Simulation: The Role of an Agile Coach

Rachel Davies

The surge in Agile adoption has created a demand for project managers and technical leads who coach rather than direct their teams. A sign of this trend is the ever-increasing number of people getting certified as scrum masters and agile leaders. Training courses that introduce agile practices are easy to find. But making the transition to a coaching role is not as simple as understanding what agile practices are.

In this session, we'll be exploring different coaching styles through a simulation. The debrief of the simulation draws out tips and tricks that can help you coach your team.

Workshop: Software Design Principles - Mining Pattern DNA

Eoin Woods, Andy Longshaw & Nick Rozanski

Design patterns are an established way of sharing and reusing design knowledge by allowing proven, concrete solutions to reoccurring problems to be captured in a standard manner that allows their form, forces and applicability to be easily understood. Indeed patterns are now so well established that it is rare to find an undergraduate computer science or software engineering programme that does not include significant study of them.

Design principles are generally applicable design rules that, when followed, are generally agreed to result in desirable qualities in a design artefact. In contrast to patterns, design principles don't provide concrete solutions to specific problems but rather are general guidelines that designers should be aware of when creating their designs. While design patterns are a practical embodiment of good design principles, we observe that many designers using patterns don't seem to understand the principles that make them work well. Examples of design principles are "maximise cohesion", "minimise coupling", "liskov substitutability principle", "don't repeat yourself/minimise duplication" and so on.

In this session we will examine a number of patterns from established collections in order to find the design principles that they embody, collate the principles and decide which of them can be used independently of the patterns that they are usually associated with.

Tutorial: Kanban, Flow and Cadence

Karl Scotland

Some teams struggle to get buy-in to use Agile methods such as Scrum, or experience difficulty implementing the approaches successfully. This results in the teams being less effective than they could be, and can give a poor impression of the benefits of Agile development. Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) are three important Lean concepts which can be combined to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the more common timebox-based approaches used by more traditional Agile methods. Using Kanban, Flow and Cadence can smooth transitions to Agile development, or further improve the productivity of existing Agile implementations.

The presenter will describe his experiences implementing these ideas at Yahoo! and explain the concepts using examples, simulations and games, as well as facilitating group discussion. To tie all the ideas together, the session will close with a large simulation and demonstration showing how a real Kanban system might work.

Workshop: Enhancing your Professional Tool Kit

Marina Haase

In "More Secrets of Consulting" Gerald Weinberg introduces a consultant's tool kit and mentions several tools that help a consultant do his job well. I sort of like the metaphor that we as professionals carry our own toolkit with us - using the tools i.e. technical tools, methodologies, best practices, mind sets to help in every day working life. And I liked the idea of sharing about our toolkit and being inspired by other people's tools and adding new tools to our toolkit - hence enhancing our tool kit.

But in my experience sometimes we tend to carry around tools we have acquired somewhere (at some course or other, or have heard our mentors use) but somehow not be able to use them too effectively.

So my thought was that we could obviously benefit by sharing about tools we use – but instead of just trying to brainstorm a great number of tools and leave it at that, I wanted to see if we couldn't try and dig into the question why somethings work. What the upsides and downsides are of different tools – and whether we can put our finger on the reason some work and some don't.

In this workshop we will spend some tome analysing the tools in our personal tool kit and present them to others.

Workshop: Pitching Agile

David Harvey & Peter Marks

While it's usually (though of course not always) straightforward to make a convincing case for agile development to developers and project managers, taking the message to senior management teams is another matter altogether. Convincing CEOs, heads of marketing and finance and other senior business leaders that iterative development, product backlogs and story points add up to something on which they can bet the business is, to put it bluntly, hard, and definitely not for the faint-hearted.

In this workshop we'll adopt a "Dragon's Den" format in which four groups will compete to impress management teams pairing four pre-appointed senior executives (the "Truly Difficult Bastards") and four assistants (merely "Difficult Bastards"). Each group gets three shots at preparing, refining and pitching a short presentation, before the Bastards retire, confer, and select the most convincing pitch. This will be presented to all, prompting further comments from the Bastards and an open exchange with the group.

This will all be fast, furious, entertaining and challenging, but we'll all aim to come out of the workshop with better answers to the awkward questions that we encounter when we try to sell agile outside the confines of a development organisation.

Retrospective Surgery

Rob Bowley & Matt Wynne

Does your team suffer from a feeling of stagnation, that nothing really changes and motivation is not particularly high? Have you ever wondered why? Do you run regular retrospectives or similar activities to try to break the cycle but still don't feel your making any significant progress? Then this session is for you.

Rob Bowley and Matt Wynne sincerely believe that regularly taking time to reflect with your colleagues, identifying your most pressing problems and tackling them is the centre pin of any self-respecting software team. However, even these sessions (usually called retrospectives) quickly become tired and repetitive, often never achieve their intended goals and even get dropped completely (big mistake).

This is a lowdown get-your-hands-dirty workshop. Participants will be spending most of their time solving each others problems and trading ideas on how to make the most effective use of your time spent retrospecting within your organisations.

The objective is to share our problems with retrospecting activities and find solutions to them. Also to create a directory of tools, tips and tricks which we'll be able to refer to when planning retrospective exercises in the future.