Agile2019

Abstract:
The best designers make complex ideas understandable. Whether you design algorithms or user experiences, architectures or team processes, understandable ideas are easier to share with teammates and to reason about. Visual thinking is one of the most powerful tools in our silver toolbox for helping us create understandable ideas. Drawing is a natural ability we all have. As kids we had little trouble expressing our ideas visually, but we’ve noticed that lots of adults have trouble putting pen to paper (or marker to whiteboard) to draw a picture of what’s on their mind. At some point along our journeys to earn diplomas and advanced certifications, many of us lost the ability to think visually. We became masters over textual information but drawing complex ideas became difficult. Luckily, visual thinking skills can be improved with practice. In this session we will reawaken our visual minds and learn how to put those skills to work to help us design software better. By the end of this session you will be well on your way to being able to select abstractions to visualize, draw different perspectives of a system, use your sketches to tell interesting stories, and sketch your ideas more confidently. This is a learning by doing session that you won't want to miss!

Learning Outcomes:

• Use at least two visual thinking frameworks to help decide what to draw under varying circumstances.
• Describe the benefits of visual thinking in the context of software design.
• Explain tips and strategies to teammates for practicing visual thinking and sketching.

Abstract:
Cultural diversity is an increasingly important reality for Agile teams. The way individual team members approach agile values and principles can vary based on their cultural background. Respecting the impact of various cultural backgrounds on how team members think, and act is essential for building a high performing agile team. On the other hand, lack of cultural awareness may lead – at the least - to failure of achieving the team potential.
In this highly interactive workshop, Hofstede’s cultural model is used to examine the impact of various cultural backgrounds on agile teams. Agile methodologies provide a set of values, principles and practices forming a system of thinking. Links between Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and the Agile system of thinking are explored. Participants are encouraged to use live voting and facilitated discussions to share their thoughts on the impacts. More importantly, understanding what interventions an agile lead can introduce to the system to make cultural diversity and advantage.

Learning Outcomes:

• Develop cultural self-awareness
• Understand how cultural dimensions can impact teams understanding and practice of agile
• Avoid cultural stereotypes yet learn to appreciate cultural differences and turn them to an advantage
• Emphasize respect and psychological safety as cornerstones for leading a diverse cultural team

Attachments:

• Agile Leadership in a Diverse Cultural Environment - Agile 2019.pdf

Abstract:
When should we test our data? From an application development perspective, a unit test against a database isn't a unit test at all. Which makes sense -- connected systems introduce overhead and dependency, both of which reduce stability and decrease productivity during test-driven development (TDD). But if we wait for integration testing, critical functionality can get missed. In this session, we will discuss strategies for filling the data testing gap, directly within a Microsoft SQL Server environment. If you do a lot of work in T-SQL but aren't familiar with TDD, you'll learn the why and how of test-first development. If you're accomplished with unit tests, but never tried them in your database, you'll learn how to apply familiar concepts like setup, mocking, and assertion. We'll spend most of our time walking through a solution based on a real-world project, specifically using the open source tSQLt database unit testing framework.

Learning Outcomes:

• what TDD is
• benefits of TDD
• the practice of TDD
• how to obtain and install the tSQLt unit testing framework in SQL Server
• how to write unit tests in SQL using the tSQLt framework
• experience walking through an example scenario

Attachments:

• HeyYouGotYourTDDInMySQLDB_JeffMcKenzie_Agile2019_2019-08-07.pdf

Abstract:
In a perfect world, every Agile team has its own QA lead and a tester or two, with time to execute continuous testing and access to end users for extensive interviews. In this perfect world, teams practice cross-training so that during peak test times, additional team members can take on testing roles, thus adding new eyes to the process and augmenting test results.
In the real world, good testing practices often fall prey to decreasing budgets and to testing bottlenecks when multiple user stories enter the testing queue at the end of the sprint. In the budget-centric organization, often the testers are the first to go when finances demand a reduction in teams. Once the “just get anyone to do the testing” mentality creeps into an organization, quality becomes relegated to that proverbial back burner. Eventually, someone gets burned. When a team is fortunate enough to retain its testers, they find themselves overwhelmed with work at peak test times (usually near the ends of sprints or just before deployment) and attention to detail declines.
With nearly 30 years of combined experience between us, we (and we are Julie Clooney and Marianne Erickson) have compiled tools to help mitigate the effects of budgets and bottlenecks in the testing process. Our tools help build team enthusiasm for quality and a Whole-Team, Agile approach to testing. Learning outcomes in five areas will provide our session participants with a toolkit they can use to facilitate improved, continuous, and collaborative test strategies for their teams.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants in our session will learn how to implement a “Whole Team Approach” toward testing, and take away a toolkit of ideas to practice with their own Agile teams.
• We will concentrate on five focal points of Agile Testing:
• 1. Culture and Mindset: Creating a Whole Team Approach
• 2. Categories of Testing: Who can, who can’t, and cross-training
• 3. Roles and Responsibilities
• 4. Test Strategy and Planning
• 5. UX and UI: The user-centric tester

