Retrospectives are the core of agility. And yet they are the scrum ceremony that is most frequently skipped. Many teams like the idea of the retrospective but find them boring, or worse ineffective.

This talk aims to re-energize retrospective facilitators and participants. Starting with the basics: "what's a retrospective and how do you run one?", this talk reveals 7 secrets that lead to more engaging, more effective retrospectives.

You'll learn:

* The best way to ensure your retrospectives lead to real change

* The "pledge" everyone on your team should take before participating

* How to know who to include in each retrospective

* The single most important thing you can do to keep your team engaged during the retro

* And much, much more!

A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today's executives are asking their teams how they'll get them there. While we have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, executives have a fiduciary responsibility to the performance of their organizations. They demand a greater level of assurance that what you plan to do is actually going to work. Executives are sick and tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Better than anyone, executives see the dysfunction in their organizations. They want line of sight to how agile is going to help them make things better. 

This talk is going to explore a safe, pragmatic, and repeatable formula for leading change in large organizations. The Holy Grail for an executive is to tie dollars spent and activities performed, to internal improvement metrics and ultimately improved business performance.

So why does pair programming (or any form of pairing really) work? Well rather than tell you why, let's experience it! 

This is a simple 3 round exercise that you can do with your teams and managers to demonstrate the benefits of pairing. It will show the linkage between having a shared mental model through collaboration and ease of integrating the resulting work.

(This talk was well-received in 2015, so we can do an updated version for 2016)

DevOps as a buzzword is gaining traction, but what does it really mean? Managers, non-techies, and developers-new-to-devops will get a guided demo of development automation. See all the cool tools in action - continuous integration, automated testing, cloud deployment, etc. More importantly, we'll walk through what they do, and why that adds value to a project. 

This talk will...

• Break down the buzzwords and define some key technical practices in plain english.
• Uncover the pain that leads teams to seek greater automation.
• Demonstrate a continuous integration pipeline working in practice via live demo.
• Diminish the knowledge gap between technical practitioners and managers/analysts/coaches.
• Level-up the vocabulary of non-technical attendees.
• Introduce practices to developers who don't yet work in an automated environment.
• Spark "ah-ha" moments to convert skeptics into DevOps believers!

By the way, all of the tools in the demo are some combination of free and/or open source. DevOps doesn't have to cost a lot.

This talk is inspired by the book ‘The Confidence Code’ by Katty Kay and Claire Shipman.

What is confidence and how do you know you have it?   While confidence is partly influenced by genetics, it is not a fixed psychological state.  However, you won’t discover it thinking positive thoughts or by simply squaring your shoulders and faking it.  It requires work and choices: less focus on people pleasing and perfectionism and more action, risk taking and fast failures.  This is why it can seem harder for women because these behaviors aren’t typically the ‘norm’ for women but generally come naturally for men.

In this talk we will explore the roots of confidence and the gender gap between men and women.  To ground the learnings, we will also hear interview summaries from four great and diverse women in agile: 

 Lyssa Adkins, Esther Derby, Ellen Grove, and Kat Conner

As timelines on application development and delivery continue to shorten, it’s no longer enough just to ask folks to work faster. Many managers are stuck between missing deadlines or burning out their people.

This was just one of the challenges for Promontory Interfinancial Network when it chose to implement Agile Portfolio Management over three years ago to speed the deployment of new financial technology software in an IT division of over 80 employees. Since its implementation, the number successful projects has more than doubled and late-stage overload has essentially been eliminated. Along with improving productivity, project visibility, resource allocation, and clarity of prioritization, the process has also been a highlight in audits and examinations as it demonstrates management oversight and risk mitigation.

In this session, Simon Storm, Senior Director of Enterprise Applications at Promontory, and the project lead in implementing Agile Portfolio Management, shares learnings from the implementation by the IT Management Team. He discusses how to get management buy-in, tips for customizing the Agile process for your institution, and his insights of how spearheading the Agile process can significantly advance your career by putting yourself in the driver’s seat of improving your organization’s productivity and collaboration.

