Add an eventSessions at GOTO Amsterdam 2011 about Agile
Your current filters are…
- Topic: Agile
Thursday 13th October 2011
-
Solution Track: Programmer Anarchy
by Fred George
The Agile movement shifted the relationship between clients and developers in a profound way. In waterfall processes, clients specified large amounts of functionality, then nervously faded into the background until the fateful day-of-delivery. With Agile, developers strove to engage with clients continuously, and deliver much more frequently against their needs. A new trust was established.
At the Forward Internet Group in London, we are implementing a second major shift between clients and developers. The trust of the clients in developers evolves into a broader trust of the developers to deliver business value without resorting to a series of well-defined stories. In essence, the business has empowered the developers to do what they think is right for the business. This model, popularized by Facebook, has several labels, but the one we prefer for our flavor is Programmer Anarchy.
We will start with stock Agile, and begin to apply environmental factors that led us to drop "standard" Agile practices. We will also watch as well-defined Agile roles evaporate completely as other environmental factors are applied. Finally, we will arrive at Programmer Anarchy, an organization often following none of the standard Agile practices, having no BA or QA roles, and even missing any managers of programmers.
We will summarize our environmental factors, and postulate on the required and optional factors.
We will make bold, controversial assertions. We will back up these assertions with actual experiences.
Keywords: Agile, post-Agile, Anarchy, Empowered, Forward, No managers, No testers, No business analysts
Target Audience: Agile practitioners (developers and coaches) will be interested in this talk as we subscribe to the Agile principles but few of the practices. Management will find the enabling factors enlightening, giving them ideas they may apply to their existing teams.
Friday 14th October 2011
-
Agile: Stop Pushing Scrum
We're seeing too many pitiful implementations of Scrum. Cases where Scrum is viewed as a set of simple practices, which are imposed on the development team. Without any connection to the business and no urge to serve customers early and continuously through valuable software. By playing a game 'live on stage' and explaining how to use Lean's pull system, we're making a point to use Scrum with more guts, more fun, more impact and more results! When time allows we'll show a very successful large scale Scrum implementation in the Netherlands.
Keywords: Scrum, Lean, Fun, Game, Agile, Results
Target audience: All Managers, their managers and everyone reporting to managers. -
Agile: It's more than just the language
by Lucio Ferrao
Business wants to "get things done", while IT struggles with maintenance, integration, scalability, security, and lack of resources. Learn how a visual language can help IT become more responsive and support this tremendous demand for change. But a cool language is only a starting point. You also need an integrated environment that supports the full life-cycle of application development - it’s not just about fast coding, it’s about changing and delivering at the speed of business.
Keywords: Visual Language, knowledge transfer, integrated development environment, application life-cycle, productivity, enterprise
Target audience: developers and IT managers looking for enterprise development tools and languages, business users who like Access and Excel
-
Agile: Fractal TDD. Using tests to drive system design
We present our experience applying Test-Driven Development (TDD) at all levels of the development process. TDD at the class level is now well understood (if not always well practiced). We find that the benefits we get from writing tests first and using them to drive design apply at the system level too. That's why we try to address integration and system testing as early as possible. The sooner the system is in a deployable state, the better equipped we are to react to changing business needs by delivering new features.
Our experience is that putting testing at the front of our development process, and paying attention to what we learn from them, flushes out architectural issues such as concurrency and distribution. The result is systems that are easier both to maintain and to support. We can also avoid some of common testing pitfalls, such as unreliability, slow execution, and brittleness.
-
Agile: When the pressure is really on: A 'rough & ready' application of Lean & Kanban in the iPlayer division of the BBC
by Katherine Kirk
How a small IPTV team at BBC iPlayer used Lean principles and elements of Kanban for their rapid and successful response to a fast paced, very demanding live release schedule for the v2 device customisation programme.
Keywords: Agile, Lean, Kanban, BBC, Workflow Visualisation, Continuous Improvement, Process, Delivery, Team Transformation, Empowerment
Target Audience: This experience report would suit those interested in how others in large organisations have handled software delivery improvement in difficult situations - such as project managers, delivery managers, scrum masters, product managers, and tech leads who are involved in and/or responsible for workflow efficiency/effectiveness. -
Agile: Lessons for Lean and Agile Software Management
by Dave Thomas
The principles of Lean and Agile software are short, clear and straightforward. Increasingly both small high performance organizations and large enterprises frustrated by the lack of impact transitioning to Agile. Too often euphoric Lean and Agile aspirations quickly turn into a few standardized practices/tools enshrined across the organization with more dogma than some of the BigM methods they were intended to replace. The recent negative reaction to Kanban and relative ignorance of Cumulative Flow Diagrams illustrates the failure of many Agilists to embrace even simple change. In other cases managers maintain waterfall and Agile “accounting” rather than think through how to properly report progress to their organization.
In this talk we step back and look at a few of key management principles Embrace Change, Sustainable Pace, and Visualize Flow which are essential for a lean and agile software organization. We discuss examples of how successful managers employ these ideas to realize systemic continuous improvement yielding mire flexible, transparent and productive organizations.