AGENDA
Day 1 – Thurs. Feb. 21st
9:15-10:15 a.m. Pacific Time
9:15-10:15 a.m.
As small-team success becomes more commonplace with Scrum and Kanban, organizations are shifting their focus to succeeding with Agile development on large projects. Many organizations have tried SAFe, and others have experimented with Nexus/SoS, LeSS, DaD, and other approaches. Yet few organizations appear to be fully satisfied with any of their approaches. Why not? What are these organizations missing? In this presentation, award winning author Steve McConnell unpacks more than 20 years of experience guiding organizations as they transition from small projects to large. He explains the key principles underlying all successful scaling approaches. He identifies common scaling pitfalls. And he explains what is really different about scaling projects in Agile environments.
Steve McConnell
10:30-11:30 a.m. Pacific Time
10:30-11:30 a.m.
Too often Agile is seen as calling for generalists—developers who can do everything needed to produce a working product increment. But how do generalists obtain the deep knowledge and specialization that are critical to many projects? What if only one person on a team really knows the subject? This session provides practical, everyday techniques to support collaborative design during sprint planning and at other times when you need a team of diverse specialists.
Earl Beede
10:30-11:30 a.m.
What is Kanban? Is it a board? A tool? A framework similar to Scrum? A unique SDLC? Kanban is widely misunderstood and misused, and many teams fail to realize most of its potential benefits. This tutorial highlights the core practices of Kanban. It discusses how Kanban can be used by itself or in combination with Scrum. You will come away with a better understanding of Kanban and how to use it to support a high maturity agile implementation.
Jenny Stuart
11:45-12:45 p.m. Pacific Time
11:45-12:45 p.m.
Most TDD books and courses focus on the Red-Green-Refactor cycle and spend little time discussing effective testing techniques. But to ensure the correctness and robustness of the software built using TDD, you also need to pay close attention to what drives it: the tests! This course describes a TDD kata in which we will interleave effective testing techniques based on Design by Contract, Domain Coverage, Decision Tables, and others. The kata will be performed in Java/JUnit, but the techniques are applicable in practically any language.
Melvin Perez-Cedano
11:45-12:45 p.m.
Scrum at the single team level is simple compared to using Scrum on projects with hundreds or thousands of staff. At Construx we have seen the good, the bad, and the ugly of scaling Scrum. Successful companies scale Scrum in ways that ensure they deliver high quality working software frequently. This course defines strategies and approaches that will help you avoid common scaling dysfunctions and be successful.
Jenny Stuart
1:00-2:00 p.m. Pacific Time
1:00-2:00 p.m.
The vast majority of developers—even those with many years of development experience—have never really thought about what it means to write code. But understanding what lines of code mean is critical to being able to quickly and cheaply deliver high quality code that solves the user’s problems. This presentation asks and answers the question of what code means and follows with important implications of that answer.
Earl Beede
1:00-2:00 p.m.
We often hear from Engineering Leadership, “How do I know my Agile teams are working as fast as they can?” Individual accountability is lost in self-directed teams. The traditional project management approach of “motivating” by focusing on individual accountability and pressure is outdated. But motivation is still important! Adopting Agile without supporting team-level motivation reduces organizational performance overall. Are your teams as motivated as they could be? This tutorial provides an analytical model of team motivation and a measurement method to track improvement. It’s simpler than you think.
Bob Webber
Day 2 – Fri. Feb. 22nd
9:15-10:15 a.m. Pacific Time
9:15-10:15 a.m.
How does your development organization and its architecture and code stack up against the industry? Matt Peloquin has had the rare vantage point of leading more than 400 Technical Due Diligence audits of companies ranging from startups to mature enterprises. These companies are successful enough that other companies are acquiring them. What characteristics do successful architectures and code bases have? What are some common risks that plague both? How do these factors contribute to a successful software organization? In this talk Peloquin reports lessons from the field, including impacts of technology selections, architectural pitfalls, scalability dos and don’ts, the average state of code, effect of development approaches, and the role of technical and business execution.
Matt Peloquin
10:30-11:30 a.m. Pacific Time
10:30-11:30 a.m.
Construx consultants work with literally hundreds of software organizations each year. Among these organizations a few stand out as being truly world class. They are exceptional in their ability to meet their software development goals and exceptional in the contribution they make to their companies’ overall business success. Do world class software organizations operate differently than average organizations? In Construx’s experience, the answer is a resounding “YES.” In this talk, award-winning author Steve McConnell reveals the technical, management, business, and cultural secrets that make a software organization world class.
Steve Tockey
10:30-11:30 a.m.
Creating solutions to customer problems is a balancing act. Effective solutions require the balanced integration of three fundamental perspectives: Business, Usage, and Technology. The Three-Circle Model was created to guide and inform solution creation across these perspectives. The model permits detailed analysis of proposed solutions to ensure that the solution makes economic sense, is conceptually appealing and valuable to users, and can be implemented. The Three-Circle Model also helps to improve organizational capabilities.
Erik Simmons
11:45-12:45 p.m. Pacific Time
11:45-12:45 p.m.
Organizational transformation is a multi-faceted approach to fundamentally improving an organization. Transformation isn’t easy, and many transformation efforts end up creating disappointing results or failing outright. Among the reasons is that some organizations set the wrong goals for the transformation. Transformations are also challenging because they simultaneously affect the organization’s people, culture, process, technologies, and environment. This talk presents an effective model for transformative change and a collection of best practices for planning and executing organizational transformations.
Erik Simmons
11:45-12:45 p.m.
The user story template is a well-thought-out aid to generating complete requirement statements. This session shows how to extend the thinking behind user stories and the user story template to help make requirement decisions all the way from the C-Level suite to the Scrum team. Learn how a consistent approach via user stories across multiple-levels of decision making can clarify and streamline your requirements.
Earl Beede
1:00-2:00 p.m. Pacific Time
1:00-2:00 p.m.
Agile adoptions are undertaken for the best of reasons, including decreased time to market, improved quality, increased employee satisfaction, and more satisfied customers. Yet the majority of Agile transformations fall short of these goals, and organizational leaders see them as failures. The road to Agile transformation Hell is, unfortunately, not paved with good intentions; it’s paved with faulty assumptions, including some that have been popularized by the Agile community itself. This frank discussion presents the key attributes of successful Agile transformations, the reasons that Agile adoptions fail, the management decisions that lead to failure, and the decisions that leaders can make to ensure success.
John Clifford
“Driving Creation of Successful Products with Impact Mapping and Story Mapping,” Melvin Perez-Cedano
1:00-2:00 p.m.
Building the wrong product, even when done efficiently, is one of the worst kinds of waste in software development. False consensus on the product being built fails the very first Agile Principle of satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. Impact Mapping and User Story Mapping provide collaborative and visual ways to work out why a product is being built and what it needs to include—leading to successful products. In this session, Melvin presents how to exploit the synergy between these two techniques, set the direction, and plan releases of highly impactful products.
Melvin Perez-Cedano
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*Speakers and tracks may change as we finalize the agenda