Just testing in production

One of the key advantages of Agile over plan-driven approaches is that an Agile mindset acknowledges our ever-diminishing ability to usefully predict the future and focuses our efforts on managing change instead of trying to suppress it. This “new reality” has become pervasive enough to drive its own buzz word – VUCA, which stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity. But beyond the hype lies a truth that Agile leaders need to understand and embrace – that certain problems really do respond differently to our attempts to manage and solve them. Why does this matter? Because problem contexts that defy straightforward cause-and-effect expectations significantly impact productivity while simultaneously presenting much higher risks to success. Even worse, applying leadership approaches that aren’t matched to the problem context dramatically increases the danger of catastrophic failure.

In this session, we’ll examine how the Cynefin framework helps us make sense of what kinds of problems we’re dealing with and how we should approach them. We will then look at ten ways in which Agile frameworks, approaches and technical practices help us manage or even reduce complexity and one where they fall short. You will walk away with a deeper understanding of how - and why - the things we do as agilists increase stability and reduce risks for our teams.

People don't like being told what to do, especially knowledge workers. Yet in many work settings we give feedback that is directive in nature. What would it be like to receive feedback that, instead of making us ashamed of our failures, helped us to learn and grow? What would it be like to give feedback that enabled deep and sustained learning and growth in another person, while still being perfectly honest?

During this talk you will learn about Developmental Feedback, which enables the giver of the feedback to be clear and speak truth, and enables the receiver of the feedback to absorb it without defensiveness, and with a sense of invitation to learn and grow. You will learn about a variety of feedback types, how to have a "shared sensemaking conversation," what Impact Feedback and "The Story I Tell Myself" feedback actually are, and review sample dialogues. We will explore the conditions necessary for effective developmental feedback conversations, such as psychological safety and timeliness. You will emerge with a practical tool you can use with anyone (not just at work) to speak your truth while respecting the other person’s humanity, leading to lasting change and deeper relationships.

Good news: Test-driven practices have jumped the chasm to general acceptance! The bad news, though, is that while TDD, BDD, and ATDD are prominent buzzwords in the industry today, they are rife with misconceptions, with many people incorrectly assuming that being test-driven is all about testing.

In this talk, learners will leave with a clearer understanding of Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven-Development (BDD), and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), and gain practical insights into how these practices can help teams develop better software. We will gain an appreciation for TDD as being primarily a specification and design technique, and how to get the whole team involved earlier in the delivery cycle using a BDD approach.

Many times, meetings are called to figure out what to do.

Many times, these meetings fail to do just that

On my current project, we use "scarecrows" to make sure that we focus on getting a solution and getting everyone's input

Government Agile transformations can feel like overwhelming efforts – but do not abandon hope! This interactive, audience-driven presentation reviews how government and large organizations ESCAPE common Agile adoption challenges.
You - the audience - will prioritize your pain points; we’ll focus on the five Agile hells most highly prioritized. We will discuss real examples of “escaping” out of each Agile hell, with pro tips and success patterns you can apply.
The Agile hells we've escaped include:

• No Transformation hell - A federal program or department wants to change but can’t start or can’t finish
• Too Fast hell - Newly Agile federal programs sometimes respond TOO rapidly, too often changing priorities.
• Technical hell - Programs can become bogged down in technical debt and manual processes.
• No Trust hell - Government delivery can be slowed by lack of trust between contractors and feds, between business and IT, or between compliance and delivery groups.
• Product Owners hell - Government Product Owners can be unavailable, think they are managers, aren’t empowered to provide vision, or struggle with prioritization
• Too Big hell- A frequent pattern in federal Agile! Large batches produce slow progress, low visibility and high complexity, seen in big programs, big deployments, and big contracts.
• Collaboration hell - Government teams can struggle with collaboration within the same organization across roles and across the fed-contractor divide.
• Stove-piped hell - Government organizations can struggle to collaborate across contractual or organizational boundaries within the same enterprise
• Leadership hell - An organization can only be as agile as its leadership. In the government, how can you work with leaders who aren't ready to be agile?

For each Agile hell, we focus on successful techniques to escape from these common dynamics. Unlike other presentations, we won't be doing a deep dive, but we will cover the most important challenges our audience face.

The talk walks through lessons learned from a specific government project, jumping head-first into agile, open source, and (oh dear) the cloud. In the jet plane metaphor, it's not about the theory of why a plane should fly (as a physicist), but about the big and little forces that will act on it in practice (as a test pilot).

Do you work on programs requiring collaboration of 30 people or more? Have you heard of Scrum@Scale? While many people have heard of SAFe, far fewer are familiar with Scrum@Scale. Did you know Scrum@Scale was built by Jeff Sutherland, the co-creator of Scrum? And that the very first scaled Scrum project began in 1983?

Come learn about Scrum@Scale, where it is being used, and why it may be a better fit for your organization than other scaling methodologies. I am both a SAFe and Scrum@Scale practitioner and trainer, and will provide a balanced comparison with pros / cons.

