Rajan Seriampalayam

 

avatar for Rajan Seriampalayam


 

Sunday, August 7 ▼

 

5:15 PM
– 6:15 PM

First Time Attendee Orientation

If you find the conference schedule slightly overwhelming, make sure to attend the Agile2011 Orientation Sessions. These special sessions are designed to give first-time attendees a little "101 Guide" to Agile2011, including insight into ways to get the most out of their experience. There will also be a "Q & A" session at the end in case we miss anything. There is no pre-registration required and any registered Agile2011 attendee may attend.

 

Monday, August 8 ▼

 

9:00 AM
– 12:30 PM

Enterprise Agile Visioning and Learning – from the Organization to the Person: Jean Tabaka, Julie Chickering
Truly Agile organizations require new ways of creating and sharing knowledge. In this session, Jean shares personal experiences and exercises in visioning & learning models. Each model targets a particular part of knowledge creation. For the organizational level, we look at PDCA coupled with Pascal Dennis's True North & Mother Strategies. For team learning, we work with ORID retrospectives. Finally, Peter Senge's personal visioning helps us dig into our own work within an Agile growth-oriented context. This regular cadence of visioning and learning truly sustains Enterprise Agile.

1:30 PM
– 5:00 PM

A Transformation Path to Enterprise Agility: Change Levers, Leaders & Culture: Michael Spayd
Organizational transformation is a journey, not a destination. It requires discipline, patience & courage, leaders at every level, insight on culture, a stomach for change. It requires real teams & the will to endure for years. In a fishbowl style consultation, one organization (will you volunteer?) will provide a realistic context to explore models of leadership, team dynamics, culture & change: the framework for deep, ongoing enterprise transformation. Meanwhile, participants organized into table teams will craft their own transformation plan, using a template & feedback from colleagues.

5:30 PM
– 7:00 PM

The Agile Manifesto 10th Anniversary Reunion The Big Park Bench

Be sure to attend this historic event where we reunite nearly all of the authors of the Agile Manifesto.  Meet the authors at the celebratory reunion on opening night, including a Q&A session where questions will be fielded from the audience.  Visit the Special Reunion Event  website.

7:00 PM
– 10:00 PM

Ice Breaker Reception

Join us for Agile2011's Opening night reception. The night will be filled with food, drink and fun! After chatting with new attendees and reconnecting with old friends, be sure to stop by the vendors to see what's new in the industry.

 

Tuesday, August 9 ▼

 

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Why Care about Positive Emotions?: Barbara Fredrickson
Dr. Barbara Fredrickson and her colleagues have found that positive emotions literally change the way the human brain works, widening people's perspectives, and their outlooks on life. According to Fredrickson’s broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, this shift in mindset drives people to discover and build new traits, skills, and resources, and over time become better versions of themselves. In this presentation, Dr. Fredrickson will describe the science that backs up these claims and and describe the nonconscious upward spiral processes that enable people to thrive with agility.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

Agile Requirements: To User Stories and Beyond!: Chris Sims
Can extensive written requirements be dispensed with in favor of lighter weight 'stories'? It sounds easier, but can it really be as good? We'll start this session by staging a showdown between traditional and agile requirements. Participants will form teams, create requirements documents, do development (no technical skill or computers needed), and evaluate the results. Next, participants will learn by doing, as we build a 3-part model for agile requirements: User Story, Conversation, and Acceptance Criteria. Participants will leave with a solid understanding, and practical skills.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

What We Have Learned So Far: what we got right & what we got wrong: Chet Hendrickson, Ron Jeffries
Many of the established ideas and practices of Agile had their first public exposure through Ron and Chet. They helped take Agile from an underground movement to the mainstream. In this talk, Ron and Chet will bring you up-to-date on their current thinking on how to best do software in the Agile style. They will explain why you should stop doing some of the things they recommended in the past and what to replace them with. They will take one more run at getting you to do some of the basics of success that many teams neglect.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

