Is your team or project supposed to “be agile?” You might not feel that way if you have a years-long backlog, standups are individual status reports, and everyone is still multitasking. The people on the project want to do great work. But how you work feels a lot like an “agile” death march. There’s a reason you feel that way. You’re using fake agility—a waterfall lifecycle masquerading as an agile approach. No one has to work that way.

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In giving hundreds of online talks, I have a vast amount expertise in things that I'd prefer not to ever do again. I have a small amount of experience in things that seem to usually work pretty well or at least don't fail as terribly when things go wrong. If you are looking for some tips for making your presentations more engaging, curious about the technical setup behind the lunch and learn series, or just want to hear embarrassing stories of my mistakes, this session is for you.

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There is a fundamental disconnect in delivering software. Software developers are often proud of their innovations, and businesses are eager to ship them. But users are increasingly exhausted by the constant technological churn disrupting daily lives and workflows. In Zimman's new book, Progressive Delivery: Build The Right Thing For The Right People At The Right Time, he and his co-authors James Governor, Kim Harrison, and Heidi Waterhouse call this phenomenon technological jerk.

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What does your software project have in common with the Sphex Wasp and Sumo Robots? They both exhibit complex behavior that can be defined using simple examples. In this session, we will look at how behavior driven development works and how it can be used to help build quality into the software development process.

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Events like Big Room Planning provide lots of practice DOING agile—refining backlogs of features and stories, reviewing acceptance criteria, designing for -ilities, bringing people together across disciplines and departments, planning to deliver value iteratively and incrementally, building roughly right forecasts rather than precisely wrong plans, and more. But what about BEING agile? What about effective idea-generation, rich learning, high-bandwidth communication, high-performing teams, shared ownership of results, radical work transparency, and real trust and respect? With intention in design and attention to facilitation, we have made—and you can make—BRP a place where people learn, practice, and master agile culture.

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Are you working on a product or a project? What is the difference and why does it matter? In this session we are going to look at the difference between the project approach to creating software and the product approach and discuss why the Agile Principles will push many teams to move away from projects and toward products.

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The field of software engineering has always favored people who can learn new things quickly. As the fundamental underlying principles and tools of programming change, especially with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, what continues to matter most are the foundational ways of reasoning about programs. In this talk, we’ll share how, at the University of British Columbia, we teach a timeless approach to understanding software.

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What does a cult that clears runways in the forest and wears coconuts like headphones have to do with Agile? You’ll find out in this talk that is a refresher of the foundation of Agile with a focus on the why behind all the different practices used by teams. No tales about pirates this time, but we’ve got stories about toothpaste tubes assembly lines, a manager who offered to buy a rocket for our team, and a modern real-life version of the emperor who had no clothes fairy tale.

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In this 45 minute session, we are going to discuss ways to create a sense of urgency that will help create a healthly working environment for your team. We'll also look at pitfalls -- things to avoid that create unhealthy urgency and drive counterproductive behavior.

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With the aid of maps a wander through the history of technology development, what it means, where we are going and what should we learn from the past.

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