people management

Now that agile has gone mainstream, team-level development is not the only way organizations are implementing agile. Some senior management teams are trying to understand how they can implement agile-and lean-principles and practices from the top down. Jon Stahl demonstrates agile and lean techniques applied in a new way with certain constraints. With these techniques, your organization can begin its journey toward becoming an agile enterprise. However, before beginning, it is important that management “see the whole”-customers, projects, applications, people, leadership, financials, and standard work products-and start implementing and practicing the culture they wish to create. To help PMOs support this journey, Jon shares some guiding principles that can be applied to both agile and waterfall approaches.

Specification by Example is a collaborative approach for constructing executable requirements. Examples demonstrate how the system should operate through the eyes of its users and shows understanding of the application’s functions. Michael Connolly demonstrates the practical and easy-to-implement Specification by Example method which he uses to write user stories and acceptance criteria. This direct approach, in which requirements are elaborated via executable code, creates a solid communication bridge between non-technical and technical staff and managers within the organization. Eventually, these executable requirements become the basis for the system’s acceptance test suite. As a take away, Michael provides participants with a lightweight requirements document format and an acceptance criteria framework to help you translate written specifications into automation.

Acceptance Test-driven Development (ATDD) is a popular topic these days-everyone’s excited about the idea of writing tests prior to development. Yet many teams run into difficulties as they attempt to implement this practice. It’s all too easy to fall into the trap of writing acceptance tests that mostly specify keystrokes and button clicks. Join "Cheezy" Morgan as he offers an overview of ATDD while sharing his experiences and insights gained working with numerous teams implementing ATDD. "Cheezy" will take you on a journey of discovery, demonstrating practical techniques for writing ATDD tests that describe the essence of what they are specifying while hiding unnecessary details that obfuscate their meaning. Because ease of maintenance is a key to ATDD’s long-term ROI, "Cheezy" shows how to structure and layer test code to reduce brittleness and fragility so your ATDD test suite will retain its usefulness well into the future.

Adopting agile is often a difficult proposition with many variables and sometimes uneven results. Recognizing when your adoption isn't working well and taking pro-active actions to put it back on track are essential. So, how do you know if your adoption is proceeding through rough but expected waters or running the risk of failing? Thomas Stiehm describes the signs of serious adoption problems and the steps you can take to fix them. Leveraging ten years of experience helping teams adopt agile, Tom walks through the many successes and failures he’s seen and, more importantly, the mistakes companies and people made that led to those failures. Learn the remediation steps you can take to re-energize and re-center your adoption efforts. Don’t let small missteps cascade into failure. Instead, join in and take back an action plan that’s sure to increase the odds of making your agile adoption a win for you, your teams, and your company.