Overcoming Self-organization Blocks: Andrea Provaglio

We know that self-organization is a critical aspect of every successful Agile project and we know that it takes trust, respect, openness and responsibility; so why many teams have a hard time to achieve it? Self-organization changes the manager/team dynamics and the teammate/teammate ones. Resistance may arise and the source is frequently rooted in mental habits, such as a latent blaming culture, confusing guidance and command, fear of taking responsibility or losing status, unconscious agendas. Attend this session to learn, through demos and exercises, how to deal with these kind of issues.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Exploring Enterprise Agile Transformation Strategies: Mike Cottmeyer, Dennis Stevens
The goal of any enterprise agile adoption strategy is NOT to adopt agile. Companies adopt agile to achieve better business outcomes. Large organizations have no time for dogma and one-size-fits-all thinking when it comes to introducing agile practices. These companies need pragmatic guidance for safely and incrementally introducing structure, principles, and ultimately practices that will result in greater long term, sustainable business results. This talk will introduce a framework for safely, pragmatically, and incrementally introducing agile to help you achieve your business goals.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Strategies for Agile Portfolio Management: Kenny Rubin
Traditional portfolio management frequently uses principles that are at odds with agile thinking. For example, believing that people should be 100% utilized might lead to us to start many simultaneous projects leading to high levels of team-member multitasking. Managing a portfolio according to these principles all but guarantees a continuous stream of impediments that interfere with team-level agility and sub-optimizes delivered value. In this session I discuss strategies for aligning portfolio management with agile development to ensure a better end-to-end flow of value.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Organizational Agility: Jim Highsmith
Leading agile organizations requires Adaptive Leadership that begins with understanding business agility and how practices like continuous delivery and a mindset of sustainable agility combine to create highly responsive IT organizations. Adaptive Leadership is two dimensional: Being and Doing Agile. Adaptive leaders embrace specific principles and practices, such as "doing" four key performance levers: “Do Less,” “Speed-to-Value,” “Quality,” and “Engage”, and “Being” agile—"adaptive", "riders of paradox", "exploring", and "facilitating."

3:30 PM
– 5:00 PM

MAKING THE ENTIRE ORGANIZATION AGILE : Stephen Denning

The failure of traditional management has led to the reinvention of management: the whole organization must be focused on creating a stream of additional value to customers through continuous innovation. The reinvention reflects an application of Agile thinking to the whole organization. The session shows how applying Agile thinking to the whole firm involves five fundamental shifts in terms of the firm's goal, the role of managers, the way work is coordinated, the shift from value to values and the shift in communications shift from command to conversation: http://bit.ly/bryJHX

3:40 PM
– 3:50 PM

Acceptance Test Design Principles: Jeff Langr
Are you designing your agile acceptance tests (ATs) well? I've derived (with the help of Tim Ottinger) and used a list of seven principles to vet the quality of ATs. I've found these principles very useful in helping agile teams improve their tests. Good ATs are: * Abstract * Bona fide * Cohesive * Decoupled * Expressive * Free of duplication * Green You'll see ATs (based on real agile team examples) that show violation of the principles and subsequently improved tests that adhere to the principles. One minute per principle, and one minute to wrap up!

5:30 PM
– 7:00 PM

Industry Analyst Panel Discussion

Agile Trends and Future Directions - Come join the leading industry analysts as they discuss the latest trends and emerging best practices around Agile software development. Learn how the most successful software organizations are utilizing Agile to drive business performance. Find out how the latest innovations in Agile practices continue to mature as development organizations deploy Agile further across the enterprise.

  • Dave West, Forrester Research
  • Michael Cote, RedMonk
  • Melinda Ballou, IDC
  • Michael Azoff, Ovum
  • Thomas Murphy, Gartner

7:30 PM
– 9:30 PM

Dinner with a Stranger

Socializing and networking are an integral part of Agile2011. If you'll be attending Agile2011 alone, make sure to stop by the registration desk and sign up for "Dinner with a Stranger" on Tuesday, August 9th. Just add your name to one of the sign-up sheets with the names of nearby restaurants and grab your "I'm a stranger" ribbon. Later that night, put it on and meet your fellow participants for dinner and great conversation. Seating is limited, so sign up early!

