The pace of change in the business world is unprecedented. Innovation is not an option, it is imperative for organisations to survive but it is very hard to do. This talk is about how to structure yourself for innovation in a repeatable, practical and affordable way and it will address the following:
Most large projects are executed under a contract with commitments on both parties. Traditional contract standards and pricing mechanisms in agile projects is frequently a road to failure. Agile projects need an innovative approach to contracting, adapting contractual models to a world different from fixed scope and fixed price. In this lecture the presenter will walk through the essentials of “Agile Contracting” and give a broader understanding of the commercial sides of scrum projects.
Ralph Johnson defined architecture as "the decisions that you wish you could get right early in a project, but that you are not necessarily more likely to get them right than any other". Given our inability to tell the future how can we design effectively for it? Much classic project management thinking is based on the elimination of uncertainty, and advice on software architecture and guidance for future-proofing code often revolves around adding complexity to embrace uncertainty. In most cases, this is exactly the opposite path to the one that should be taken.
The talk looks at how uncertainty, lack of knowledge and options can be used to partition and structure the code in a system.
Today, software companies adapt agile concepts for their development teams rapidly. However, the lack of understanding of such concepts by other facilitating entities of the organization including supporting departments , such as HR department, may create complexities and slow down the expected return of such agile transformation by its production staff. Further with current dynamic business climate, the entire organization is challenged to deliver more with less. This session will discuss such challenges in the context as well as the solutions to overcome them.
Feature Driven Development (FDD) is one the founding Agile methodologies and it came to international recognition from a project right here in Singapore. This project pre-dated the writing of the Agile manifesto and was at the time one of the largest Java projects in the region.
How did the people, process, and technology changes required for such a project get successfully introduced at a major Corporation that was a Mainframe Cobol environment at the time and had not even done client/server or object oriented before?
In this session you will get to listen to the creator of one of the founding Agile methods. Hear him tell the story of this famous Singapore Agile project from the perspective of adoption lessons that can be applied today. That is, how to successfully adopt Agile and the change it requires. Then, hear about the latest thinking on the rise of Social and it's impact on organising structures including Agile projects.
Agility in software development is oftened defined by the shortening of feedback loops; by providing feedback to users, stakeholders and developers faster, we can act and change more quickly. Many teams are now successful in providing feedback throughout their development cycle with showcases, collaboration and prototyping. However, the "last mile" of getting a feature into production and ensuring it operates effectively once there is still a challenge for many teams.
This presentation focuses on how a combination of cloud computing (broadly defined as public clouds such as Amazon Web Services and private clouds such as OpenStack), infrastructure tools (such as Puppet and Chef) and a collaborative culture (known as DevOps) can help in getting software out faster and keep it running there with fewer outages. The presentation looks at a common deployment pipeline and how the technologies listed above can be utilised to make the pipeline more efficient, robust and effective.
By using cloud computing and DevOps, teams can get products to market faster and shorten their feedback cycles allowing them to compete more effectively in their chosen market.
Managing software is different from other management because of the nature of software development. It is the softness, the focus on learning, the complexity and the lack of physical material that causes this difference. Companies who manage software development without understanding this different nature will grossly mismanage their development effort, causing it to be ineffective at best and resulting in low quality software. In this session, Bas will explore five principles of managing software development that he has distilled out of his own development experience and the experience of coaching management of several large agile development projects.
This is a presentation about the search for understanding...in many forms. It asks the following questions:
It is intended to inspire those working in agile ways, or who are thinking of adopting agile principles. It will draw from several sources from a variety of disciplines, including organisational psychology, user experience, and change management.
The presentation is inspired by the lyrics in the Nick Lowe song, made famous by Elvis Costello.
Most discussions of Agile start with methodologies like story points, cyclical planning, sprints and stand-ups. We start talking so quickly about nuanced practices that we miss the big questions of context. It's a narrow focus that misses the larger and more relevant story leaving many confused and playing catch up.
Ask 10 people in your organization what Agile is or why it's important and you'll get 10 different answers. There's often little unity of thought around what we are actually trying to accomplish or the goals and vision of an Agile transformation. Worse yet leaders are often confused about how best to support an Agile adoption, or even more troubling, apprehensive about whether to spend political capital on what they perceive to be the latest flavor-of-the-month methodology.
