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.

Agile Methodology has been widely accepted in the private sector for a number of years and has caught the attention of government program managers as a process for software development designed to make work more efficient. Chief Technology Officers (CTO) and Chief Architects of the Lockheed Martin programs will provide an overview of the challenges experienced by the program’s leadership when balancing between Agile and traditional methodologies used on Government programs.

So much of moving traditional test teams towards agile methods & testing is focused towards the individual tester and testing techniques. As often is the case in agility—directors, managers, team leaders and test-centric project managers are sort of marginalized. But not in this session! Here we want to focus on agile testing from the perspective of the Test Leader. We’ll pair off into groups and examine some of the greatest challenges when it comes to leading a testing team from traditional towards agile testing and emerge real-world strategies for surviving and thriving in agile testing.

Could an executive team be happy using Scrum? Yes, it’s possible! Picture the scene: executives of strategic departments (financial, HR, IT, sales & marketing, production, etc.) being part of a cross-functional executive team…an executive Product Owner prioritizing an Executive Product Backlog that helps the team to follow the company’s vision. What are the main challenges of an executive ScrumMaster? In this session I will show a real case of a Brazilian company that uses Scrum in their executive team.