Attachments:

• Ten Principles for Testers.docx.pdf
• ForgetTheQA_v11.pdf

Abstract:
How many times have you been asked the million dollar question: "When will this (feature, project, product) be done?" Most agile teams and organizations often grapple with being able to confidently answer that question when communicating with stakeholders. We often try to "guesstimate" when something will be done based on gut, fear, or hope.
We should take great pride in building a culture of "Hope Killing" by understanding what it takes to build (and deliver) realistic road maps in order to have meaningful conversations with leadership teams allowing them to confidently predict and deliver, manage expectations, and facilitate decision making.

Learning Outcomes:

• Participants will be able to:
• Gain an overall understanding of the concepts of a roadmap framework
• Build visual roadmaps to facilitate road mapping sessions
• Understand the various components needed to build a roadmap
• Identify and understand the link between value delivery and dependency management
• Discuss and understand the impact of "curve balls"
• Facilitate the process to recast the roadmap
• Understand how to manage stakeholder expectations to facilitate decision making

Attachments:

• Predictable Roadmaps-Final.pdf

Abstract:
Many organizations feel it is time to scale their teams and experience many challenges in their efforts. Are you asking yourself such questions as: Is the organization ready to scale? Are your agile teams stagnant and appear to be doing agile or going through the motions? Do you have a lack of team cohesion? Does your team appear to be falling back into the storming stage? Are scrum practices dwindling out with lack of enthusiasm? Are we wanting to scale due to governance or integration issues? Are you trying to scale your teams and facing struggles such as disengagement or unmotivated teams?
Let me introduce the concept of base camps to help with the questions and challenges in the teams' journey to scale! As in climbing, base camps are positioned throughout your climb to provide supplies and an area for climbers to regroup. We want to provide the same support for agile teams throughout their agile journey. The base camp concept helps teams acclimate to the culture change, new ways of working with stakeholders, socializing and collaborating techniques, and understand the overall business. By utilizing the base camp concept, the teams understand their interpersonal dynamics to constantly reflect and improve how the teams can work together.
This session will help you determine if your organization and teams are ready to scale, explain the various base camps, identify and provide recommendations/actions to move to the next base camp, and provide a template to take back to your teams.

Learning Outcomes:

• Understand the different agile maturity levels by utilizing base camps
• Capability to identify the anti-patterns at each base camp
• Utilization of the “Agile Team Assessment” tool to help teams at various base camps
• Recommendations for a successful agile scaling

Attachments:

• TravelingAgileBaseCamp2019c.pdf
• Agile2019 Team Agile Assessment Sample.pdf
• LINKS TO DOWNLOAD THE EXCEL FILES.pdf

Abstract:
As Agile eats the world, most medium and large organizations are faced with the necessity of an Agile transformation. Surveys show that more than 90% of executives give high priority to becoming agile, yet less than 10% see their own firm as “highly agile.” Implementing Agile is a means, not the end. The goal is to enable the organization to generate instant, frictionless, intimate, incremental, risk-free value at scale, and the financial rewards that flow from that capability, as exemplified by the five largest and fastest-growing firms on the planet. For most, this is a major challenge—one that will involve deep change over many years. If the organization has been traditionally managed, the journey will include radical shifts in attitudes, values, mindsets, ways of thinking and ways of interacting with the world—in effect a change in organizational culture.
Some organizations’ Agile journeys have been spectacularly successful, whereas others have failed and many have stalled. What are the causes of success or failure or stalling? What are the common features of these different journeys? What patterns are emerging? How can failure or stalling be anticipated and prevented?
For those in the midst of an organization’s Agile journey, how do participants communicate simply and clearly where the organization is on its journey? What steps have been accomplished? What steps remain? How can an organization anticipate and avoid failure or stalling?
Many executives who would like to undertake an Agile transformation journey don’t know where to begin or what the journey will look like. Where does one start? What does the journey look like? How long does it take?
The session will show an approach to graphically mapping the Agile journey and provide answers to these questions, at both the organizational and individual level and the relation between the two. The examples of Microsoft and GE will be highlighted.
In the course of the session, participants will graphically represent both their own organization’s Agile journey and their own individual Agile journey and evaluate the relationship between the two.

Learning Outcomes:

• - Enhanced understanding of the emerging patterns in Agile journeys of medium to large organizations.
• - Capability to map the organization's Agile journey
• - Capability to map individual Agile Journey
• - Capability to relate individual Agile journeys to the organization's Agile journey

Attachments:

• Mapping the Agjile Journey Steve Denning Agile2019 Aug 8 2019.pdf