 

Wednesday, August 10 ▼

 

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Distributed Scrum: Why some teams make it work well and others don't: Val Scott, William Rowden
How does a geographically-distributed team collaborate across distance, culture, and even language? What can an organization do to encourage successful teamwork? What technologies and practices increase collaboration? This workshop will explore the patterns that enable companies to successfully deliver software with a distributed team. It will be co-presented by the VP Technology of a company that adopted Agile for teams in three time zones with two languages and cultures, and an Agile coach that assisted with the transition.

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Scaling Software Agility: Advanced Practices for Large Enterprise: Dean Leffingwell
Dean Leffingwell describes how rapidly advancing agile methods are being successfully applied to enterprise-class software development. He describes emerging practices including: lean requirements practices that scale to the full needs of the enterprise, intentionally-emergent enterprise architectures, a kanban system for re-architecting large-scale systems, achieving strategic alignment and product development flow with the Agile Release Train, and strategies for agile portfolio management and governance. see. www.scalingsoftwareagility.com for more information.

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Design Thinking: Mary Poppendieck
What does the US Military have in common with Apple? The both deal with increasing complexity by emphasizing design thinking. At Apple, design thinking starts by deciding, first of all, what NOT to do. In the military, design thinking precedes planning, and takes leaders through a series of steps that reframe their thinking about the environment they are dealing with. When you have competitors like Apple - or when your decisions are a matter of life or death - then you need to move beyond working software, beyond backlogs, even beyond agile - and focus like a laser on customers.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

Continuous Delivery: Jez Humble
This talk will focus on the engineering practices required to achieve the goal of agile development: satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. I'll cover the importance of good configuration management, automated testing at all levels, and continuous integration. There will be a particular focus on why feature branching is considered harmful, and alternative techniques which allow for continuous deployment while developing functioanlity incrementally such as branch by abstraction, feature bits, and dark launching.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

Integrating UX Into Agile: How To Ensure Your Sprints Result In Usable Software: Jon Innes
Learn about the UXI Matrix, a modified version of the product backlog that integrates UX-related information to help the team consider UX impact when working the backlog. It helps you track user experience work and its impact. This is not a product. It’s a simple set of techniques proven in multiple projects, that allow you to improve your ability to deliver great experiences to your customers in an Agile fashion. See the next generation in the evolution of the product backlog and find out how to overcome the weaknesses of traditional product backlogs that don’t consider UX related work.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

The Joy of Work: Managing Performance, Innovation & Organizational Maturity: Sanjiv Augustine, arlen bankston
Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your team rewarded for finding better ways to work? While many organizations have adopted Agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with Agile values, or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition for their teams. Join us to explore the subject of creating a truly holistic performance management system that not only adheres to Agile principles, but actively promotes individual drive, team innovation and organizational maturity.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Writing Maintainable Automated Acceptance Tests: Dale Emery
Test automation is software development. As with other software development efforts, most of the cost of test automation occurs during maintenance after the tests are first written. Automated tests can become brittle, so that a small change in a requirement or in the software renders scores of tests obsolete in the blink of an eye. How can we reduce the high cost of inevitable change? Dale Emery demonstrates key principles for writing adaptable automated tests: remove duplication, focus on the essence of the test, and name every important test idea.

1:50 PM
– 2:00 PM

Agile Management: creating a culture to help your team succeed: Karen Greaves
I'm the software development manager for a product company with 3 agile teams. My job is to foster the environment or culture that helps us be the best team we can be. In this talk I'll share a little about how I've done this, where I got my ideas, and how this works compared to other environments I've worked in which are.... well let's just say different :) I recently blogged about this: http://scrumcoaching.wordpress.com/2010/12/17/a-development-managers-strategy/

2:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Yahoo! Sports: Sprint 100 & Beyond: Keith Nottonson
Yahoo! Sports, the Web's leading sports' destination, began one week sprints and weekly releases with Sprint 100 in October 2010. The experiences and learnings of the Yahoo! Sports team will demonstrate specific actions to take to overcome scrum fatigue and rejuvenate your teams. Our exploration will focus on three transformative events: the implementation of daily code releases during the 2010 World Cup, the innovative Hacktacular event, and the data quality improvements of the Great Bug Sweep.

