Every day, agile teams are solving real world complex problems. This requires creative problem solving by team members. Often, we end up with few team members with dominant personality tend to hijack these meetings. Brainstorming in its truest sense is intended to be a practical approach towards creative problem solving as a team. The term Brainstorming means "Using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective". Utilizing the team's collective creative power in your (problem solving, idea generating) meetings is a powerful way to enhance collaboration and idea creation among team members.

In this highly practical workshop, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy will introduce the audience to a variety of Brainstorming games. Attendees will practice and take back variety of ideas and concepts to facilitate a fun and effective Brainstorming session.

To name a few, these games are intended to:

• Get the creative juices flowing
• Think outside the box
• Comfortable with bad ideas
• Identify and Zap negativity

This session is targeted towards Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Managers or any team members who are looking to add more facilitation tools to their tool belt and put them to immediate use in their teams and meetings.

Everyday, Agile teams are solving real world complex problems. Real world complex problems require creative problem solving by team members. Brainstorming in its truest sense is intended to be a practical approach to creative problem solving. Alex Osborn along with his team in 1939, coined the term "Brainstorming" which means- "Using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective."

In this fun and practical workshop, Pradeepa will introduce to bunch of Brainstorming games that will get the creative juices flowing in your agile team and yields better collaboration among team members.

All the games are based on the brainstorming principles defined by Alex Osborn:

1. Focus on quantity instead of quality

2. Allow no criticism

3. Welcome far-fetched ideas

4. Build upon each other ideas

This session is targeted for Scrum Masters, Agile Coaches, Managers or any team member who are looking to add more tools to their tool belt, who are looking different ideas to take back to your teams to facilitate a fun and effective Brainstorming session. 

Have you ever been part of a team that found collaboration difficult or awkward? Did the team feel frustrated about their progress and their meeting outcomes? Do you know if you are collaborating for the right reasons at the right time? Is it possible that you are you under-collaborating or over-collaborating?

My inspiration for this topic came from personal experience on attending way too many “collaborative” sessions with little to no outcome. To make the meetings worthwhile, we tried having set agendas, time-boxed discussions etc. Very few times we succeeded in driving towards results, and many times we failed to reach consensus. Oftentimes ideas were shot down, damaging trust and fostering fear among team members. How do you get over these hurdles and make collaboration worthwhile?

Pradeepa Narayanaswamy will expose the power of disciplined collaboration and talks about the difference between good and bad collaboration. She also discusses the divergent and convergent thinking phases that are critical for successful collaboration. She talks about critical thinking and ideas to promote critical thinking that helps in successful collaboration. She shares ideas to foster trust, a crucial role at play in collaboration, among team members. She also differentiates when to and when not to collaborate.

As an Agile team member, learn how to make collaboration efforts focused and worthwhile. As a Scrum Master, learn to look for collaboration mishaps and how to skillfully promote critical thinking an essential component for successful collaboration.

It is not a question of if a team is going to have a conflict; it is a question of when. Equipping them to deal with conflict is more than creating agreements or having a good facilitator. We look at a conflict model that focuses on dynamics of conflict by understanding- 1. Cognitive skills:self-awareness about triggers, hot spots, emotions,behaviors. 2. Emotional skills:reading emotions, body language, balancing emotions, using curiosity 3. Behavioral skills:understanding others’ perspectives and needs, avoiding 8 destructive behaviors, embracing 8 constructive behavior. In an organizational setting, it is important to understand the source (culture, interdependence, incompatibility, personality, power, etc.) and types of conflict (cognitive vs. affective). Creating awareness about conflict processes, retaliatory cycles and building a conflict profile can empower teams engage in constructive disagreements.

Have you ever had an experience where someone said "I know how it feels ...", and felt that they really meant it? Servant leaders must strive to understand and empathize with others in order to lead agile teams. It sounds simple, but is not easy. In this session,  Ram Srinivasan will explore the brain science behind empathy and offer suggestions on how to develop this skill.

In agile teams, it’s inevitable that team members are expected to be more cross-functional and produce high quality products for their customers. How can agile team members become more cross-functional and take ownership of quality? Often times there seems to be a scarcity of testing talents in agile teams. How can agile teams create high quality products when working with very few or no testing talents?

For agile team members to take ownership of quality, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy exposes the power of “Pair Testing”, a technique that promotes rapid feedback to produce high quality products. For the scarce testing talents, an effective way to become more cross-functional, one approach is for team members to pair up on various (unit, integration, exploratory and several others) testing efforts that emphasize the shared eye on quality and learning. Pradeepa talks about several options for pairing opportunities between various specialties on an agile team. She also talks about some new opportunities to pair with DevOps, Operations, Sales, Marketing and Support members to name a few.

As a new or an experienced agile team member, learn how to spearhead this technique in your team at various levels to generate buzz on other teams. As a tester, learn how to get the non-testing talents excited and experience the value of pair testing. 

This session includes a fun Pairing activity and a Group discussion. 

In lot of agile teams, often times, all the team members will be doing the grooming and planning exercise as a team. Often times, defining the behaviors is either ignored, overlooked, skimped or done by individuals on their own without a common understanding as a team.

To solve this problem, I have used this hands-on time-boxed activity for all of my teams to define behaviors as they move along in the sprint. This will help all the team members to have a shared understanding on their users and their behaviors as it relates to their user story. This is an activity that any agile team member can take and implement the next day at work.

As more and more organizations are transitioning to agile, it’s inevitable that Agile testing is not just a concept any more. It is also not just about placing a tester in every team. What is so radically different now? How to be successful at agile testing? How to be an effective cross-functional team that embeds and honors all specialties including testing?

In this presentation, I am going to share my teams’ success with Agile testing and how we incorporated these 3 aspects – people, process and tools/techniques. This talk will benefit any members in an organization who has a stake in the product quality. It is also highly beneficial for those agile testers (from aspiring to veteran) to understand the 3 main aspects as it relates to testing and why we need to embrace- not just one, not two, but all these 3 aspects to be successful in Agile testing. 

As more and more organizations are transitioning to Agile, there still exist a lack of understanding on how testing fits in the Agile teams. Is it just about placing a tester in every team? How can we realign the team members including testers from being on silos to an effective cross-functional team? Pradeepa Narayanaswamy shares her insight on the key basics of Agile testing along with understanding the Agile testing mindset and testing goals. Pradeepa also shares her ideas on how to manage defects, what to measure as metrics and what to document. Learn what you need to know as a tester who are new to Agile. If you are an experienced Agile tester, review these important basics and realign the concepts that may have been overlooked or forgotten in your teams.