Keep Austin Agile 2017

This session will provide information about ChatOps and what makes it important to use in an Agile environment. It will talk about how the technique can be used by everyone within an Agile organization, instead of just the operations staff, as it is widely used currently. We will discuss how it will shorten the feedback loop and improve empowerment - two things that many Agile teams strive to do in order to realize the Agile Manifesto.

Through interactive exercises, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the Scrum values. Participants will walk away with increased awareness of their team's current aptitude for the Scrum values and techniques for coaching them.

Scrum is a framework to enable agility, not a set of steps that will guarantee success. People have to do the hard work of solving complex problems, of coming up with innovative solutions, of experimenting and adjusting to deliver amazing products. There is no silver bullet, but there is a secret to Scrum success -- Scrum values.

The Scrum values are the lifeblood of the Scrum framework. The creators of Scrum believe values are so important and so often misunderstood or neglected that they updated the Scrum Guide in July of 2016 to include values. The Scrum values are focus, openness, commitment, courage, and respect. The words are easy to remember, but it can be difficult to understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognize them. Without the Scrum values, we are just going through the motions. Applying the Scrum values maximizes our efforts with Scrum.

Agile is a mindset, not a methodology.

Every leader, whether in business, sports, or battle, aspires to assemble and guide a high performing team that will achieve outstanding results and surpass everyone's expectations. There have been many books, articles, and blogs written about assembling high-performing teams, and countless examples of highly successful teams in all walks of life. Why is it then that we struggle to accomplish this in our place of work?

In this session, we will go over key strategies that will help any Agile leader build their own high performing teams. These strategies are easy to understand but hard to implement. Having had first-hand experience building high performing teams, Yasser will speak to the nuances associated with implementing these strategies and what challenges leaders can expect to encounter when deploying them.

• What makes a team high performing?
• What should a leader look for in people they hire?
• What role do environmental factors play and how to change them?
• What kind of actions can transition a team from average to great?

In the good old days, new product development was so manageable with Scrum. We ambled along with 30-day sprints, a single product owner, a neat product backlog, and a collocated Scrum team. Today’s business environment is a tsunami of global hypercompetition. Companies enter and are forced off the S&P 500 every 15 years. The classic Innovators Dilemma has become more pressing.

Disruptive innovation requires us to gather and filter ideas, creatively experiment with them, sell them internally, and ultimately capture their economic value. In the 21st century, we need to surf business turbulence by creating innovative new products and services. Simultaneously, we need to operate existing products and services and trade out non-performing ones for sustained business value.

Learn the five essential steps to surf this “fuzzy front-end” of innovation, including innovation pipeline management, Agile budgeting and incremental funding, high-performance standing teams, product discovery and lean experimentation, and high-performance Agile engineering.

Everybody likes the idea of playing games with stakeholders to gain better insights and make it more fun, but few people ever put it into practice. It is a fact that designing and facilitating an Agile research game is MUCH more powerful than the typical powerpoint (crutch) conversations we can fall into. It is time to rise up and be prepared for those golden opportunities when we are asked, "Hey, I've got this group of people (customers, prospects, salespeople, partners, developers, etc.) in today. Do you want to spend an hour with them talking about the product?"

What we need is a quick and easy formula to help us be ready, and confident, the formula will work! An EZ-Bake Oven for games!

Practicing a skill in a supportive environment builds confidence.  We will play a simple, yet powerful, Agile research game, practice designing our own games, and then actually play a few games in smaller groups. At the end, we will discuss design tricks and tips.

In December 2008, a team adopted Agile development practices. They used Scrum as the basis for their process, did two-week iterations, and tried to get a little better with each one. In the process, the team created two product lines and learned a lot about how to best work together to get things done. The team just completed their 200th iteration. Team members came and went over the course of the 200 iterations. The state of the business changed dramatically over the time period. The biggest differentiator was the sheer number of iterations and around eight years of retrospectives and trying to get better. 

Walter will talk about the things they tried in several areas -- such as Backlog Management, Grooming/Planning, Quality, Communication and Politics ---  what worked and what didn't.  Some things worked well at a point in time because of the composition of the team then.  But as the team composition changed and the business changed, the way they needed to work together changed as well. Each iteration is an opportunity to become better, to evolve as a team in order to be able to better deal with the problems at hand. Come see what they learned along the way.

Trust is an integral component of high performing Agile software development teams. We know that.  This workshop explores trust within a team through exercises that underscore the importance of trust, help you understand trust relationships, then help you strengthen those relationships.

Your guided experience through the landscape of trust begins as you enter the workshop.  Bring a dollar bill to the session for a lesson about the importance of trust in ambiguous circumstances.

Next, we practice a retrospective technique that assesses the level of trust present in a team.  Think you have a high trust team?  You’ll know for sure after you run this exercise with your team.

A successive team retrospective exercise analyzes existing trust relationships in a very detailed way.  The "Trust Map" that results is a roadmap to guide trust development in low trust teams or to foster insightful dialog in high trust teams.

Finally, we offer a clear approach to building team trust.  One that empowers each person to be their best and to assume a team leadership role aligned with their abilities.

You will find no silver bullet in this workshop.  Instead, you will leave with tools that, when conscientiously applied, will help you assess, analyze, and improve the trust level of your team.