program selection system

Without a doubt, agile processes rely on effective collaborative teams. But we can’t just throw a group of individuals together and expect an agile team to just happen. It takes knowledge of team strategies, skillful team building and ongoing coaching to build and maintain high-performing agile teams.

Self-organization is a key concept in agile software development, but teams are often more used to taking orders than making their own decisions. Touchstones Discussion Project prepares participants to take responsibility for their own future by applying structured discussion techniques that encourage them to examine and adapt their own behavior, their peer relationships, and their culture. Those who join us in this interactive Touchstones session will experience the power of group learning in a setting that emphasizes respectful participation, collaborative skill-building, active listening, and participative leadership.

Where are those fantastic, self-propelled teams that were promised by agile? Where they were missing, we took action. It was sometimes difficult. Along the way, not all the pegs fit into their corresponding holes. In many respects, we had been our own worst enemy by allowing poor behaviors and poor teams to manifest themselves before and after scrum. In hindsight, Kelley Blue Book applied an informal intervention model which was useful to address our team deficiencies. Self-organizing teams didn’t just happen - we had to help them along.

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.

Abstract

Over the last few years we have had the good fortune to aggressively apply the agile practices on a number of projects with great success. These successes, however, have not been achieved without challenges and lessons learnt along the way. This experience report specifically highlights examples from three different software development projects of varying sizes within this period and within the same organization. This is the story of three little pigs, where in all cases the pigs were well and truly committed.

Agile methods like Scrum and XP involve repetitive meetings and actions that can become routine and lose freshness, challenge and novelty. How do we put “heart” into agile processes? How can team members inject variety or even whimsy into what they do every day? What are effective ways to “punctuate” agile routines? And what exactly is “Haiku-Driven Development (HDD)”? In this workshop, we’ll review actual experiences with teams practicing XP and Scrum, and provide examples of how teams avoided having agile processes become more albatross than aid.

If you don’t pair program, have a distributed team, or your iteration is 5 weeks long, are you Agile? In this session we will debate both sides of this issue as we seek to answer the questions –“how much compromise is too much?” and “when is Agile no longer agile?” Do you give up on the concept of Agile Development altogether because you are not adopting the whole methodology or do you look for ways to use as much as possible even if your environment is not ideal?

Agile in development teams has distinct benefits, but in large organizations a development team is a small part in the chain from customer request to customer delivery. Introducing Agile is a massive change in both our culture and our ways of working. The results are impressive: team motivation and product management satisfaction increased. We will present how to leverage on improvements in development in a large organization, the main choices we made, the resistance we had to overcome and how we made the changes stick.

__Software teams confront what works and what doesn’t throughout every project. Where does their hard-earned experience go?

Underestimating the impacts of cultural diversity on your team can be disastrous, creating barriers and even team breakdown. Most leaders aren’t even aware of the influences that different cultures can have on team dynamics. These impacts can be even more pronounced on agile self organizing teams.