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Friday 27th July 2012
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Registration
by Ed Wong, Craig Brown and Last Conference
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Welcome
by Ed Wong, Craig Brown and IBM Rational Australia/New Zealand
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Doctor Jeckyll and Mr Scrum – the transformation from Waterfall to Agile
Many programs, projects and enterprises are starting to consider transforming to agile ways of working. Some start with just stand-ups. Some then call it Scrum. Others start with execution, follow it with up-front analysis and design, and then call it ‘agile’. For many, the resultant transformation is too painful with hideous results. For some, though, the result is a thing of beauty and not a beast. What is the secret to changing from Waterfall to Agile? What are the pitfalls? How do you stay on track? How do you incorporate traditional project reporting? What is the recipe to the potion for a transformation that can be celebrated rather than treated as a curse?
Matthew will present his learnings from coaching the transformation of recent projects from Waterfall to Scrum. He’ll look at the psychology of learning Scrum behaviour, the symbiotic relationship necessary to create between the Scrum Master and Product Owner, and the habits – bad and good – that can hinder or help the process along. Overall, he’ll cover the learning lifecycle of Scrum for new teams and what it takes to increase your chances of becoming agile.
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Story Mapping | Build a better Death Star
by Craig Brown
Story Maps are an agile technique for assembling a more sophisticated view of a product backlog.
This session will be a facilitated workshop where we use story mapping to design a better Death Star. After two failed attempts the empire can't afford to get it wrong again...
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Storytelling and Anecdote circles
Join Shawn Callahan from Anecdote and learn about the art of not just story telling, but listening and making sense out of what you hear,
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Systems Thinking: An Introduction
The term Systems Thinking sounds familiar, doesn't it? Indeed when asked most people say they have heard of Systems Thinking (ST). It is not until people try to describe ST that they realize they have heard of it but they don't know what it is.
Join me for this introductory session on ST and discover how to infect yourself and others with this amazing way to see the world.
Together we will explore what ST really is, we will learn how to explain ST to our friends and colleagues (create our elevator pitch), learn what ST definitely is not (myth busting) and see how ST helped me to save $$$ in technology provisioning.
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The Agile Tester — How to add value as a quality geek
Agile has become increasingly mainstream as an approach to development, yet the software testing community has, overall, lagged behind in embracing agile processes.
This interactive session will highlight common misunderstandings of the role of testers in agile projects, based on the collective experience of agile test leads across several different organisational environments. With a focus on what testers need to do to ensure they're adding value in a release focused environment, there'll also be lots of scope to explore what agile developers expect from their tester team mates, and how to get the balance of tester and developer expectations right.
Participants can expect to take away practical ideas to help raise the quality of their output and keep both testers and developers happy along the way.
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Designing Portfolio Kanbans
by Ronica Roth
At Rally Software, we manage our portfolio of products and initiatives at two different levels (initiatives and enhancements). Each level has its own kanban board with policies and WIP limits, its own review cadence, and its own steering group. In this discussion-oriented session, we would quickly present what we've done, describe benefits and challenges, and learn together how that might inform the environments of the attendees.
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Lean Business Intelligence: Achieve Better, Faster, Cheaper Business Intelligence
by Kurt Solarte
Come find out how an Australian Insurance company undertook Lean IT delivery processes in the creation and maintenance of Business Analytics reports.
We'll be talking through the method used, the adoption, the tooling, and even show the before and after metrics that management kept proving the improvement in complexity and productivity that the team was able to achieve.
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Testing in an agile environment – A practical example at Seek
by Rob Manger
Even though it is widely known that Agile is "nothing new" there still seem to be a lot of misconceptions and misgivings around it. Early in 2011, Seek began the transition from a Waterfall development environment to Agile. Throughout this process we have challenged, and been challenged by some of these fallacies and by working closely with members from all corners of the business is working towards defining what testing is at an "Agile" Seek.
