Most (if not all) of us are tasked with solving wicked, complex problems using some kind of technology products that may or may not be good fits for the problems we are solving. It’s stressful! In this session with agile coach Dave Marsh, we’ll explore the nature of complexity and how some agile approaches can help us solve these seemingly ever-morphing problems we are tasked with. Dave will demonstrate practices you can use and provide a bit of theory (the “why’s”) that make them useful when dealing with complex problems. These practices include maximizing the diversity of opinion on your teams, a “shift-left” approach to reducing risk and enabling the kind of transparency needed to make decisions effectively, even under uncertainty."

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You've probably heard about "splitting" user stories, but often the idea is mentioned without any real concrete idea of what it involves. In this talk we are going to look at why splitting user stories is valuable, some theory about how to do it, and then look at some real world examples of splitting users stories.

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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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Are your retrospectives producing value for your team? Have they turned into unfocused complaining sessions? Or have people stopped coming altogether? Understand what's going wrong and learn how you can bring value back to your retrospectives (hint: it doesn't have to do with incentivizing with food or popular TV show themes).

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Agile says that we need to prioritize collaboration with the customer. It also says that the best way to communicate is face-to-face. These principles and values are behind the creation of team rooms and daily 15 minute face-to-face meetings to coordinate work. But what does that mean for teams in hybrid environments where not everyone is co-located or where everyone has been sent home to work? Even post COVID lockdowns, we are likely to have more people working from home. How do we follow the Agile principles with a new way of working, leverage technology for the reality of working from home, and create strong team cultures in this new environment?

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I’ve worked with a number of incredible Scrum Masters over the years. For this talk I asked several what they feel is the most important secret behind their success. This talk covers the things they identified as well as my observations about some of the things that made them successful.

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Are you tired of having the same conversations, delivering "late" and being put under pressure for decisions you didn't even make? In this session, I'll walk through how we managed to flip the script in a highly regulated, risk-averse, financial institution by introducing probabilistic forecasting and flow metrics as well as ditching wasteful estimations.

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To kick off the first Agile LnL of 2023, we are going to take an example driven tour of the Agile principles. With real world stories of projects that both succeeded and failed, we are going to see how teams follow Agile principles for success and ignore them to their peril.

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Come test your Agile knowledge, impress your co-workers, and win fabulous prizes! For this lunch and learn session, we are going to take a break from listening to talks about Agile and instead play some game show-style quizzes with prizes and bragging rights for the winners. We'll cover topics from past lunch and learns, the Agile Manifesto, and maybe just a bit of random Christmas trivia thrown in for good measure. Hope to see you there!

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Team change is inevitable, especially when your company is hiring like crazy or when it is shrinking. Your teams might grow bigger and split. Some people might leave and then your teams merge together. What feels like tectonic shifts happen as you morph structurally to refocus people and work, continuously. It can be a wild ride. How can we bring a humanistic stance to this dynamic reteaming? How can the people be empowered to have ownership over their team change? How can we integrate the new people, honor who is already there and redefine our collective sense of “culture?” We will explore questions like these and will discover practical strategies to master dynamic reteaming.

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