3:30 PM
– 4:30 PM

Undoing Performance Review Damage - Coaching towards Customer Purpose: Harold Shinsato, Chris Sims
The Performance Review survives almost intact in most organizations despite the ever increasing rate of adoption of agile and lean techniques. Unfortunately attempts at motivating and engaging employees from such a mindset is more likely to cause damage. Help your coaching clients to understand the pain of the Mass Production mindset with an experiential simulation. And then see within the simulation how coaching can help adjust the process to use intrinsic motivation through more deep understanding of customer purpose.

3:30 PM
– 4:30 PM

Team Traps: Esther Derby
Some teams soar; others wallow, bicker and slog their way to uncertain results. Teams that soar have a few things in common: they have a shared goal, interdependent work, complimentary skills, mutual accountability. Slogging teams have a few things in common, too. They fall into predictable traps. What are those traps and how can you help your team climb out of them? That’s what Esther is here to talk about.

3:50 PM
– 4:00 PM

Agile and Kanban Work Together to Deliver Maintenance Releases: Leslie Ekas, Scott Will
Agile and Kanban together to create maintenance releases separates the unpredictable job of fixing defects from the predictable work to validate them. Defect resolution times are hard to forecast because the environment may be hard to recreate and a safe fix may take analysis. Very short Agile sprints manage the constant prioritization of defects and team coordination. Defect validation time is more predictable and Kanban provides a reliable way to verify small batches of fixes for a maintenance release. Come learn how to use these processes together to improve your maintenance deliveries.

4:00 PM
– 4:30 PM

IEEE Best Paper - Lean as a Scrum Troubleshooter: Carsten Jakobsen, Tom Poppendieck
Systematic has relentlessly improved how it does Scrum during the past 5 years using the A3 problem solving tool from Lean. This approach is behind the learning and experience reported in the past 5 years. This talk will take a walk behind the scenes of years of successful experiences and show the management and mechanics driving this learning. The cumulative learning from major improvements are presented, including a small set of measures that for the past 3 years has proven to be very valuable in monitoring project progress while at the same time fostering a Lean mindset in the teams.

6:30 PM
– 9:30 PM

Sponsor Reception

Get your Agile2011 passport stamped at this year's Sponsor Reception. The sponsors have played a large role in making this year's conference a great success. So come out and visit their booths, find out the latest and greatest in agile development, collect stamps, enjoy appetizers and drink, and enter for your chance to win great prizes!

 

Thursday, August 11 ▼

 

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Handling Product Management Across the Enterprise: Alan Shalloway
The common model of a product owner works well for small to medium scale Agile adoption. However, for large scale Agile adoption one must expand the role to include a product manager that works with the business stakeholders while the product owner focuses on driving the teams. How proper product portfolio management that eases the handling of business dependencies by properly loading the backlogs of the teams involved is presented. The timeliness of this flow from business stakeholders to product managers to product owners to teams also demonstrates the need to keep backlogs to a minimum.

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Visual Portfolio Management - Putting the 'Big' in Big visible tracking: Bob Payne, Michael Kaiser
In this interactive workshop we will explore the use of a Portfolio Alignment Wall (PAW) to track progress, visualize dependancies and increase collaboration on large portfolios. Experience the process of populating and managing the PAW through a portfolio simulation. We combine Scrum-Of-Scrums, visual management, value streams and a simple set of rules to balance simplicity and sufficiency. Bob and Mike have used this technique to manage delivery across 17 agile and waterfall teams, 11 major feature streams with cross team dependencies.

11:00 AM
– 12:00 PM

The Agile Scaling Model (ASM): Be as Agile as You Need to Be: Scott Ambler
The Agile Scaling Model (ASM) provides the context and advice for effectively tailoring agile strategies. It describes how to extend the agile construction life cycle into a full-fledged disciplined agile delivery life cycle from project initiation to production. It then describes how to tailor agile practices to address eight scaling factors: team size, geographical distribution, domain complexity, organizational distribution, regulatory compliance, organizational complexity, technical complexity, and enterprise disciplines (such as enterprise architecture, reuse, and governance).

