Buy a Feature - Jeff Brantley
Which features will customers purchase? Which projects should be funded?
Unfortunately, this choice is often made after long debate without customer or stakeholder feedback. Or worse, all are selected! The Buy a Feature game improves this process by asking your customers to help you make the decision in a life-like, yet fun collaborative market game. By engaging them and giving them limited resources, you let them prioritize their needs. The magic lies in that your customers are negotiating with each other for specific features. It is this negotiation that enhances your understanding of what they truly want or need.
Learning Objectives:
The Chip Flip Game - David Hawks
The Chip Flip Game illustrates the Theory of Constraints (ToC) by seeing how quickly chips are passed from the team to the customer in the acceptable form. Join David Hawks and Reese Schmit as they help participants explore ToC and other values of Lean such as local vs. global optimization, batch sizing vs. single piece flow, and lead time--all in a fun team environment.
Learning Objectives:
This is a new and unique approach to Agile at Scale. Beyond just theory, this presentation includes a case study from Premera Blue Cross in Seattle and includes an accompanying exercise for the audience to participate in, and witness first-hand, self-organization at scale.
High-quality Agile requirements are more than just user stories; they are visual models, testable acceptance criteria, and the result of collaborative facilitated sessions with your stakeholders and team. Given, When, Then (or Gherkin language) is an effective style for documenting acceptance criteria, particularly in support of teams engaged in behavior-driven development processes.
In this interactive discussion, we will talk about what it takes to get to a “good” user story. We start with visual models that help identify and prioritize the right user stories and use proven techniques to elaborate stories into solid acceptance criteria in the Gherkin format (that could be consumed by automation tools like Cucumber). We then take a real world example from idea to “ready” requirement, so you can walk away from this session with hands-on experience at crafting user stories that are ready for the team and testable.
The Story of our Sprints - Lee Fox
From the TastyCupcakes website, The Story of our Sprints is a great and fun way to conduct a retrospective. It's interactive and can be quite thought provoking as it leverages player creativity.
The game will have a team of people describing their past sprint in the form of a story in a pass-the-narration fashion. The team will not only tell the story, but try to find the symbolism and lessons learned from the story as well. Best of all, when the game is over, the team will have an artifact to share about the sprint that is entertaining and easy to distribute.
Learning Objectives:
Kanban Pizza Game - Dhaval Panchal and Dave Sharrock
Kanban practices may seem simple, yet many teams struggle to get the most out of Kanban in their work. The Kanban pizza game helps participants learn how to apply Kanban in any scenario. During the game, the teams will iteratively discover the approach that works best for them. The facilitators will guide them through the use of Kanban principles and practices to visualize and refine that system in order to improve their team’s performance and reduce waste in their process.
Learning Objectives:
Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging the decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After 108 years cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers, even the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series in 2016. A high school football coach in Arkansas, with a devotion to statistical analysis, has won three state championships, by going against conventional wisdom and never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars, with each Constructor managing what amounts to a 'Data Center in a garage', for the purpose of eking out seconds of performance during the course of a two hour race.
Geoff uses these concepts, along with others from the world of professional sports, to provide insights from the operations of the Dell EMC Server division as they adopt a data-driven, predictive analytics approach to its global test practices. Geoff shares how Dell leverages its structured and unstructured data from sources as varied as Engineering, Sales, Factory and Customer data to optimize test operations. From the identification of high-value test cases and test configurations to which automation test scripts should be retired and not re-factored, he demonstrates how these types of insights can be used to plan, forecast, and allocate resources to advance your organizational capabilities and maturity.
How do you take Agile to the next level, where your organization moves beyond basic Agile delivery to fully acting with Agility in everything you do? How do you move past predictable and productive delivery to fast response to market needs?
Many organizations are barred from this level of success by a project-centric mindset, which impedes your ability to maximize value delivery. David Hawks pushes for an evolution of the Agile Manifesto into a set of values and principles for outcome-driven development.
