Speakers

Speakers

Last night (Sun July 17th), the program sofa met and we chose 30 talks out of 65 submissions. Were now contacting the selected speakers to get their confirmation for the event. As these confirmations come in, well update this page to give you news about the program. Expect the full program with all speakers to be published by the end of July.

Keynotes

Were proud to present three keynote speakers and the host for our CodingDojo:

Rachel Davies, England

Rachel Davies is one of the primary promotors of the European Agile community and has been involved in ALE from the start. Shes principal Agile Coach with Agile eXperience and author of “Agile Coaching”.

Bjarte Bogsnes, Norway

Bjarte Bogsnes is VP Performance Management Development in Scandinavias largest company, Statoil. Hes the author of “Implementing Beyond Budgeting”.

Dave Snowden, Wales

Dave is founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Cognitive Edge, leading thinker about advances in the use and “management” of knowledge.

Jon Jagger, England

Coding Dojo with a Twist

The twist is that we will be using the CyberDojo technology to do the dojo. Participants need only a laptop with a modern browser and wireless capability. Nothing needs to be installed. Nothing. Nada. Zip.

Participants will be working in small groups. Each group

  • works at a single computer
  • writes their code and tests inside the CyberDojo mini IDE web page
  • submits their code and tests to the CyberDojo server as often as they wish.

The server saves the submissions, runs the tests, and returns the test-outcomes to the browsers as a traffic light; green if all the tests passed, red if one or more tests failed, amber if the tests could not be run (eg syntax error).

A dashboard shows each participants traffic light history. Click on any traffic light to open a diff-view of that submission.

We will do a short coding exercise, a retrospective, and then repeat.

We will also be swapping drivers/navigators during the dojo.

CyberDojo is a great environment for doing deliberate software practice and learn about test driven development, team dynamics and collaboration.

CyberDojos have been run at many software conferences: XP, NDC, JavaZone, ACCU, DevWeek, Software Craftsmanship, JAOO, Agile Cambridge, etc. They are always very popular.

Speakers and Talks

Vaidas Adomauskas, Lithuania

“Product Management in Agile organization with product developed by many teams”

Early in 2010 we implemented Scrum in Adform as its development process. More than 40 people were split to 6 cross functional teams. So what’s the big deal you will ask? The big deal for us was: we all work developing ONE product (SaS AdServing platform)! We are not working on separate projects!

How to organize Product Management work to fit this? How 6 Product Owners should work together, with company management, and other departments? How to split big features and divide work to teams (usually one feature had to be implemented by few teams to bring value to the customer)? What to do with “research” projects? How to handle the growth of the company (now we have more than 50 people and 8 teams)?

In this presentation I will share our journey, as well as mistakes we made and lessons learned. If you are implementing Agile in organization or project with many teams working on one product this presentation is for you.

Monika Konieczny, Poland

“How to create happy Super Heros Team and bring daily smile to Product Owners face?”

What comes to your mind when you think of the most important (and the hardest) Scrum Masters daily task? Making communication effective? Helping the team in meeting deadlines and making PO dreams come true? Finding ways to overcome obstacles? Yes but All above issues can by solved by the team if only members are happy, motivated and willing to do their best to accomplish the project.

Whoever tried to motivate other person knows how difficult (== almost impossible) it is. Mainly because motivation is a very internal beast living in each of us. Fortunately there are few tricks which might be helpful for a Scrum Master to inspire the Team and awake their motivation demons. Gamification, serious games, inspiring user stories, magic kanban board and many other awesome tools changing your daily boring tasks into awesome, challenging experience.

For the last 10 month Ive been working with amazing team. They are just like magic Transformers. In 10 month time they turned from regular devs into super heroes. We had ups and downs, crisis, 24h deploy and other advetures. But weve tackled with all the problems and now enjoy everyday work.

During the presentation Id like to show you some tips & tricks and discuss your magic ways how to motivate/make Team smile.

Bruce Scharlau, Scotland

“Agile at the University”

You need to provide more than lectures about agile, in order for students to learn agile. They need to be guided in their doing agile for it to have an impact. It needs to (a) tell about agile, (b) provide examples to work through in workshops, and then (c) use agile on a larger project for the whole system to sink into their working habits. So how do you help this happen?