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

How a Traditional Project Leader Transitions to Scrum: Nafis Ahmad, Jeff Sutherland
Transitioning from a traditional project manager to Scrum is challenging. The PMI Project Manager manages the project by ensuring that intermediate deliverables are delivered at various stages of the project. Agile development emphasizes the need for producing tangible results as soon as possible and as often as possible. The resulting role of an Agile project manager is fundamentally different from a PMI Project Manager. We will map the PMI responsibilities to Scrum and show a project manager how to more easily make the transition to an agile practice.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

User Experience Teams Gone Agile: Carol Morton, Clement 'James' Goebel
If an open collaborative space, short iterations, story-cards, and functional testing are good for software development, then why are software the developers the only ones who have to do it? What would happen if user experience designers followed the same practices? In this energetic hands-on tutorial you will explore practices that some user experience teams have adopted/adapted from agile developers. The session will also share some success stories that demonstrate how these techniques resulted in greater project success.

1:30 PM
– 2:00 PM

User-Centered Design and Agile Methods: A Systematic Review: Tiago Silva, Angela Martin
This paper presents the results of a systematic review of existing literature on the integration of agile software development with user-centered design approaches. Through systematic and rigorous research methods and data analysis, this paper shows that a common process model underlies such approaches and discusses which artifacts are used to support the collaboration between designers and developers.

1:30 PM
– 3:00 PM

Telling Better Stories with User Story Mapping: Jeff Patton

User story maps help us understand the product we're building, break in down into small pieces to build iteratively and incrementally, and effectively plan minimal viable product releases in holistic product slices. In this quick tutorial participants will learn the basics of user story mapping by building their own story map quickly and collaboratively. They'll see examples and hear stories of a wide variety companies who've used story maps to simplify backlog building, planning, and delivery.

3:30 PM
– 5:00 PM

Slackers and Debtors: Meet Commitments, Reduce Debt, and Improve Performance: James Shore
Does your team have trouble finishing its stories every iteration? Is your "done done" actually a "maybe maybe?" Are you constantly removing stories from your plan? If so, this session will help. We take a close look at the relationship between technical debt, velocity, and iteration slack. We teach you how to use slack to achieve a stable iteration velocity, increase team performance, and get your stories "done done" every time.

3:30 PM
– 5:00 PM

To Make a Long Story Short: Splitting User Stories: Bill Wake
Large stories mix different levels of functionality, risk, and value. Large stories are disproportionately hard for teams to understand, estimate, and implement. There _is_ a way out: split stories to a manageable size, while keeping them valuable to customers. We'll examine splitting and merging stories using a variety of concrete techniques. We'll see why splitting on technical lines sounds easy, but gives poor results. Finally, we'll practice applying splitting techniques. You will leave with a toolkit of 20 or more ways to split stories, directly applicable to your project.

7:00 PM
– 10:00 PM

Conference Party

We reserve the final evening for this year's Agile2011 conference party. We are still working on the details of this event and waiting for the last responsible moment to finalize our plans.  But trust us; it will be a party that you won’t want to miss.  It will include a scrumptious dinner, beverages and entertainment rarely found at software conferences. 

 

Friday, August 12 ▼

 

9:00 AM
– 10:30 AM

Code: Kevlin Henney
Code is the stuff of software. It is the definition of the software. It is the enabler of functionality, the realizer of business value, the expression of understanding. It is also an expression of misunderstanding, a resister of change, a source of sunk costs. But the word code has meanings beyond source and binary. In a broader sense, code and codes are also the stuff of software development. There are cultures of programming, principles of practice, manifestos of desire. Code refers to a set of conventions by which a group of people will govern themselves.

11:00 AM
– 12:30 PM

The Power of an Agile Mindset: Linda Rising
I've wondered for some time whether much of Agile's success was the result of the placebo effect, that is, good things happened because we believed they would. The placebo effect is a startling reminder of the power our minds have over our perceived reality. Now cognitive scientists tell us that this is only a small part of what our minds can do. Research has identified what I like to call "an agile mindset," an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for learning, a belief that we can all improve over time, that our abilities are not fixed but evolve with effort.
 

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