Conference Presentations

Keynote: Magnificence: Culture Hacking, the Common Platform, and the Coming Golden Era
Video

A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. The unique challenges of creating software have demanded totally new types...

Jim McCarthy, McCarthy Technologies Inc.
The Five Facets of an Agile Organization
Slideshow

Is agile—or lean, kanban, lean startup, etc.—starting to follow the path of other management buzzwords in your organization? Is it losing steam, now resembling only a minor change from the old ways? Have you compromised to "make agile work in our organization?” 

George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions
Governing Agile Teams: Disciplined Strategies to Increase Agile Effectiveness
Slideshow

Many organizations have successfully adopted agile on a subset of their projects, while, at the same time, struggled to do so across entire departments. A common challenge is the need to overhaul the IT governance strategy so that it will work with agile teams. This is a serious issue for...

Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
It’s Agile, Not Fragile
Video

The time is now to rethink the way you and your teams build, test and deliver applications. In this session, we will share the insights, best practices and software innovation to address the challenge of rapid delivery of today’s user-centric applications. 

Kelly Emo and Michael Cooper, HP
STARCANADA 2013: The Tester's Role in Agile Planning
Slideshow

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while...

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Scaling Agile at Dell: Real-life Problems - and Solutions
Slideshow

The transition from waterfall-based software development to an agile, iterative model carries with it well-known challenges and problems-entrenched cultures, skill gaps, and organizational change management. For a large, globally distributed software development organization, an entirely different set of practical challenges comes with scaling agile practices. Last year the Dell Enterprise Solutions Group applied agile practices to more than forty projects ranging from a collocated single team project to projects that consisted of fifteen Scrum teams located across the US and India. Geoff Meyer and Brian Plunkett explain how Dell mined these real-life projects for their empirical value and adapted their agile practices into a flexible planning model that addresses the project complexities of staffing, scale, interdependency, and waterfall intersection.

Geoffrey Meyer, Dell Inc. l Enterprise Product Group
Doing Agile in a Waterfall World? Without Breaking Your Neck
Slideshow

Although many of us want to use only agile practices, we often work alongside teams with strong waterfall traditions. If you’ve had trouble finding ways for your agile ideas to co-exist peacefully with traditional lifecycles, this session is for you. Jared Richardson describes key integration points between waterfall and agile teams, and demonstrates the best ways to work together-or to perform clean hand-offs, if necessary. He shows how to use adaptive planning while still providing accurate progress status to traditional PMO counterparts. Jared reviews popular agile practices and discusses how they best function in a hybrid environment. Together, you and Jared will build a common vocabulary, examine two project models-one traditional and one agile, and then combine them in a hybrid that keeps the best of both worlds.

Jared Richardson, RoleModel Software
Sprint Reviews that Attract, Engage, and Enlighten Stakeholders
Slideshow

Are you suffering from chronic disinterest in what your team is delivering? Are your product owners unavailable or distracted? Are your sprint reviews ho-hum experiences with low attendance? If you answered Yes to any of these questions, your agile teams are in trouble-and you need to attend this session. Experienced agile coach Bob Galen explores real-world patterns for how to increase the interest in-and the energy and value of-your sprint reviews. First, Bob explains how to prepare properly, the keys to dry runs, and the role of a Master of Ceremonies. Then he examines ways to orchestrate pro-active reviews that include the whole team and engage your audience when demonstrating "working software." Next Bob discusses how to perform a review follow-up and gather feedback for high-impact improvements. Finally, Bob wraps up by exploring ways to make sprint reviews a centerpiece of your agile adoption and transformation.

Bob Galen, RGalen Counsulting Group, LLC
IT Governance and Compliance in an Agile World
Slideshow

Establishing IT governance and compliance practices is essential for organizations that have regulatory or audit requirements. The good news is that you can be agile and still comply with Sarbanes-Oxley, CFR 21, HIPAA, and other regulatory imperatives. Done well, IT controls actually help you improve both productivity and quality. Bob Aiello describes how to implement IT controls in frameworks such as ISACA Cobit and ITIL v3 that many regulatory frameworks require-while maintaining agile practices. Bob's guidance includes specific examples of establishing IT controls: separation of duties, work-item to change-set traceability, physical and functional configuration audits, and more. Bob explains how these practices help government, defense, and corporations scale agile practices where audit and regulatory compliance is a must.

Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Ready and Fit: Adopting Agile in Highly Regulated Environments
Slideshow

If you live and work in a highly regulated environment (HRE)-medical devices, DoD and its contractors, nuclear energy, or other life-critical systems-this session is for you. For the past three years, the SEI has been researching agile and lean adoptions in the US Department of Defense. Suzanne Miller presents the organizational and cultural factors they identified as most important for development organizations to demonstrate when embarking on an agile adoption program. In the SEI's technology transition research, Suzanne and her team found that the more closely an organization meets the readiness and fit criteria, the more likely it is that the adoption will succeed. Suzanne discusses the risks and challenges that agile adoption presents to HREs, and presents ways to mitigate risks and overcome challenges.

Suzanne Miller, Software Engineering Institute

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