It's far too easy to get stuck in the "This is the way it's always been done" mentality, not accepting any change, and not taking any risks until you have all the answers. By taking you through an end to end process from "The Wall" to Production, I would like to address the management of changing the Test Strategy and the roles & responsibilities in an Agile environment, encouraging people to try new ways of doing things that may or may not be better, evolving an approach to testing that maximises coverage, minimises risk and reduces any duplication of effort while maintaining, and measuring, a high level of Quality.
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Morning tea
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DevOps and continuous delivery in the cloud
by nigelfds
Everyone talks about continuous software delivery and complete automation, and wonderful world of elastic capacity on cloud environments.
But not everybody shows you how to do it.
In this talk the presenters will show you actual code, freely available, to demonstrate push button software delivery. They'll walk the audience through setting up a CI server, build pipeline,
test environment, and production environment using amazon cloud formation, in a completely automated fashion.They'll also demonstrate effective deployments and zero downtime using autoscaling and AMI snapshots.
All the building blocks need to get your team started with DevOps, Infrastructure as code, and complete automation.
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Discover your own Agile Journey
by Michi Tyson
An homage to the "Make your own adventure" books of my (and maybe your!) youth, this is an informal group game exploring and discovering different approaches to agile implementation and transformation!
For both "Agile Newbies" as well as "Seasoned Agilistas" we will race each other to navigate our "agile project maze" as effectively and efficiently as possible - all the while watching our project schedule and credibility!
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Problem solving with agile UX
by Ed Wong and Peter Grierson
Practical ways that you can incorporate UX techniques into your development and design to increase shared understanding, and gain ideas from all members of a team.
We will be looking at a Melbourne cinema’s website and trying to improve its usefulness for its users.
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Use of SCRUM in a BAU setting
by Mia Horrigan
I was working with small teams of 2-4people, and the teams always have something that I would equate to a product backlog.
So we did a pilot to test the feasibility of converting all of this project work to Scrum. As ScrumMaster I worked with the PO to define and elicit consensus on the product backlog and ranked order and of importance of key project system requirements and then worked with the team to implement SCRUM as the approach to deliver the projects and manage their BAU responsibilities.
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Visual Collaboration
by Lynne Cazaly
The Visual Revolution is here folks!
Learn how successful collaborators and project teams use visuals to
- capture their thinking
- convey ideas and
- create compelling futures.After a speed-sketch thinking session (i.e. play time drawing stuff!) it will be all about how to bring visuals to the table to help teams get thinking, get going and get things done.
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IBM Rational Team Concert - Agile tools demo
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Organising for Innovation & Growth
"Innovation that does not align with company strategy and does not provide it a distinctive position in the market has little value from a strategic perspective."
Today's businesses are under constant pressure to innovate and stay relevant to their customer or lose their market share to other competitors.
In this presentation I will be looking to answer the following three questions about how businesses can organise for innovation:
- How to organise to innovate within the scope of existing businesses?
- How to organise to radically innovate beyond the scope of existing businesses into new markets?
- How to go about implementing an Innovation Governance Process to achieve business objectives? -
Take it offshore! Ramping Up a Distributed Team in 3 Weeks
by Herry Wiputra and Francisco Trindade
Distributed software development is one of the hardest challenges in the software industry, since it's hard to keep up with good team principles as collaboration and ownership when you are working with a team in multiple countries.
During this presentation, we are going to describe how, during a 3-week period in China, we have built an autonomous team out of a group of people, transfered knowledge and planned a new product for the REA Group, while trying to overcome language and cultural differences.
We are going to describe this experience by sharing the constraints we had and the story about what we did in China, which included design workshops, knowledge sharing exercises and building trust.
We will also speak about the learnings and benefits obtained in this experience, and how a traditional communication method such as face to face can deliver a successful product.
Presenters:
Francisco Trindade - ThoughtWorks
Herry Wiputra - REA Group -
Lunch
by Ed Wong, Craig Brown and Last Conference
Eat, chat, share your ideas and lessons
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Gamification and Agile
Take a ride on the sometimes politically incorrect mind of Renee as she walks through what is a game, what makes something a game, what about Agile is game-like, how can we learn more in Agile using games, and what can software developers take home about games.
