program selection system

Drawing from our experience implementing Agile not only across cultural and physical boundaries with on/off shore blended teams, but within limitations that aren’t so obvious - we play an interactive game to learn about how people from diverse groups with different learning styles can gain knowledge and insight in cooperative and competitive settings. We will draw from this workshop’s experiential learning to feed a larger discussion about intercultural work groups, whether these groups are from different countries or different work disciplines.

Agility asks for face-to-face communication, trust and collaboration. Proximity can be created by travelling – at least sometimes. Virtual communication channels provide another possibility overcoming the distance. But we should take the trust threshold into account which, once hit, will break an existing relationship.

This session is presented by a group of panelists – Esther Derby, Hubert Smits, Tamara Sulaiman, Samir Shah and Monica Yap. All of the panelists have experience working with successful distributed Agile teams, from offshore and onshore. They will share their experience and insights on how to face the common challenges arise from this environment. Topics such as how to start well, how to deal with time zones, will be discussed. During the session, the panelists will also answer specific questions from attendees.

Gathering and writing “User Stories” is always a challenging activity and interview skills are the primary factor that makes the activity effective. In this session, I propose a method for exploring “User Wish” — user’s vague ideas before shaping user stories — using semi-structured interview with mind maps. The former half of the session is an introduction of mind maping and how to use it in user story exploration. The latter half will be a demonstration and workshop of attendees.

• What is a Mind map and Why ?
• How Software Development Benefits from Using Mind Maps

Summary for the printed Program Guide

Any successful recording artist eventually submits to releasing a “Greatest Hits” album. This is the opposite: a beat-up XP coach putting his biggest and furthest-reaching mistakes in a neat package and releasing them to the public. This talk could also be named “Ten ways to guarantee your Agile transition is a total failure”, or “Apologies of an XP coach”; however I’m sure I’ll mention more than ten mistakes and I make no apology for them.

ORIGINAL SUMMARY:

Writing haiku, the art form of short poetry from Japan, is a great way to reset the brain, express emotions without using emotional language, and explore the wealth of talent for writing and communication which exists in each of us. Often, our thought processes are procedural in nature. We treat our lives and work as railroads to success. This workshop explores the structure and language of haiku, aiming to break the habit of procedural thought through techniques which capture the moment and nurture the brain’s natural tendency to make connections.

What are the factors critical to the success of a CIO? Which relationships are the most important in determining the longevity of a CIO? How can a CIO consistently deliver business value? How can development teams in general and agile teams in particular contribute to this success? In this presentation, Niel Nickolaisen shares his experiences and the survey responses from his CIO peers on how the development team and CIO can work hand in hand to improve IT and business performance.

Cognitive scientists say we are more productive and happier when our behavior matches our hardwiring. That is, when what we do and why we do it matches the way we have evolved to survive over tens of thousands of years. One disturbing behavior we are hardwired to perform is to decide instantly who we trust. It is a particularly interesting characteristic of this behavior that we aren’t aware of what we are doing or why we are doing it. This hardwired evaluation often prevents us from working well with others.

After running a similar workshop with about 20 participants on XP2007 it became clear that getting distributed agile projects right is still a challenge. We got the impression that the community has definitely started to test and execute distributed agile projects. This is obviously driven by the offshoring trend. The interesting phenomenon we are observing is that it is the quality and collaboration aspects of agile practices that leads to an interest in agile practices despite the initial belief that distributed projects would need a more structured waterfallish approach.