Firms exist for different reasons, from short-term enrichment of owners and shareholders to fulfilling a long-term purpose. According to Jim Collins “Great Companies” have a long-term purpose their leaders are passionate about. For long-term sustainable growth to achieve a larger purpose then short-term profits it takes a certain type of leadership. Great leaders build an agile business, but realize agility is not embedded in a business model, software, or clever manipulation of the global footprint. Long-term sustainable growth comes from leaders who are committed to the vision and develop people who can innovate as a way to adapt to the rocky waters of the environment. Leaders at all levels understand the environment and their business and become coaches of continuous improvement constantly developing people to identify the next goal needed to advance, innovate their way toward that goal, and learn, learn, learn.
When we’re feeling stressed, threatened, or unsafe, our bodies help us do a lot of things better. We’re able to run faster, hit harder, yell louder. We are able to notice the slightest movement out of the corner of our eye.
Things we do not do better: think creatively, work collaboratively, solve problems.
These are very human activities, and they work best in a very human environment. We know that emotional safety is vital to a team's productivity. Let’s talk about what it takes to have emotional safety, and how to get there.
"Oh no! I just typed something into git and now my work is gone! Ahh!"
Don't panic. Contrary to popular belief, git is one of the most non-destructive version control systems available. When used right, git never loses any data, and even when misused, chances are very high you can still recover.
This talk will present turn-by-turn directions on how to recover from a wide array of common git mistakes, and also provide some workflows to minimize them.
Examples include, but are not limited to:
As well as more advanced topics, such as:
You've grasped this goal, this ideal, this vision of how your world might be different. Now. How do you make that changed world happen?
GeePaw Hill, wildly inappropriate, deeply based not in theory but in actual practice, shares the insights that have made him, occasionally, succeed.
Which practice is this?
In theory, retrospectives are the heart of agile methods, the reflect and adapt cycle that fuels continuous improvement. In practice, many leaders encounter passive resistance: the teams find them a painful waste of time. How can we get the real world benefit without the pain?
Patient, “It hurts when I do retrospectives. Retrospectives suck!”
Doctor, “Then stop doing that!”
Patient, “...OK, then what should I do instead?”
This session answers that question. Learn a simple system of practices that give retrospectives clear purpose and yield these additional benefits:
Prerequisite knowledge:
Basic familiarity with iterative planning (Scrum's sprint planning, XP's planning game, etc.)
Optional: painful retrospectives or ineffective follow-through on retrospective action items.
This talk starts with an overview of the fundamentals of git bisect – finding the commit that introduced a defect or some other issue, and how to automate that process.
Knowing the faulty commit is a good first step and sometimes sufficient in itself to solve the issue at hand. In practice however, the next steps can be more complicated. The rest of the talk will discuss techniques to go beyond the initial commit and take bisect to the next level, a "bisect within the bisect" if you will.
You've seen and used personas on projects before, but did they really add the value you desired? This session will be a hands-on workshop exploring how and why we use personas. We'll get practice creating personas for a fictitious project. At then end of the workshop you'll have experienced how to effectively bring a human element to your project through personas.
We want to create organizations and systems where people thrive. We want an environment where we can create valuable software people love, and make money and have fun together while doing it. For a team to be healthy in this way, we need to be able to talk about difficult subjects. If only it weren't so awkward!
In this session, you'll learn how to give effective feedback, both positive and negative. You'll also learn how you can approach difficult conversations, and use them to move your team forward.
Creating a product without a shared vision is like trying to read a sign without your glasses. There's a lot of squinting and guessing as to what the sign says. Where one person sees an E another might see a T. In the end, no one can agree on what the sign says and everyone has a headache.
Having a poor vision or no vision at all almost guarantees poor results for your product. The stakeholders won't get the value that they need or expect, the team won't know why they're building the product and no one knows what success even looks like.
In this workshop you'll learn how to create a product vision board - a simple, visual tool for defining the goal of the product and the path to achieve that goal. We'll look at why we need a common vision, how to create the board and how to validate the board so you know that you're on the right track. Get your glasses on and let's bring our product vision into focus.
Learning Outcomes:
The way software is developed and run in production has changed dramatically over the past ten years. These changes are just now reaching the “mainstream” who are looking to respond to the idea that “software is eating the world” and use software like all the “unicorns” we read about in the market. Getting your advice strictly from unicorn companies can feel a lot like getting dieting advice from celebrities: it sure will work if you have unlimited resources, few constraints, and, well, are already successful. What can the rest of shlubs who actually work in “the real world do” to get closer to the benefits of being “cloud native”?