Many agile talks are about the benefits of cross-functional teams and integrating them with your business and changing their structure to better align to the value delivery. And amazing things happen with you get all of this stuff working together. There are industries and organizations that can't do this. Not because they don't want to or that they are not interested in the modern ways of working, but because they don't have the skills in-house and the cost of bringing all of those skills into the organization are inhibited by constraints of one sort or another.

The use of contractors and outsourcing of IT development was a major push for many years as businesses focused on their core capabilities. Industries like government couldn't compete with the marketplace for IT skills and so turned to contractors to fill the needs in many organizations. Now, these same organizations feel they need to bring the modern agile ways of working to their organizations. So how do they actually get the benefits of modern agile ways of working and delivering products while continuing to use contractors for most of the work?

This talk will focus on 3 areas of achieving most of the benefits of modern agile work while continuing to use contracted work. First, how to decide what to outsource. The decision of which pieces or work to use contractors for is the most important. Second, how to actually hire contractors. The procurement process can be evolved to be more agile and to encourage finding contractors that will drive toward the desired collaboration. Finally, how to manage and work with contractors. The day to day grind of working where real delivery will be accomplished.

Getting benefits from an agile framework and delivery is important and can still be achieved when some of the work is outsourced and the importance of defining and finding the right contractor are vital to achieving the desired success.

My team was asked to build an integration with an old legacy application which had no programming API whatsoever, and we were so excited. How did we tackle that challenge? Did we succeed? What happened next? Come and listen to find out. And I promise the ending will surprise and/or depress you.

Sometimes, a good debate is what’s needed. Conventional wisdom is boring. Agile is old enough now to inject some alternative thoughts. This session seeks to use the idea of the French Salon. A salon is a gathering of people under the roof of an inspiring host, held partly to amuse one another and partly to refine the taste and increase the knowledge of the participants through conversation. The intent is to combine learning, good manners, and conversational skill. Salonnières provided a place to gather, a topic, a structure or starting point for the gathering, and ensured that there would be a good mix of opinions among the guest list. “Salonnières therefore had to perform a difficult balancing act, cultivating individual merit without letting one guest overshadow the others.” Therefore, the goal is to facilitate the topic of Long Term Planning in Agile and whether there are any responsible ways to perform and execute it. Participants will bring their ideas along with an open mind to developing new possibilities.

Changing the practices, behaviors, and beliefs of people and teams is hard; and organizations are many multiples harder. As agilest, we are educated to seek and deliver value. But that is one of the first big issues. What are the chances that we can know what is truly valuable for the people within the team or organization, both individually and collectively?

Another big issue is that most agilists are well-educated in frameworks, practices, and tools, but our training doesn’t generally prepare us for the other aspects imperative to implementing lasting agility and change. There is little focus in our standard training on the impact of systems and structures, and even less on internal aspects such as morals/ethics, ego, psychology, and culture.

I would like to present to you two models which opened my eyes over the past 6 years to a much larger awareness and understanding of how to approach agile transformation for impactful lasting change, and show you how to apply them to your work efforts. Seeing people, teams, and organizations through the lens of these models has greatly changed my understanding and approach and I believe has strongly benefited the outcomes of my efforts.

Spiral Dynamics Integral (SDi) is a bio-psycho-social developmental model showing itself through color bands representing levels of increasing inclusive evolution. AQAL – All Quadrants, All Levels [All Lines] – models a set of quadrants depicting our internal and external, individual and collective attributes and aspects. Woah! Don’t be thrown by that crazy-sounding stuff. Stick with me.

While those models might not sound very applicable to decreasing your cycle time to deliver your latest microservices through your fully-automated DevSecOps pipeline, without awareness of these models, you may never actually lead your team(s) to the point of decreasing cycle times, much less get your organization to the point of benefiting from DevSecOps practices.

Please join us for this session as we explore how these models allow us to be more successful in our work as Scrum Masters, Coaches, and/or Leaders. Benefit from learning new ways to see your system, avoiding and removing challenges and impediments you face in your sluggish, stuck, or failing agile journeys. Begin to see the world in a whole new way, not just at work, but in all aspects of life.

The federal government, and many local governments, have embraced agile. This has been helpful in terms of incremental progress for the "how" of building software.

However, it's not enough.

The next big shift is when government agencies lift their focus from IT project delivery to digital product management - focusing on the "what" should be built and "why" it should be built. Such a shift will move agencies from incremental progress in delivering mission value to a ground-breaking shift in how missions are supported via technology.

We all know the Agile Frameworks - Scrum, Kanban...they are on the web for all to see, but what brings Agile to life? In this discussion, Allan Guyet, Agile Coaching Practice Leader, will discuss how "being intentional" in your role as a coach will 10x the performance of your Agile teams and create excited teams and customers.

Geared toward new Coaches but with plenty of tricks for veterans, Allan will share his experiences on how "being intentional" helped prioritize features, build trust with stakeholders, and shift mindsets. Filled with his classic anecdotes and analogies, the stories will make you feel like you were there.