But Agile is not a methodology. True there are many methodologies that fall under the large Agile umbrella, but Agile itself is an approach and a mindset. It is not a method.
If we are to reap the benefits of this Agile mindset we need to have a view of the landscape. In Agile Business: A Leadership Perspective I'll offer an holistic perspective on what it means to be Agile. We'll start with foundational concepts of a whole-systems approach to business, place the specific practices and concepts of Agile within this larger framework, and end with specific next steps leaders can take to improve your organization's product quality, morale, and time to market.
Programming skills are so fundamental these days that people seem to take them for granted. However, a 10 year veteran might only have accumulated 1 year of experience as performing the same programming tasks over 10 years would not have resulted in 10 years' worth of skill development. To improve ones programming skills requires deliberate and intentional practice. This session will introduce a couple of ways to do programming exercises and will demonstrate the difference in their effectiveness. Terry will start you off on the journey to mastering the craft of programming.
Although a great deal of the enthusiasm for Agile development initially grew from software developers, the perception is that much of the current focus in Agile circles has moved to organisational aspects, product management and soft skills. Craftsmanship has long been a quality and a metaphor applied to software development, but more recently software craftsmanship has emerged as a more explicit movement and branding focused on reclaiming and re-emphasising the importance of the detail, of how to code and how to do it well.
There are many different perspectives on what the craftsmanship metaphor implies and what benefits and liabilities it may have. This talk lays out and explores the motivation, implications, pros and cons of a craftsmanship view of software development, as well as touching on other metaphors and their implied practices
Oh nooooo, not again a retrospective. We still haven't implemented the improvements we discussed last month. Again those stupid questions... aren't we done improving by now?
Recognize this?...... Actually the retrospective is the most important of the agile ceremonies. The entire point is continuous improvement, and the retrospective helps you find areas and actions for improvement. If you are doing it right it is a very powerful meeting which will help you in successfully implementing agile.
Gamestorming is an easy-to-comprehend-and-apply guidebook to a new method of brainstorming; a world in which we use the basic foundations of games (yes, games) to think through challenging or sophisticated problems. Time to play!
Session outline:
The energy I put into creating a false image of myself, for myself or others, is energy wasted. Why are programmers so often ill at ease with themselves? What can we do to become comfortable in our own skins? What might happen as a consequence?
Many agile teams hit a wall when it comes to improving the way we do business. Management and the broader organisational eco-system often find themselves feeling defensive about the challenges and changes that agile adoptions bring. How do we get everyone on board the agile change journey so that we can all improve together?
Management 3.0 is a modern look at management practices and offers a variety of ways to help management align and work better with agile teams.
This presentation reviews the Management 3.0 model presented in Jurgen Appelo’s book of the same name. It covers six key management practice areas and offers example of how to apply agile values and practices to the way we do management in a modern and complex world.
In this talk we discuss the overall model, share examples of Management 3.0 practices and talk about extending agility out of the development teams.
The six management themes are;
Who among you have that uneasy feeling during each and every scheduled performance appraisal? Supervisors tend to dislike it, employees are repelled by it. And yet it is still practiced. We Agile practitioners do not lack the values and principles to drive ourselves to excellent performance. And yet get de-motivated by company policies and practices that operate under false assumptions. Performance appraisals try (and fail) to provide solutions to specific areas in the world of work. Worse, it risks driving a culture of disempowerment and direct towards individualism over collaboration. What do we do instead?
Agile promotes empiricism and change, yet many practitioners continue to scope out and estimate delivery times and costs for software products and projects.
Defenders of the art of estimation claim that we need to estimate software projects in order to answer common business and customer questions such as:
This session challenges participants to flip these questions on their heads and seek alternatives to estimation rituals. It covers the many risks inherent with an estimation culture and demonstrates real, practical alternatives, both at the portfolio and the sprint level.
Participants will get the following learning outcomes:
Matt will discuss an exciting and large scale agile transformation happening across the globe in JP Morgan’s Core Processing Technology division. During this talk Matt will share some of the challenges and pitfalls the group faced while trying to be agile and some of the tactics being applied in order to improve all the time.