This talk answers that question by looking at the current state of IT and how the role of IT has changed in recent years: if around ⅔ of businesses think IT doesn’t help them innovate, how is IT going to be effective in an era where custom written software is key to surviving and thriving in a business world where competitive advantages are now highly transient? Building on my observations in recent years about what technologies are helping organizations and, more importantly, the organizational and process (“culture,” the unicorns call it) the rest of the talk goes over how organizations can switch up their tools and approach to IT to code like a unicorn.
See a rehearsal recording of this presentation here, as well as slides for various versions of it: http://cote.io/2016/03/03/unicorn-coding/.
Teams are not a group of people who work together -- Teams Trust One Another.
Building trust is critical for individual relationships, teams and the whole organization, but how deeply have we really examined it? It is far more complex than just the cliché of "I trust them or I don't". Authentic trust is far more actionable. There are critical distinctions to trust and understanding them is really the first step to becoming more effective and purposeful in our efforts to gain authentic trusting relationships.
Extreme Programming with its provocative name, got people’s attention in 1999. It is based on sound technical practices. Why do so few agile teams employ engineering practices that support the tight iterative cycles of Agile and Scrum? The creators of Scrum expected the continuous improvement cycle to pull engineering practices into teams once the cycle revealed the problems of poor product quality, hard to change code, wasted time debugging, long stabilization efforts and the ever growing burden of manual test. This talk will cut through the mystery and show why we should all strive for Technical Excellence.
Agile transitions fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager fits into an Agile organization. What do you do now? What is a manager to do when teams are supposed to be empowered, self-managing, and self-organizing? Is there even a place for managers in an Agile organization?
YES! There is a lot for managers to do in an Agile organization — they might be different than what you did before. Agile is a whole new way of work for most managers, as it requires a particular style of leadership. Your role and responsibilities need to evolve to support the growth and success of the team. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles and model new styles of communication.
In this interactive session, Selena guides you on how you can thrive as an Agile Manager as you nurture and support your teams in transformational success. You leave with insights, techniques, and approaches you can readily apply when you return to work. Ready?! Come learn how to inspire, influence, and have an expansive impact in your organization while you flourish as an Agile Manager.
Learning Outcomes:
Prerequisite Knowledge:
You have had a role in managing people or teams - as a manager, project manager, ScrumMaster, or executive.
Test-Driven Development is an important design and problem solving technique that helps software developers improve product quality and the quality of their life. How? By preventing defects and by giving you warning when your design starts to deteriorate. The tests created during TDD also give you the freedom to change your mind and safely evolve your design.
This tutorial describes the problems addressed by TDD, as well as the additional challenges and benefits of applying TDD to C, C++ and embedded software. You'll also see the latest ideas, techniques and tools for creating fakes, and mocks in that help you make sure you know what your code is doing. This won't be just show and tell. Bring a laptop or tablet and you can get your own first hand experience at TDD.
If we are to go Beyond Agile we must consider the problems that remain even after teams have adopted agile methods. Are the problems caused by agile methods, or just not addressed?
Bring your thorny ‘beyond agile’ problems; you may help shape the software development practices of the future.
Have we been looking for our keys in the wrong spot this whole time? We have 10 years of data that describes why organizations struggle with Agile. Centralizing project management didn't help us understand what's going on with our projects. Centralizing HR didn't engage our employees. Centralizing our process improvement group didn't improve anything.
So why is it we think hiring a VP of Agile, and creating a centralized Agile transformation team will be any different? In this session we'll explore a different way to approach Agile transformation by looking at how change happens, and what we can leverage from how societies evolve.
That might sound nuts, but you'll walk away with tangible practices you can start right away.
Everyone's heard the old saying "A family thats plays together, stays together", right? Well this session is going to kick that up a notch and talk about getting the family to "hack" together. It starts out discussing the different forms of hacking a family might embrace and at what age levels each might be best suited. Along the way it highlights what supplies & equipment you might need, as well as suggesting the overall costs that one might expect to incur. It then takes a brief focus on safety and proper use of that equipment. The session finishes off with some tips and tricks that may help with both the hacks themselves, as well as getting the family to actually interact by joining in on the fun.
Here's a link to the slides - http://bit.ly/1seSnsb.
Organizations have traditionally beendesigned from the ground up to be predictive and consequently slow at every level. Planning for agility requires us to adopt adaptive practices organizationally, in our teams and as individuals. Organizations need to change how they value the work being done, how it is vetted and how they bring work to the teams. Teams need new skills around customer feedback, prioritization and coordination, both internally and across teams. Individuals need new skills around commitment, collaboration and quality. This session will explore the design changes needed at every level.
