Agile2017

Abstract:
People ask questions and we say things that may relate to the questions. (We call this the Simplest Description That Can Possibly Work!)
Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson are two of the original XP developers and have stayed active in the community since the mid-90s. They have a wealth of knowledge around development, Agile, training, mentoring, and delivering quality products. Come challenge them with your best questions about Agile!

Learning Outcomes:

• Entirely up to the questioners and listeners.

Abstract:
Although the notion of organizational Agile and business Agility covers many variations in managerial practices, the site visits of the SD Learning Consortium revealed a striking convergence around three themes or “laws”:

• The law of the customer: An obsession with delighting customers by continuously adding value for customers and users, as well as a recognition of the current need to generate instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale.
  
• The law of the small team: A presumption that in a volatile, complex, uncertain and ambiguous world, work needs to be disaggregated into small batches and performed by small cross-functional autonomous teams, working iteratively in short cycles in a state of flow, with fast feedback from customers and end-users.
  
• The law of the network: The entire firm functions as a fluid interactive network, not merely a top-down bureaucracy with a few teams implementing Agile tools and processes.
  

Achieving continuous innovation is dependent on an Agile mindset pervading the organization. Pursuit of all three laws is key to sustaining business agility. Individually, none of the observed management practices are new. What is new and different is the way that the management goals, practices and values constitute a coherent and integrated approach to continuous innovation, driven by and lubricated with a pervasive entrepreneurial mindset.
About Steve Denning
Steve Denning is the author of several books on organizational storytelling, including The Leader's Guide to Radical Management (Jossey-Bass, 2010).
Steve is the former Program Director, Knowledge Management at the World Bank. He now works with organizations in the U.S., Europe, Asia and Australia on Agile leadership, innovation and organizational storytelling. His clients have included many Fortune 500 companies.
Steve currently writes a popular column for Forbes.com.
Steve’s innovative work has been recognized world-wide. In November 2000, Steve was named as one of the world’s ten Most Admired Knowledge Leaders (Teleos).
Steve was born and educated in Sydney, Australia. He did a postgraduate degree in law at Oxford University in the U.K. Steve then joined the World Bank where he worked for several decades in many capacities.

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Abstract:
Dean Leffingwell is a software industry veteran, serial entrepreneur, methodologist and author who has spend his entire career helping software teams meet their goals. He is the creator of the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), and cofounder of Scaled Agile, Inc., where he serves as Chief Methodologist.
Mr. Leffingwell is always happy to discuss topics in the convergence of the bodies of knowledge around SAFe, Agile development methods, systems thinking and lean product development.

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Abstract:
Arlo Belshee is a utterly awesome at writing about himself in the third person. He’s so good at it that you will totally think this was written by someone else, even though it is the usual marketing spew.
Arlo has worked for over two decades as a coder/tester, manager, bookkeeper, team craftsman, salesperson, executive, and coach. He invented lots of things (Promiscuous Pairing, Naked Planning – which you know as Kanban, Read by Refactoring, #ZeroBugs). He…
Wait a minute. You don’t care about any of that. It’s so much marketing pabulum that Arlo would get bored even writing it. If he had to. Which he doesn’t. Because this is totally written by somebody else.
You’re considering this session for a reason. You have some challenge. It seems intractable. You really want someone who will do 2 things:
* Really deeply listen to you and learn your context. * Give some practical, real-world options to try. Stuff not based on theory and hope, but on what has worked in the real world. If that problem is in any of the following domains, then Arlo has probably tried several things and can share what worked:
* Eliminating technical debt. * Ship at will. * Data-driven decision-making. * Creating powerful teams. * Egalitarian business structures and Teal organizations. * Authentic human relationships. * Writing code without writing bugs. And if you can’t tell what you’re in for from this description, then, well, I can’t help you. Whoever I am. (Totally not Arlo.)

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Abstract:
Top buzzwords today almost always include teamwork, collaboration, engagement, change, faster, better, and cheaper. Sounds like a lot! Luckily, you can achieve success in these with just one word…networking, schmoozing, rubbing elbows, connecting, or any word you choose that focuses on building solid, trusting relationships.
In the end, many of us get paid for who we know and who has the information we need, not what you know. There is not enough time in the day to know everything. On the other hand, there is enough time to build and foster relationships that you and your team can utilize to achieve better results.
There is an art and science to all this stuff. Join the conversation with Kupe to discuss ways to help you connect with others. One of the awesome things about this session is you’ll be able to start putting things into practice during the conference!
Kupe is a connector and has a goal in life to meet everyone! As the Founder & Principal of KupeTalks, he possesses over 20 years of helping companies achieve business value. Kupe feels the foundation to his effectiveness over the years begins and ends with improvisation. Kupe is a trained improvisational comedian and uses applied improvisation tools to help everyone be better collaborators, connectors and team players.
Kupe is the co-author of Business Analysis for Dummies and is an industry requested keynote speaker. Being a trained improvisational comedian, Kupe is sure to make you laugh while you’re learning. Kupe is a connector and has a goal in life to meet everyone!

