Better Software - September 2008 - (Page ADP9) PRE-CONFERENCE TuTORIALS HALF-DAY TUTORIALS Mg Experiencing Agility from Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software MONDAy, NOvEMBER 10, 8:30-12:00 A Certified Scrum trainer, Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes—from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. He can be reached at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com. An agile coach with Rally Software Development, Jean Tabaka has more than twenty-five years of experience in IT. After studying DSDM in the late 1990s, Jean became an agile devotee, working with organizations worldwide to deliver more value faster through the adoption of agile principles and practices. Specializing in scaling agile practices, guiding leadership shifts, applying lean, and building continuous planning practices, Jean uses a collaborative approach in helping organizations adopt agile. A Certified ScrumMaster Trainer and a Certified Professional Facilitator, Jean is the author of Collaboration Explained: Facilitation Skills for Software Project leaders. You can reach her at jean.tabaka@rallydev.com. Requirements to Planning NEW During this highly interactive session, you will experience an agile project from inception through its first iteration. Put theory into action working in small groups to create interesting case studies with product backlogs. Start by writing the high-level epic user stories that might be used to gain funding for a reallife project. Because no project proposal is likely to be accepted without a schedule, you’ll learn how to estimate with story points and then forecast the team’s velocity. You’ll use these techniques on your product backlog to establish a baseline release plan for your project. Knowing it is important to work in priority order when a project begins, you’ll learn the four essential factors to consider when prioritizing feature delivery. Practice using these factors to divide epic user stories into smaller user stories more suitable for the development team to produce during iterations. MH The Beginner’s Mind: Keeping your Agile Adoption Fresh NEW David Hussman, DevJam and Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development Join David Hussman and Jean Tabaka on a journey that guides participants in how the best agile teams truly engage and adapt. By investigating the notion of “Beginner’s Mind” versus “Expert Mind” through interactive exercises, David and Jean invite you to embrace an agile adoption approach that keeps your mind in the present, open to new ideas, and always curious. They “open their agile kimono” by sharing experiences of teams that have successfully adopted Beginner’s Mind versus teams that unfortunately embraced Expert Mind. David and Jean challenge you about your team’s decision styles, agile practices, and notions of best practices—any of which can inadvertently invite the damaging blinders of Expert Mind. They invite discussion within small groups about how Expert Mind practices actually impede agile maturity and keep teams from gelling. Finally, they invite you to create and share a set of Beginner’s Mind practices with other participants in a quiet reflection of how to stay fresh. Bring your experiences and curiosity—and expect to be surprised! For many years, David Hussman has led software projects in a variety of domains—digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, government, legal, security, industrial, financial, retail, and education to name a few. David now spends his time coaching and leading agile project communities worldwide. The author of Cutting an Agile groove and contributor to several books, including Managing Agile Projects and Agile in the large, David leads DevJam. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on using agile to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam (www. devjam.com) provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products. Conducting Requirements-Driven Workshops for Agile Projects NEW MI Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting learn the essential skills you need for planning and conducting a series of three agile workshops—Product Roadmap, Release Plan, and Iteration Requirements—for large or complex agile projects. Find out how to generate “just enough” requirements information at the right time and for the right stakeholders. Avoid the struggles some agile teams have grasping enough of the big picture to mitigate the myriad of problems that can arise—guessing which slice of the product to start with or build next, needing extensive rework due to undetected architectural dependencies, establishing a viable release strategy for business planning, and suffering from inadequate customer involvement. These three facilitated workshops help you combine “grokking” your product requirements with the benefits of a collaborative process that builds trust, mutual understanding, and accountability. Ellen gottesdiener shares her toolkit of guidelines and practices—reinforced with practice sessions and group discussions—to improve the quality of your large agile product development efforts. Principal Consultant of EBG Consulting, Ellen Gottesdiener helps business and technical teams get product requirements right so their projects start smart and deliver the right product at the right time. An agile coach and trainer with a passion about agile requirements, she works with large, complex products and helps teams elicit just enough requirements to achieve iteration and product goals. Ellen is the author of Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger. Ellen writes articles, speaks, and advises at industry conferences, and provides training seminars to both traditional and agile clients. Contact her at www.ebgconsulting.com. For the past twelve years, Jeff Patton has designed and developed software on a wide variety of projects from online aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. A winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to agile development, Jeff has focused on agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. Jeff has specialized in the application of user-centered design techniques to improve agile requirements, planning, and products. Some of his recent writing on the subject can be found at www. agileproductdesign.com and Alistair Cockburn’s Crystal Clear. His forthcoming book gives tactical advice to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software. Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, and the change process, Linda is the author of Design Patterns in Communications; The Pattern Almanac 2000, A Patterns Handbook; and co-author with Mary Lynn Manns of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas. Find more information about Linda at www.lindarising.org. MJ user Story Mapping: getting Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant the Big Picture NEW Is your agile project buried under a mountain of user stories? As you add stories, does your vision of the product you are building grow hazier? As story count increases, do business stakeholders become more frustrated with priorities? Do you find it difficult to communicate the big picture about what the system does? User story mapping helps agile teams create a simple model that places user stories in the context of a complete system. With a story map in hand, you’ll be able to see the big picture—the breadth of functionality the product implements, the users it serves, and the activities in which they engage. Jeff Patton shows how to visually prioritize user stories and create realistic, incremental release plans. learn the essentials of story mapping, story splitting, story thinning, and incremental planning. Discover the characteristics of a good user story and how those characteristics differ when you are writing stories for planning versus development. With a living story map, all stakeholders—management, developers, and end users—will, for the first time, see a complete view of the entire system before you build it. MK The Power of Retrospectives NEW Linda Rising, Independent Consultant One of the Agile Manifesto principles states, “At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly.” How can this best be done? Join linda Rising to learn why project retrospectives are a critical part of your agile practices. By taking time to reflect, learn, and proactively decide what the team should do differently—in the next iteration, release, or project—teams discover what they’re doing well so that successful practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance. Retrospectives are not finger pointing or blaming sessions. Rather, they are highly positive and interactive sessions in which teams reflect on the past to become better in the future. linda shares her experiences leading several types of retrospectives for dozens of projects—both small and large. Her lessons learned will help your project and team become a true learning organization. ML Fostering Trust in Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova Teams—A Leadership Practicum NEW In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments wit http://devjam.com http://devjam.com http://www.ebgconsulting.com http://agileproductdesign.com http://agileproductdesign.com http://www.lindarising.org http://WWW.SQE.COM/ADPREG
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