Confreaks

In our enthusiasm for the incredible wealth of useful practice for delivering software that’s emerged from the agile community, we seem to have lost the plot. We’ve become the next wave of people enamored with our process and believing it cure...

Is it easier to transform an existing culture to agile or build one from scratch? Menlo Innovations’ CEO Richard Sheridan will share two tales of Agile transformation. The first occurred when Sheridan was a VP of a 30-year old technology company...

Managing Agile involves designing, supporting and reinforcing a system of work to deliver business value. “Prevailing” organizational systems often reinforce and reward management behaviors that produce three dysfunctional paradigms: 1) magica...

While many organizations have adopted Agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their human performance management processes with Agile values. This presentation and discussion will explore the subject of creating a truly h...

Technical debt had originally been conceived as an expediency measure – “a little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.” However, like financial debt, unrestrained borrowing can lead to a broad spectrum ...

A great agile design process is complementary to a great agile development process, producing products that people love. There’s a tension between the notion of ultimate flexibility that agile proposes, and the need for coherency and excellence ...

Your brain is literally wired to be agile. Are you working with it’s strengths? Do you know how to tell if you’re not? In this session we’ll explore some exciting discoveries in neuroscience and psychology, and then immediately put this know...

Because of Eric Evans’ Domain Driven Design, agile developers are familiar with embedding their domain models in their code, but architecture and design remain hard to see from the code. How can we improve that? This session presents a new agile...

Agile Product Owners are under a lot of pressure. On one side, customers, stakeholders, and users provide a constant stream of requests and demands. On the other side, developers own their estimates and commitments. It’s easy to take on too much...

Designing software is hard; designing quality software is even harder. Quality software should be more than just data with algorithms, more than a sum of its parts. One key to achieving this is to change your thinking and focus on the humanity inh...

For many organizations, Agile methods have been a proven answer to the vexing questions of developing better software. But now that many organizations have mastered Agility, they are once again turning to Innovation. In this talk, we’ll explore ...

Eight thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine hours of pair programming – does that make us experts yet? No, but we sure have learned a few things in five plus years. Many agile programmers see pair programming as too hard, but don’t have the a...

One of the toughest problems facing agile UX designers is keeping the big picture in mind while designing incrementally. This talk builds on prior work at Alias (now Autodesk) that described successful agile adaptations of usability testing, conte...

Agile strives for good communication with their customers. The Embedded User Experience works with the customer to understand what they need, when even the customer may not understand themselves. We teach how to paper prototype and how to do on-si...

Mock objects are a good way to break apart a legacy system to test it. However, they do not improve coupling (few dependencies between units) or cohesion (each unit does one thing). Making code easy to change requires using indirections with loose...

The intern program at inContact uses 5-10 interns every quarter for a period of 10 weeks, and has been running for 1 1/2 years. Some of the challenges with using interns are discussed:

• How do you on-board an entirely new team each quart...

This experience report is about early adoption issues within two companies which share certain similarities (large, very distributed) but have differences as well (services vs products, IT vs engineering focus, close vs distant customers).

We’re so used to talking about processes and methodologies in the form of big manuals, techniques and procedures from the 1980s and 1990s that we haven’t noticed that the new methodologies aren’t methodologies. They aren’t even collections...

In 2000, Agile was revolutionary. In 2010, Agile is stagnant. There are two Agile worlds today: The first is pushing the same practices and processes they’ve been pushing for the last decade. The second takes many of these practices and processe...

Great software is only possible in a true Learning Organization. This talk gives a pragmatic exploration of the connections between Senge’s five disciplines for learning organizations and the Agile software development framework. Specifically ma...

Agile methods promise an iterative and incremental approach to building software. Unfortunately, the iterative portion is often omitted when it comes to incorporating true user feedback and observation. In this workshop, participants will learn ho...

Everyone has been to an Agile meeting that has little or no value and that’s felt like a complete waste of time. Facilitation Foundations is designed to offer attendees a chance to learn more about how to make meetings more valuable and save eve...

User Stories have become common practice among Agile teams. Cucumber is a Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) tool, written in Ruby, that allows teams to capture these stories in plain English as a series of scenarios. These scenarios become execut...

Agile developers and UX designers have a lot more in common than you might think. We’ll show that both agile design and development work best when they integrate and when users are put at the center of the process. We’ll focus on what works an...

Is Certification important? Well that is a debatable topic that can take days and months to conclude. The fact is that for some people, in some cultures, and for some organizations certifications are important and have value; that is a fact. Our g...

We present a whirlwind tour of Michael Feather’s book “Working Effectively With Legacy Code,” showing and discussing specific techniques from the book, with full examples in code. Our intent is to display a variety of different ways to “sl...