User stories drive the process of creating software. Good user stories help develop software efficiently, but poor user stories can lead to lower return on investment and even cancelled projects. We will look at a number of example user stories from robotic milking machines to online shoe stores to discover the key to creating stories that effectively represent complex work with simplicity.

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In this Test Driven Development and Pair Programming Benjamin and Mark are going to create a simple algorithm using TDD and pair programming. Come see how developers can use pair programming and test driven development to create code faster and with higher quality than when they work alone.

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Awesomely Simple is a book that takes strategies gleaned from successful companies and distills them down to six simple principles. These principles aren't just for huge companies. They are also very present on successful Agile teams and notably absent on teams that fail to deliver for their customer. We'll go over the 6 principles, show how they apply to your Agile team, and give a copy of the book away--all in 30 minutes.

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Some software projects fail because of things outside the team's control. However, most of what makes a project succeed or fail comes down to what the team decides to do each day. In this talk we are going to look at some of the habits that lead to success as well as some of the practices that frequently cause failure.

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Continuing our journey of doing a deep dive with each Agile principle, this session is going to be focused on Agile Principle #6: "The most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team is face-to-face conversation." Come hear examples and stories about how teams have used and abused this principle.

We will kick the session off with the premier of a new Agile cartoon illustrating Principle #6 with scuba divers and sharks.

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Agile says we should satisfy the customer through "early and continuous delivery" and that "working software is the primary measure of progress" and that we should "deliver working software frequently." With all this talk about getting working software delivered and into your customer's hands, it must be a pretty important part of creating a successful Agile team.

In this session, we are going to explore ways to help lead teams toward better Agile delivery. We'll look at examples of how software can be delivered incrementally in ways that produce value and talk about how to inspire and coach teams toward that goal.

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Many organizations are switching to hybrid work as the new normal. How does that work for an Agile team? What Agile principles should guide the way teams organize their work in a hybrid environment? We'll explore these questions in this 30 minute lunch and learn.

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You've probably heard the term MVP for minimal viable product. In this session we are going to take 45 minutes and do an ultra focused lunch & learn driven mostly by interactive polls to look at what MVP means to different people and some of the advantages and pitfalls of using an MVP approach on your project.

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In this session we are going to walk through the Agile Values & Principles, discuss the importance of various principles, and talk about how easy or hard they are to follow in our particular situation. The talk is interactive so we'll be using a polling tool to aggregate everyone's feedback and better understand what it looks like to follow Agile.

If you know someone who needs a non-technical introduction to Agile, this is a great talk to invite them to join, but it will be just as useful for people with Agile experience looking for ways to make improvements who want to think more deeply about improving the way they work.

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In 1925, Bruce Ingram was given a mummified hand with the words "Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence." Soon after receiving this grim gift, a mysterious fire burned down his house. Ingram rebuilt his house only to have it destroyed by water in a flood. Coincidence? You be the judge, but it was enough for Ingram who is said to have disposed of the hand and was able to keep his house in one piece after that.

In this talk we are going to look at some of the happenings surrounding the opening of Egyptian tombs that caused many people to believe they were cursed. From there we'll look at some of the coincidences around testing and talk about testing beliefs that can lead to "The Curse of the Testing Pyramid." Our goal is to look carefully at what type of return on investment we hope to get from testing and use that to drive the way we create and shape our tests.

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