program selection system

This session isn’t a conventional presentation at all: it’s an interactive workshop in which everyone participates.

We all know folks who seem to be naturally creative, outrageously productive, somehow able to do things we can’t do. We call them “talented,” “artistic,” “super intelligent,” or some other word that means they’ve got an inherent ability that we don’t have. Thing is, most of what we call talent is actually skill, and can be learned. Not only can it be learned (by you), but it can be practiced, and you can get better at it with practice.

There are those among us who believe that a puddle of primoridal ooze, a Ball of Mud, if you will, can, if you leave it alone for four billion years or so, turn into a sentient primate that can ponder his or her own existence without the benefit of “intelligent” design. Indeed, such an “intelligent” creature might him or herself design marvelous software artifacts to burnish mighty civilizations. What ever one might think of the plausibility of biological evolution, surely no one would dispute that software is the product of, if not omnicient, at least semi-intelligent designers.

Thru conference and gathering participation, several companies who have been practicing Agile for a number of years discovered that most of the topics or discussions were not addressing the difficult issues facing larger organizations - i.e. performance management, distributed and offshore teams, Agile portfolio management, etc. Two separate Enterprise Agile discussions amongst the leaders of companies with large development teams and similar experience implementing Agile have been held.

Reasonably accurate estimation of user stories is necessary in order to provide the customer with development schedule predictability. Small stories are usually fairly easy to estimate, but estimates for larger stories are often accompanied by higher degrees of uncertainty. Although a large story may sometimes be broken down into smaller stories for purposes of estimation, this is not always the case.

This workshop proposes a method for enabling a team of developers to rapidly quantify the relative complexities of larger user stories by using “tests” as the unit of estimation.

Groups that are releasing their software to production one or more times per week are doing micro-releases.

Industrial Logic has been doing micro-releases of its Greatest Hits eLearning product (http://industriallogic.com/elearning) for a few years now.

Micro-releasing has simplified our process by eliminating traditional agile planning activities, such as

• estimating user stories
• reconciling estimates
• calculating velocity
• trying to obtain a consistent velocity

Based on “Zen Mind, Beginners Mind” —- Suzuki Roshi

As effective as Agile teams have become, many times it isn’t the team that is the problem. In many cases, the structure within which the team exists is more problematic than the performance of the team itself. The myopic view of agility towards teams has not helped address this problem.

Value Stream Mapping comes from Lean Thinking and provides a way to see the entire chain of events that leads to a product from its inception. It describes the transition from concept to cash. It maps the flow of ideas and actions across the entire organization.

Self-organization of human beings is a tricky thing. Agile coaches, especially ScrumMasters, are constantly challenged with how to motivate/persuade/trick their teams into self-organizing and doing things, without telling them what to do, but there is very little information or training on this topic. Allowing a team to self-organize along the lines of “oh well, they’re all adults, they’ll figure it out” is just as irresponsible as reverting to the command-and control school of management. So, how should one go about it? This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics to change the dynamics of a team with the aim of optimizing their work together.

Drawing from the art of improvisation, Agile coaches Jim York and Tobias Mayer lead this fun and fast moving session to explore healthy and innovative ways of communicating and collaborating. Many Agile teams suffer from dysfunctional interpersonal communication born of learned “bad” behaviors. These stifling exchanges keep individuals entrenched in old ideas and inhibit forward progress.

Systematic is an agile CMMI level 5 company, where the default way of working is based on Scrum and story based early testing. Several years of Experiences in combining CMMI with Scrum, has shown that the mix of Scrum and CMMI provides strong synergies and results, which were reported during Agile 2007. This session presents specifically how agile methods like Scrum and story based early testing development can be sucessfully augmented with inspiration from CMMI. CMMI provides solid support for what disciplines to consider.