This is a what my experience has been since I started promoting agile practices at the University of Aberdeen in 2001. This session will take you on a roadtrip showing you how to raise awareness of agile practices at a university so that you can benefit from the experience and apply the lessons where you need them. It will propose

(a) the minimum ingredients for agile at the university along with

(b) some proposals for extra agile aspects that help further and sustain the whole system, and

(c) show how people outside the university system can bring their local university into the agile system.

Gaetano Mazzanti, Italy

“How (fr)agile we are. Metrics in a complex world”

Yet another talk about metrics!?

This is a talk about goals and proxy variables, about double (and perhaps triple) loop learning, change and complexity. Do metrics fit/help in all of this? They do, especially if they have an expiration date.

We will then introduce metric quadrants and discuss which metrics fit where and which correlations exist between different quadrants.

A short break will lead us to check how motion charts can help us in understanding the evolution of various data/properties/artifacts including tests, code and backlogs.

And speaking of backlogs, given that a backlog is a queue (as such it should be removed, shouldnt it), our closing topics will be queues, flow and different ways to measure WIP.

Joanne Cranford, England and Barry OReilly, Ireland

“Mental Models for Agile Adoption”

Our mental models help shape our behaviour and define our approach to solving problems, carrying out tasks and form the structure of logical reasoning.

One view suggests mental models can be constructed from perception, imagination, or the comprehension of discourse.

What are mental ingredients to support Agile adoption within learning organisations? How to we amplify what enhances adoption and break down barriers that inhibit it.

We would like to explore ideas how mental models are at the very heart of success of organisational change and individual transformation.

Zuzana Sochova and Eduard Kunce, Czech Republic

“Agile communication: Back and forth between managers and teams”

Everybody agrees these days that communication is one of the key success factors in any project, regardless of their size and complexity. During the agile adoption process, many teams and managers are blind to communication issues and believe everything is working just fine. However, experience

suggests that communication is failing at many levels -managers dont really understand their developers, testers and other geeks, who on the other hand often fail to effectively sell their point back to management. Similar situations exist between sales and technical experts or even between developers and testers.

The fact is that speaking the same language doesnt guarantee the understanding of each others points. This highly-interactive talk shows typical communication patterns, behaviors and provides eye-opening insights into the ways communication can improved. Some practical games include the whole audience, which typically makes the session very lively and engaging.

Rob van Lanen, Netherlands

“FedEx Days: Awakening intrinsic motivation”

I want to share my insights on organizing FedEx Days to awaken intrinsic motivation in your teams.

In short, its about unleashing creativity, innovation and motivation by getting out of the peoples way. You set a timebox of 1 day and apply 1 rule: If you sign up, you show the results to the company the next day.

I have organised a FedEx Day with the development team at my company. Some results are already implemented. Moreover, it boosts creativity and teambuilding. Now we have planned a FedEx Day with the entire company, late September.

I conducted an Open Space session about this topic with 10+ participants at Agile Coach Camp Germany.

More info: http://bit.ly/fedexday

Jurgen Appelo, Netherlands

“How to Change the World”

“How do I make my managers more Agile?”
“How can I convince developers to educate themselves?”
“How can I make customers more cooperative?”
“How do I start a European network of Agile and Lean practitioners?”

When transforming organizations and other social systems people usually encounter obstacles. And these obstacles very often involve changing other people’s behaviors. Of course, we cannot really _make_ people behave in a different way. We also cannot really make people laugh, and we cannot really make people happy. But… we can certainly try!

This session is about Change Management 3.0. It is a new change management “super model” which views organizations as complex adaptive systems and social networks. The Change Management 3.0 supermodel wraps various existing models (PDCA, ADKAR, Adoption Curve and The 5 Is). It lists a few dozen hard questions that can help people in their attempts to change the behaviors of other people in an organization and beyond. No matter whether you are a manager, Scrum Master, Product Owner, software developer or writer, anyone will find it useful to know how to change the world around them.