AgileRX - Session Descriptions

Hindsight is 20-20 - the Agile Retrospective

Agile development teams should always be looking for ways do develop software better, and the iteration is the perfect tool for doing so. Each iteration we can tweak, tune, adjust, and readjust our practices. So how does an agile team decide what to tweak? This is the purpose of the Agile Retrospective.

Monitoring your Rails application with ExeptionNotifier, Munin and Monit

(including side processes like backgroundrb and ferret)

Rails Application Tuning and Performance monitoring

Most developers who adopt Rails deploy their first application and see it get rushed under heavy load... thus the rumor that 'Rails doesn't scale'. Well, Rails does, you just have to know a few things

The New Work of management in Agile Organizations

Sometimes I see teams that reject all direction and go their own way, declaring, 'We are self-organizing'. They are missing an important fact. When someone is paid by a company to be part of a team, that team exists within the organizational context.

On the other hand, some managers hear the words "self-organizing" and believe the team is on its "own" that they can go into semi-retirement. But that's not the case, either.

In fact,both are risky over-simplifications.

When teams self-organize there's still plenty for managers to do, but management attention must shift from individual to team performance, and creating an environment where teams can excel.

Working with Complex Adaptive (Human) Systems

The world abounds with complex theories and complex advice about complex adaptive systems. But most of them aren't very helpful when it comes to knowing what to do to make a system work better. In this interactive session, we'll explore three levers that you can use to influence patterns of behavior in complex adaptive systems...such as software development teams.

Agile Practices Review: A Tactics Retrospective

Increasingly, people are adopting Agile practices a la carte, and some are even talking about "post-Agile" methodologies. If things are going to be changing, let's take a moment to review Agile development practices, the problems they were trying to solve, what worked, and what difficulties these new methodologies are responding to. With this information in hand, we can make an intelligent decision about the development methodology for our team.

Refactoring Your Wetware

Software development happens in your head; not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware—our own brains?

The Future of Agile

Agile methodologies are enjoying increased adoption and relevance. Will they continue to do so as time goes on? We understand that business needs change over time—sometimes quite rapidly. However, change isn’t limited to the business or the requirements. Markets will wax and wane. Developers and business owners will experience a change in their own views, become older, and slowly be replaced by the next generation of workers and thought leaders. In this future world, will agile continue to prosper, or will it flounder? What might agile be replaced with or evolve into?

Wetware: Part 2

We make important decisions and try and solve critical problems everyday. But our decisions and problem solving is based on faulty memory and our emotional state at the time. We tend to ignore crucial facts and fixate on irrelevant details because of where and when they occur, or whether they are brightly colored. Especially if they are brightly colored.

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.

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.

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.

Agile Architecture

Developing large software systems is inherently difficult. Because of this, we attempt to make the right architectural decisions early due to the significant anticipated cost affiliated with making incorrect decisions. But this contradicts agile practices which have taught us to embrace change. So how do agile and architecture come together? Conceptually, the goal of agile architecture must be to eliminate the architectural significance of change by crafting software that can easily adapt to change. Ultimately, an agile architecture is a modular architecture. This session presents patterns for modularizing large software systems.

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".

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.

Agile Anti-Patterns

Agile is wildly popular in some circles and hated in others. How can the same ideas cause such different reactions? Sometimes it's the definition of "agile" and other times it's company culture, but there's usually a good reason when Agile ideas are thrown out on their collective ears.

Agile Testing: Solid Strategies

Many teams have strategies for development, but just hope that testing will magically happen. It usually doesn't. Let's look at how a solid strategy and environment will make your testing effort a success.

Kanban: Making Agile Visible

Many shops are adopting Kanban as a new twist on an existing Scrum team. Using a Kanban board helps your team spot bottlenecks in the path from idea to deployment, and makes it just as easy for non-technical managers and customers to understand as well. Additionally, other elements of Kanban (like time boxed features), do a great job of helping you stay productive.

Teamwide Tune-Ups: Principles and Practices

We rarely get a chance to "reboot" a team, but we get lots of chances to introduce smaller improvements. What are the best areas to target? How can you successful improve the way your team works?

Hiring For An Agile Team: Detecting Candidates Who Will Fit

Even the people who claim experience on Agile teams are not necessarily working the way your team works. And, because not everyone is using Agile approaches, some people who aren't using strictly Agile approaches may be perfect for your team. If you've tried to hire people recently, you know you can't reply on people with or without 'Agile' experience to be just right for your open positions and it's not a question of technical skill.

In this hands-on session, we'll define the essential technical and non-technical skills for your position, identify your cultural issues, and practice interviewing so all your hires can be successful.

Say Yes--or Say No? What to Do When Faced with the Impossible

Imagine this scenario: You're a Scrum Master who's desperately trying to facilitate two projects and your boss asks you to work on a third. Or you're a writer who's supposed to work on two different areas of the product--at the same time. Or you're a developer or tester who's supposed to work partly on this project, and partly on that one. Or, you're dragged away from one project to work on another one. Or, part of the project is stuck--so badly stuck that it makes no sense to continue there, but to work on another completely different part of the project. Welcome to the wonderful world of multitasking!

Multitasking is a huge drain on projects. Multitasking can prevent an otherwise reasonably planned and executed project from completing. But in the face of too few people and not enough time, what can you do?

In this session, we'll experience some multitasking, and discuss and practice techniques to deal with senior management, the project team, and ourselves.

Successful Software Management: 17 Lessons Learned

Many software managers came to management through the technical ranks. Although they may have had plenty of technical training and mentoring, they frequently have to learn management skills the hard way, through trial and error. Johanna will describe some technical management tips and tricks learned through trial and error, focusing on software managers and their particular issues.

You'll learn about a manager's job, how to create an effective work environment, and how you can help people do their best work.

Measuring Business Value: An Agile Approach

Scrum emphasizes the product owner's role in prioritizing the backlog and building the highest priority features first. But do features equal value? How can teams ensure they are delivering value to business stakeholders?

This interactive presentation goes beyond epics, features and user stories. Attendees will learn proven techniques for translating business strategies into business objectives, selecting the best design ideas and measuring the team's output as value delivered. All this in a light, agile manner.

Agile Release Planning: Preparing the release vision

With agile, management and customers can be concerned that there is no vision of what will be included in a release -- they'll just get what they get when a predetermined number of timeboxed "iterations" have expired. Rather, agile release planning involves the creation of a release vision by determining, prioritizing, and estimating the major pieces of desired functionality for a release and by determining how long it will take to complete this functionality.

Hands on Planning Poker

Agile teams often use planning poker for the "whole team" to collaboratively estimate the overall effort to implementing a release-ready feature. Through planning poker, teams also gain a greater understanding of the requirement, set expectations for the feature implementation, share implementation hints, and conduct high-level design and architecture discussions.

Test-driven Development: Have teams found the practice beneficial?

With the test-driven development practice, software engineering write automated unit test code as they write implementation code -- on a minute by minute basis. Have the engineers and teams who have used the test driven development practice benefited from all this testing?