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After 7 years of traditional IT delivery, Gap Inc. Direct decided to adopt Agile. This experience report discusses three key factors that contributed to our successful (and ongoing) Agile transformation: 1. Ambitious Pilot Project 2. Massive Investment in Continuous Integration 3. Rethinking our Assets

FIT is a framework that comes in various guises (Fit, Fitnesse, Fitlibrary), and can be used in different ways. The core principle behind writing FIT documents is to promote better communication between the stakeholders of a system. In principle, using FIT is a good thing, but in practice we find that some teams struggle to use FIT documents effectively. In this tutorial we will introduce some concrete examples of poor FIT style, and get the participants to refactor these examples to improve them.

By attending this session, you will:

Overview
Learn from our experience in executing Agile in a complicated and integrated organization and culture at The City of Calgary. This experience report will be of particular interest to large organizations and those in government. We are are going to describe the lessons learned from our journey from first deciding to look at Agile to actually executing and evaluating it. Our particular viewpoint will focus on how this played out in a government IT organization that is highly structured.

Cultural Context
• Team dynamics were focused on managing the team as opposed to leading it.
• Process and its complexity could obscure the end goals and motivations of a team’s effort.
• Highly defined roles for all team members at times hampered needed communication and collaboration.
• Client participation was challenging to get and keep past requirements sign off.
• Teams were not empowered to make the decisions that directly impacted them and how they worked on a project.