David Hussman

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.

Producing Software Groove

Agility comes in many forms. While you may start out using XP or Scrum, long term success will mean finding a groove which fits your company. This session provides a path for adopting or adapting agility which draws on the strength of the successful practices being used.

What Is Lean and Why Should You Care?

Whether it was intentional or not, the agile community has been borrowing successful ideas from the lean manufacturing for years. Lean practices, like finding and removing wasteful work, can be applied without needing special permission or certification. Ideas like kanban (visual planning aids) and kaizen (continuous learning) are simple, helpful tools that are easily applied and produce great results.

Acceptance Test Driven: Beyond the Geekdom

How testable are your requirements? If they are user stories, you have better odds than others, but you may still struggling to increase your automated feature testing. Acceptance test driven (ATD) means understanding the needs or the value before you start coding, and it is often hard to make ATD sticky in organizations.

While tools and geekology are needed, the upstream flow with the larger project community must exist to be successful. The session will teach you how to spark ATD from idea to code, connecting the dots and the players along the way. From product concept to automated tests, we will discuss and practice various ways to connect business, development and testing around the creating and getting value from ATD.

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.

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.

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.