Government missions are complicated undertakings; wouldn't it be great to be able to understand all of your key components at a glance? This session will review the use of a Business Canvas to capture what your organization does, regardless of size or mission, on a single page.  It will also cover  analyses that can be done using such a canvas, both logically and via experiments, and how this can fit into transformation. The demonstration will also show how decisions you make for improvements  on your canvas can fit into your project or program portfolio.

This interactive demonstration will walk you through the concepts using a real Government organization.

We firmly believe that automated testing puts the "A" in "Agile". Without an effective suite of automated tests your ability to be truly agile (that is embrace change) can only be based on the hope that your latest change doesn't have unintended consequences. Additionally, without automated tests, you are missing a vital component in getting feedback into the development team's hands. In our travels, we have encountered many organizations that are struggling with automated testing. These organizations are successfully adopting many Agile techniques but are failing when it comes to automated testing. We frequently hear "Automated testing just doesn't work for us" (eerily reminiscent of the days when we would hear, "Agile just doesn't work for us"). From our experience addressing their challenges, we have identified anti-patterns common across these organizations. These anti-patterns look like they should work, but are in fact doing more harm than good.

This talk is about those anti-patterns. We have given those anti-patterns a name and a face to help organizations understand why they are not getting the benefits from automated testing that others are. We describe several anti-patterns, such as the "Ice Cream Cone", the "Monolith", the "Sunk Cost". We explain why these anti-patterns appear to be good solutions, what makes them attractive, and why they do more harm than good. We talk about the right approach and draw on our experiences helping organizations adopt a robust automated testing strategy that instills confidence and provides fast feedback to the development team. We explain what benefits from automated testing the anti-pattern is preventing. 

Empowerment. All of the agile literature focuses on it being a key characteristic of a successful Product Owner. Necessary to ensure decisions can be made quickly and representative of business value. Yet in most environments, particularly in the public sector, the notion of a single Product Owner empowered to represent the multitude of stakeholders isn't feasible. In this session, if you have a situation where you are a Product Owner, or know a Product Owner, who is not in that ideal textbook situation (and even those who are), learn how we can harness the power of classic and emerging innovation methods to put you in a position of success.

There is much talk about diversity in the software development field and in the tech industry in general, and yet most teams and organizations comprise mostly a single cultural group. The dominant group may be 20- and 30-something white males, as is common in Silicon Valley, or some other culturally homogenous group, such as H1B holders from the same country, as is common in large corporations. 

When nearly everyone in an organization has the same general worldview, problem-solving approach, educational background, life experience, and so forth, the organization tends to suffer from groupthink - they can only conceive of a single approach to achieving a goal or solving a problem. When faced with a unique challenge or an unexpected change in circumstances, such an organization often has great difficulty.

In contrast, a diverse organization can bring to bear a variety of perspectives, experiences, collaboration styles, and problem-solving approaches. The rich blend of differences enables the organization to adapt to change and to overcome unexpected challenges creatively and flexibly. How can we build a more diverse workforce in the software development field?

While there are many examples of Agile  methodologies being used in government, the number of agencies realizing success from it is much lower. A recent survey of Federal CIOs shows that while over 90 percent of respondents reported some form of Agile adoption, 50 percent believe they are ineffective at implementing Agile.

So why the gap? If agencies can stand it up, why are they stumbling to realize the promises of Agile?

Understanding this gap and the reasons causing agencies to stumble will help you to recognize similar issues impeding Agile adoption, understand ways to address those challenges, and reflect on your own journey transitioning to Agile. 

This presentation will address these questions by telling the story of ongoing Agile adoption within the IRS around a large-scale IT modernization project. It will describe the organizational characteristics that challenged Agile adoption and integration, and share lessons learned through our Agile journey to date.

There are dozens of quality project management applications to chose from today. But most are either complex or costly. This presentation will show how you can effectively use github issues and Waffle.io. The beauty of this strategy is that most shops today use github and waffle.io does a great job of providing a visual, Kanban representation of github issues. Discover how Corgibytes.com uses Waffle.io and github issues to provide project management for multiple clients. 

The presentation will cover how to set up Waffle.io and cover strategies for effective and efficient use of Kanban. It will also cover tricks and techniques used to circumvent some of the limitations of github issues.