Bob Payne

Presentations

Agile Portfolio Management - Throw it against the wall and see what sticks.

Managing large portfolios with multiple teams and dependencies can be a nightmare. Balancing simplicity and sufficiency is the key to deriving sustained value and continued adoption of any tool. The Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) works well on our projects and we hope some of these techniques will work for your teams.

The Portfolio Alignment Wall emerged out of my work with an orgainzation the had 4 agile teams working with 17 interdependent projects. We achieved this using index cards, yarn, stickers and a few simple rules.

This workshop will explore the use of a Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) to visualize dependencies and track projects for customer facing feature streams.

Participate, learn and never forget to “Talk to the PAW�.

We will begin the workshop with an introduction to Portfolio Alignment Wall and the workshop.

Attendees will break up into 3 agile teams. These teams will be engaged in a simulated development project for Caged Animal Development Inc. This simulation will have multiple releases delivered in an iterative incremental fashion.

We will build a simple Portfolio Alignment Wall in this workshop.
Features and external dependencies will be tracked and managed. We will plan, deliver and report work using the portfolio planning and tracking techniques utilized in the Corporate Internet Solutions group at Nationwide Insurance.

The Portfolio Alignment Wall will be built/maintained by the teams during the workshop.

Learning outcomes

* Multiple techniques for managing and tracking portfolios
* Visualizing and dealing with organizational complexity
* How to reduce the cost of change
* Importance of the physicality of the wall
* Greater appreciation for simplicity

Jumping the Agile Shark - When good projects go bad.

When the ideas of Agility are used to create a process that seems to have the right "Agile" formula but is just "Wrong, Wrong, Wrong".

I have worked on many Agile teams in many organizations. Many would lead you to believe that creating Agile teams and processes can be reduced to a formula. This leads to people with the best of intentions doing the "Right Thing" at the wrong time or for the wrong reason.

Explore how to implement agile in your organization by exploring the learning from the mistakes I have seen in the field.

Real World Agile Automated Acceptance Testing

Need to acceptance test the web front end but tired of the same old selenium scripting or big record and playback solutions. Need to have those tests run in your continuous integration rig. Want testers to help write those tests. Review the framework I use called Pickle-Juice.

You are in luck.

Pickle-Juice is an open source "micro framework" that hooks together Celerity (HtmlUnitWatir ish) Cucumber and creates a basic acceptance testing framework.

Imagine writing tests like this and having them be executable.

Feature: Search the web using Google Scenario: Look for Bob Payn Given a Browser And navigating to google.com When entering Bob Payne in text_field with name of q And clicking on button with name of btnG Then page has the text Agile Toolkit Podcast