Agile 2009 - New to Agile

Painless Iteration Planning

chicjulie — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 04:32:38 +0000

Plan an iteration - sounds pretty easy right? It can be easy using a well defined framework. This sessions will cover the following:

Owner or facilitator of the meeting
When to hold the meeting
Whom to invite
Materials - please note that this session is not tool specific other than Sharpies and Sticky Notes! But the plan can be input into your tool of choice.
Purpose
Agenda
Planning Data - what to bring to the planning meeting
Output & Deliverables - All contribute to the iteration planning meeting

A handout will be provided for future reference.

Just Enough Design: Modeling With Agility

Ken Collier — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:38:58 +0000

Instead of a whole new set of modeling techniques, agile development requires a new way of applying good modeling methods like UML, ER, and UCD, in an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary (Agile) manner. This tutorial introduces an agile software modeling process that strikes the right sufficient-up-front and just-in-time balance. Participants are introduced to a blend of domain modeling, usability modeling, data modeling, and architectural design. We will utilize appropriate UML, ER, and UCD methods in an agile fashion to help limit technical debt, and increase design quality.

A Day in the Life of a User Story

jeantabaka — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 20:44:03 +0000

Jean Tabaka passionately believes in highly interactive, collaborative conference experiences for helping people new to Agile embrace its practices. This ½ day tutorial drives a quick-paced set of 8 exercises for attendees working in small groups. From unranked backlog items, to fully tasked out stories, each exercise builds on the work of the previous exercise. Through these series of activities, attendees learn to collaborate and create great user stories that turn into tasks, estimates, and commitments. The tutorial ends with a retrospective of how to apply these practices in real life.

Nano-Incremental Development, or Elephant Carpaccio

alistair — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 16:45:33 +0000

In a quick survey, 17 of 20 programmers said they didn’t know how to slice feature requests to the sub-day level. In contrast, top programmers easily take them to 15-30 minute programming episodes. What does it take for people to make the transition?

In this workshop, analysts and programmers will pair up, decompose an problem into initial requests, then the programmers will deliver those features in five 10-minute iterations, the analyst adjusting requests on the fly.

This workshop works well with experienced programmers. Programming language and environment don’t matter.

Malleable Code: How Tests Improve Production Code

eric_anderson — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 05:43:09 +0000

Test Driven Development (TDD) is not just about the tests. Test Driven Development is also a design discipline. In fact, many TDD veterans prefer using the acronym to refer to Test Driven Design. So, how exactly does TDD improve design? TDD improves design by making the developer more aware of fundamental design principles. TDD does not force good design. TDD rewards for good design and punishes for bad design.

Through test-first development, design principles are moved from abstract, academic concepts to concrete needs.

"Done" - Are We There Yet?

vg — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 07:37:09 +0000

One of the core values expressed in the agile manifesto is “working software over comprehensive documentation” because working software is what delivers value to our customers. Agile development requires a sofware development team have working software ready to deploy at the end of each iteration; but accomplishing this can be harder than it seems, especially when first starting with agile. In this highly interactive session you will understand how a team definition of “Done” is necessary to making agile delivery possible, and what you can do to make it happen while avoiding the pitfalls.

An Introduction to Agile Estimating and Planning

mikecohn — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 02:36:18 +0000

Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision-making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with “Planning Poker.” Both short-term iteration and long-term release planning will be covered.

Esther and Diana's Excellent Retrospective Adventures

DianaLarsen — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 16:54:53 +0000

Join Esther and Diana, the authors of Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great!, on an interactive journey of Adventure. Follow the trail of a flexible framework for Retrospectives, a map for designing and leading Retrospectives. Retrospectives offer the greatest lever for project or process improvement—based on the solid data of a team’s immediate past experience of success and failure. The Adventure lies in holding Retrospectives throughout the project—capturing, managing, and disseminating technical knowledge and process wisdom to improve current and future projects.

The Kanban Game

yattom — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:51:04 +0000

This game is designed to teach/learn/experiment how to use Kanban. In this session, everyone will play it and learn the way how Kanban works, effective use, and how to teach their colleagues “Kanban.”

I have designed this game to teach new members the Kanban. Attendees form teams and will have a set of task cards. They will build a Kanban Board from the tasks and ‘commence’ on the project. Using dice, the project might finish by the time or not, as in reality. An important part of the game is how teams must face problems happening by accident.

Ineffective Pairing, How To

brett.schuchert — Wed, 04 Feb 2009 15:15:09 +0000

Most sessions show us how to do various agile practices right. What is sorely lacking is the opportunity to learn how to do the practices wrong. How can we be expected to bring agile into an organization successfully without mastery of that key skill?

Pairing isn’t controversial, done effectively it: * reduces defects (by up to 86%, according to the 2000 University of Utah study), * improves productivity (up to three-fold, according to the 1975 US Army study)

However, learning by doing wrong is actually an effective learning technique, and that’s what you’ll see here.