We will describe our journey from a process where design/planning work was performed away from development to one where small cross-functional Feature Teams self-organized to complete design, planning, and construction within the same sprint. Each team member is involved in getting READY, planning, executing and being DONE. The results we observed are an increase in team morale, more predictable results and accumulation of less debt, while maintaining a constant velocity. Our process is a deviation from the established approach where upfront work needs to be ready before starting a sprint.

Values can be powerful forces when applied to a small company. From their seed can come personalized principles and practices. By starting with agile values, and then making them your own, you can instill a creative force for change and adaptation necessary for success. Traditional agile practices become personalized through iterative improvement measured against these values. Different teams can create new practices that are applicable to their discipline. Most important, they frame every conversation and decision, enabling rapid execution and shared vision.

When charting new territory–-enterprise-scale Agile–-traditional roadmaps only take you so far. When landscapes change in weeks, product management must find a way to reconcile sprint plans and backlogs from multiple teams with longer-term product direction. David Wilby, SVP of Products at Borland, shares how his teams tackled the roadmap challenge during Borland’s Agile transformation. He’ll cover how roadmaps became a barrier to scaling Agile, how his teams adopted Agile roadmapping, the challenges, and the impact the new practices have had on Borland’s Agile transformation.

This experience report, by a project’s technical architect, details the adoption of agile methods across several teams after one high profile success. The organization had a long history of waterfall development and a clearly defined remit for technical architects. Years of refinement had led to a set of techniques which contradicted many of the ideals held by agile practitioners. The author’s challenge was to maintain agility and fulfill responsibilities inherited from waterfall processes without reverting to the conventional practices that ultimately lead to the architect’s ivory tower.

Today’s developers are quick to adopt leading-edge technologies that can accommodate project peaks and valleys, evolve and change, and support agile principles. Using the CollabNet platform, this session will demonstrate the agile best practice of continuous integration (CI) using cloud provisioning capabilities and the Hudson open source CI engine. Attendees will learn a framework that can be used in their environment, including an understanding of the components, tools, set up, and generalized use cases for development in both virtual private clouds and public clouds, like Amazon EC2.

W. Edwards Deming identified performance appraisal as one of the Seven Deadly Diseases of Management.

But annual appraisals are currently a fact of life in most organizations, in spite of their negative effects. Many companies are reluctant to give them up, because they don’t see what to do instead of the annual review.

I’ll walk through the assumptions behind performance evaluation and review, and share some of the recent research on the efficacy of annual reviews. Then I’ll offer alternatives that actually help people improve and build stronger relationships.

All respectable software craftsmen make efforts to keep their coding claws sharp. And solely working 9-5 on business applications will dull one’s whit. In this session we will broaden your coding horizons with some Ruby Kata and test your skills will some Ruby Sparring.

Over the last several years, innovative UX practitioners working in agile environments have improvised and invented ways to include effective user experience practice inside agile projects. This short talk describes many common emergent agile-ux practices. Some of these practices are lighter weight versions of traditional techniques, while others are new inventions combining the best of UX rigor with a collaborative and pragmatic twist. As a participant, you’ll leave with a buffet of useful UX techniques to add to or adapt your agile process.

What happens when the CIO decides the dev team needs to adopt agile practices and the dev team nods their heads but don’t plan on doing zilch? It is time to leverage those fancy shmancy influencing skills we agilists are so famous for. We’ll cover new fun tactics that have not yet been explored in some of the prevalent literature. All fresh information from the field.

Can my large, geographically distributed, systems program benefit from agile development methods? Absolutely. This talk presents real-world experiences applying agile practices to large, systems projects with a high degree of governance. The practices discussed are technical (continuous integration, test-driven development, user stories) and non-technical (communication, welcome changing requirements, frequent collaboration). And it presents several challenges we experienced while scaling agile practices and changes we hope to make on future programs.