This session is going to look at some techniques for managing user stories for tracking development work. We will look at the use of story points for sizing work, planning poker for creating quick consensus, alternative approaches to sizing work, splitting techniques to deliver small pieces of value, and common pitfalls in the definition of done.

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People have been programming computers for more than 80 years, but there is little agreement on how to design software or even what a good design looks like. As a community, we talk a lot about tools and processes, but hardly at all about design. In this talk I will describe my recent work to identify and communicate a set of software design principles, including a new software design course at Stanford that is taught more like an English writing seminar than a traditional programming class, and a book on software design, which is based on the concepts from the class. I will also present a few of the design principles, such as "classes should be deep" and "define errors out of existence."

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In this short ultra-focused 30 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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Five people working together at one computer?! How can that possibly be productive?

While this is a reasonable question, it's not easily answered - until we begin to understand the power of flow.

Mob Programming grew from one team's quest to learn how to work well together. Once we started working as a true team we almost immediately noticed that working this way provided better results in a variety of ways.

In this presentation we'll share the results of that exploration, and see if we can get a better understanding of Mob Programming and the power of flow.

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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 you tired of spending more time estimating and forecasting when work will be done than you spend actually doing the work? Exaggeration or not, if you calculate the value of the time used by your experts to go deep into requirements to break down tasks and estimate time, how much does it cost? How often do those expensive estimates turn out to be wrong despite your investment? The exciting news is that there's a way that you can save money and stress to quickly generate forecasts that are as reliable, or better, than the ones you're slaving over today.

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Burr Sutter from Redhat has graciously agreed to spend an hour demonstrating Kubernetes & talking about microservices. If you and your team want to know what these are and why they matter, you won't want to miss this talk and live demonstration.

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For many teams, the Sprint is the core iterative unit that delivers working software to the customer. In this session we are going to look at practices and approaches that will help your team get the the most value out of Sprints while avoiding common pitfalls and anti-patterns.

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Early space missions hardly seem like a place to get inspiration about Agile software development, but the first probes sent to the moon successfully used a number of the principles that modern teams strive to implement in following Agile. Looking at the historical usage of these principles in important endeavors of the past provides insight and understanding in how to best leverage them in our work to develop great software today.

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Imagine you are a saboteur trying to infiltrate a company and wreck their ability to deliver software efficiently. Since you don’t want to be detected, your malevolent efforts are focused on encouraging the use of metrics in ways that will mislead the organization. What would this look like and what type of things would be likely to mislead teams while making everyone feel like they are getting great information?

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