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Abstract:
Do you make New Year's resolutions? How successful are you are keeping them? I'll bet some of you have some techniques that
have worked for you. I invite you to come share them and, for my part, I'll talk about tips from cognitive neuroscience.
We're really good at setting goals. We've been told to dream big, the sky is the limit. We tell others to "go for it." These are mostly American mantras, but now there's research that examines how our brains get in the way of achieving something when all we do is "believe we can do it." Maybe you'll get so excited you'll dust off those New Year's resolutions that you dropped by the wayside in the middle of January.
Linda Rising is an independent consultant who lives near Nashville, Tennessee. Linda has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the area of object-based design metrics. Her background includes university teaching as well as work in industry in telecommunications, avionics, and tactical weapons systems. She is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. Linda is the author of numerous articles and several books. The latest, More Fearless Change, co-authored with Mary Lynn Manns. Her web site is: www.lindarising.org

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Abstract:
Although I got famous for my work on Jacobson's use cases and all things agile, this is your chance to raise questions on any topic, at any level. Who knows what my responses will be. Here are some hints for you:
On my mind at the moment are "Guest Leadership" and "pull" cultures.
Guest leadership is when the guests lead. There are 10 times as many guests as hosts, 10 times as many employees as managers. Why are the hosts and managers leading?
What happens if everyone takes leadership moments, temporarily, as the situation calls for.
Pull cultures are those in which people feel drawn to take an action, in distinction to push cultures, in which someone pushes people to take actions. Public corporations are intrinsically push cultures at the top, thanks to the stock market. Creative work thrives in pull cultures, where pressure is less. What are the vocabulary of pull? How can we convert the push from above into space for pull below?
Additionally, I have spent the last five years traveling the globe, so that could be a source of questions.
Ask something, let's see what happens.

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Abstract:
Early in the agile movement, large technology challenges were often given to alchemist like wizards we called "Architects". They were essential, and sometimes helpful, but also hard to find and sometimes a single point of failure. Experimentation taught many of us the finding a new wizard was not the answer. Instead, the answer was to break down large problems into smaller problems distributed to a collection of builders who collectively and collaboratively took ownership of the system and its architecture.
Today, we have the same opportunity in the product space. Many companies are finding success by what I would like to discuss as "dynamic product discovery". To explore this topic, we can talk about who is needed for product discovery, how often is product discovery helpful, how can we blend product discovery and product delivery into a fluid cadence where product leaders work in one of both tracks, or dynamically float between the two.
Please show up ready to challenge the status quo and explore our new options around product learning, product discovery and the essential need to scale product learning in large systems, especially in IT shops where product and service may be playing second fiddle to customers and interactions.

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Abstract:
Many teams transitioning to agile struggle with testing activities, and deliver products that fail to delight their customers. Testers are often lost in agile transitions, left to fend for themselves on new cross-functional teams without training or support. Programmers may get training in development practices such as TDD, but not in the many types of testing for which the whole team should be responsible.
Please join Lisa to explore the whole-team approach to building in quality, and how testers and teams can build quality into their product and deliver the features and quality attributes valued by customers and stakeholders. Be ready to share your stories of how you and your teams learned ways to improve testing and quality.
Lisa Crispin is the co-author, with Janet Gregory, of More Agile Testing: Learning Journeys for the Whole Team (2014), Agile Testing: A Practical Guide for Testers and Agile Teams (2009), the LiveLessons Agile Testing Essentials video course, and “The Whole Team Approach to Agile Testing” 3-day training course. She co-authored Extreme Testing (2002) with Tip House. She is a contributor to Experiences of Test Automation by Dorothy Graham and Mark Fewster (Addison-Wesley, 2011), Beautiful Testing (O’Reilly, 2009) and other books. Lisa was voted by her peers as the Most Influential Agile Testing Professional Person at Agile Testing Days in 2012. She enjoys helping people find ways to build more quality into their software products, as well as hands-on testing. Please visit www.lisacrispin.com and www.agiletester.ca for more.

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This session is about product thinking, product ownership, and how to give customers and users what they need and not just what they ask for.
There’s always too much to build. Always. And, most of what we build doesn’t succeed. At least not to the level we’d hoped. Agile development alone doesn’t solve this biggest challenge with software development, and all product development for that matter. But, contemporary product thinking does bring us some practices that do help.
Come chat with Jeff and discuss the essentials of product thinking and how we use product discovery approaches to articulate and test solution ideas quickly and cost effectively before fully investing in production software. Feel free to ask questions about how stories and story maps can help, and any other product development questions that might come to mind.

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Abstract:
Lyssa Adkins is a passionate player in the Agile Coaching profession. She develops Agile Coaches to be the skilled and visionary change leaders that their organizations need, and that Agile calls for. In 2010, she co-founded the Agile Coaching Institute to answer that call. Since then, ACI has up-leveled the skills of close to 6,000 Agile Coaches and strategized with their organizations to develop Agile Coaching as a core capability for Agile transformation. She is the author of Coaching Agile Teams, which is still a top-10 Agile book seven years after publication. When you meet, she is likely to truly listen to you.
Lyssa likes to explore agile coaching, agile transformation, adult human development, human systems dynamics, societal change, organizational change, the benefits and costs of being human in the workplace, facilitating intense conflict, the role of nature, and books of all sorts. She tends toward a balance of the provocative and the practical, and likes to make sure she really understands someone's question before answering.

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