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.

Short Abstract [88 words]

Sticky notes (aka Post-it Notes [tm]) are the lingua franca of remembering pesky tasks…yet their real potential lies in effectively and rapidly organizing collaborative group work. Don’t underestimate these simple tools: it’s amazing what powerful results you can get from a $2.00 office supply investment.

Whose Project is it Anyway? Presenters: Bonnie Aumann, Rob Kinyon

From organizing the backlog of stories to choosing a branching strategy, developers and clients can find themselves wondering who’s really driving the project. These problems are only exacerbated when an outside team is brought into the client-space. In this session we will explore organizational patterns and anti-patterns, particularly focusing on conflict resolution, via improvisational role-playing.

It’s easy to speak of test-driven development as if it were a single method, but there are several ways to approach it. In our experience, different approaches lead to quite different solutions.

In this workshop, we’re not trying to decide which approach is best. Rather, we’ll use concrete examples to explore

• What goes into the moment of decision when a test is written?
• How do you think about the problem you’re trying to solve?
• What strategies or techniques help you write the first few tests?

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.

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.

What is an Agile coach? What is not agile coaching? How do I start and grow as an Agile coach? A short introduction by Erik Lundh, founder of Agile Coaches Guild, and member of a cross-disciplinary team that currently trains a significant number of agile coaches for a large international development organization.

The reality is that our teams are not always colocated and many of us have to adapt. The empirical, inspect-and-adapt, approach will help us evolve toward processes that work. This session will help you accelerate this process by learning what has, and hasn’t, worked for others. Come share your distributed agile experience and tap into the collective wisdom that will be present. We are going to compile a list of the most important ingredients for success.

Intent
The intent of this session is to expose participants to the challenges faced by distributed agile teams, to allow them to discover ways to mitigate those challenges, and to have fun.

Summary
The Distributed Agile Game is meant to be played by people who are interested in challenges experienced by members of distributed agile teams. The participants may have prior experience in distributed development, but this is not required. In fact, no software development experience is required.

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.