David Hussman
Twin Cities Software Symposium
Minneapolis · October 2 - 4, 2009
Agility Coach/Instructor/Practioner
David teaches and coaches the adoption and improvement of agility as a delivery tool. His work includes helping companies of all sizes all over the world. Sometimes he is pairing with developers and testers, while other times he is helping to invent, evolve and plan the delivery of all types of products and projects. David also spends a great deal of time helping leaders at all levels find ways to pragmatically use agility to foster innovation.
Prior to working as a full time coach, David spent years building software in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now leads DevJam, a company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on agility as a tool to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products in competitive cycles.
Along with teaching and coaching, David participates in conferences around the world. He is the recipient of the Agile Alliance, 2009 Gordon Pask Award. David continuously contributes to books and various publications.
For coaching information, presentations, and more, visit www.devjam.com
Presentations
Discovering Real Value with Story Maps and Personas
While actors and use cases often left users behind, personas and story maps bring the users to life and help mine real value. This session will teach you how to craft personas and use them to drive value into your development stream. The tools presented will help you better understand your buyers and users and build strong product backlogs and product road maps.
Coaching and Producing Agility
This session speaks to the question being asked so often: “what is an agile coach” From guiding planning sessions to pairing with developers to helping teams groom backlogs, this session provides insight into coaching agile projects and fostering the agility that produces. Whether you are a manager, developer, or tester, if you are interested in leading the adoption or tuning agility, this session will help prepare you for your first coaching gig.
Selling Agility: Experience from the Trenches
People ask me all the time, “How do you get people to buy in the use of agile methods?” While this is easier than it once was, there are still many challenges, and agile snake oil sales are on the rise. If you are looking to sell agility or deeper your agile investment (or your sales force), this session will provide you with tools that will help you frame your sell points, select your sales tools and communicate the value (of a practice) over the mechanics.
Agility as a Tool: Getting Ready to Iterate
Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.
Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.