Games are a key foundation to practicing whilst learning. We can re-affirm practices and techniques that we know through games or we can demonstrate risks to avoid.
Learn some new games that you can add to your arsenal and also how to create a game from scratch to suit your special needs. Bring along your own games if you have them!
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High Performance Scrum
by Brett Maytom
"This speaker is excellent. Very informative with sufficient level of detail."
Agile and scrum provides a base framework to work in, yet many teams are either underachieving or not reaching their full potential. Do you get the feeling your team can do much more? What is holding the team back?
In consulting and engaging with teams, there several common traits that hampers a team progress. This talk will walk through various challenges that teams face and solutions to them. Some core areas covered are self-organisation characteristics, management support, requirements and product backlog, team resourcing and communication.
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Lightning talks
by Mark Mansour and Ignite Melbourne
Bring your own topic
Share an idea in 5 minutes (or less)Hosted by Mark Mansour, of Ignite Melbourne notoriety.
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The Time-Bomb Experiment: Valuing Individuals & Interactions
by Nadir Khan
Are we building projects around motivated individuals?
Are we giving them the environment and support they need?The most common indicator of lack of motivation within a team is a dysfunctional stand-up. Be a part of the time bomb experiment and see how you can make your stand ups more fun and useful.
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Why nothing you ever do might make the slightest difference: A crash course in the Theory of Constraints
by James Ross
"A smash hit at Agile Australia."
The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a large body of knowledge that has a lot in common with Agile and Lean, but for some reason is not well known in Agile circles. TOC brings good news and bad news - the good news is that you can learn how to focus on process improvements that provide the biggest bang for buck and they're easier than you think. The bad news is that nothing you are currently doing might be making the slightest difference, despite all your positive change metrics. Find out how that can possibly be, and discover a whole new perspective on Agile.
Learn:
- How TOC relates to Agile and Lean
- That eliminating some waste is a complete waste of time
- The five steps from the TOC process of ongoing improvement
- How the TOC Thinking Processes can help you communicate, collaborate and plan more successfully
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I've Got Your Back: How to make collaboration work
by Viv McWaters
Taking risks can be, well, risky. So collaborators who 'have got your back', who you know are there for you - providing ideas, support, encouragement, dollars - are worth their weight.
What does it take to be a great collaborator? How do you know when to drop an idea, and pick up another? We'll take some of the principles used by some of the best collaborators and idea generators on the planet (improvisers) and see how they can be applied to your work.
Improvisers get up on the stage, in front of a paying audience every night, and make stuff up. Together. Find out the secrets of how they do that, and how you can do it too in your business or project.
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Open Space (session 1)
Get together with like minded people.
Share and explore ideas.We will have a suggestions board and people can nominate and vote for discussions. (Including publishing them here if you want.)
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Edgy Agile things that you may not have heard of.
by Jason Yip
Pretty much the opposite of Agile 101. A summary of more edgy and obscure Agile ideas and practices that you may find useful.
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Rally Product Presentation - Agile Tools Session
Whether you're using Scrum or Kanban, the reality is that you need an easy way to see what your Agile software development teams are working on and if they are blocked. You need to give distributed teams a way to efficiently work together and align their work with organizational priorities. And you need to report on progress across projects or programs.
In this session I'll demonstrate how Rally's Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) platform can be used to achieve the above objectives and much much more.
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Removing standards is a good thing!
Most people like consistency, but at the other hand dislike following standards even more. At National Australia Bank (Wholesale Banking) we have taken a different approach to create consistency without getting in the way of people getting on with their work.
Please join this HIGHLY INTERACTIVE session to demonstrate how the approach is now also being applied across multiple communities in Melbourne to achieve exactly the same on a slightly larger scale!
This approach will be showcased at the APAC SEPG conference in August and has delivered considerable performance improvements by, for instance, removing standards!
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