

There are more tools are coming available everyday which allow developers, testers, and customers (or product owners) to work together to automate acceptance tests. This process helps clarify the needs of the end user before development begins and removes more of the wasteful work based on incorrect assumptions from vague requirements.

Architecture and Agility Are Not Enemies

Being agile does not mean living life one iteration at a time. Agile projects without a long view can run into the common design problems of the past. Planning iteration by iteration is often foolish and feeds the myth that agile projects do not think beyond a few weeks. Successful agile projects plan within iterations and across iterations. The later planning is called release planning and it is the forum where agility first engages architecture and other cross cutting concerns.