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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The Agile Principles were designed by software engineers for software projects. But might the general principles be useful for other types of projects? In October some friends and I attempted to pit roast a whole pig--something that has a few ways to go right and many ways to go wrong. In fact the most frequent story I heard when trying to get advice from people who had tried it was that we should be ready to order pizza when it didn't work out. You'll have to come to the talk to find out the results, but let's just say that the Agile principles came in very handy along with many other approaches to managing risk that can help make your software projects successful.

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When the British offered a bounty to rid India of Cobras, they ended up making the problem worse. The French had a similar experience when trying to rid Hanoi of rats. Your Agile team can learn from the history of such missteps or repeat them an learn from experience. In this talk we are going to look at some examples of unintended consequences in history and on software projects as we discuss ways to avoid these types of mistakes.

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What is the difference between a Kanban system, Kanban board, and the Kanban method? In this session, we are going to look at the things that fall under the Kanban umbrella and how they can be used to visualize work and create a balance between demand and capacity. We'll also be looking at how to use a Kanban board to effectively visualize work. While we are going to be discussing things from the Kanban perspective, many Scrum-based teams use these approaches and tools as part of their toolkit to continually improve.

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Using robots from Mark's hands on "BDD with Robots" workshop, this demonstration of Behavior Driven Development will demonstrate all the elements of the BDD process without requiring an understanding of a particular programming language. Regardless of your role, this talk will give you a good feel for what the BDD process looks like and how Agile teams can use it to collaborate in ways that enable the delivery high quality software rapidly and with low risk.

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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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Using robots from Mark's hands on "BDD with Robots" workshop, this demonstration of Behavior Driven Development will demonstrate all the elements of the BDD process without requiring an understanding of a particular programming language. Regardless of your role, this talk will give you a good feel for what the BDD process looks like and how Agile teams can use it to collaborate in ways that enable the delivery high quality software rapidly and with low risk.

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During WWII British Security Service MI5 ran operation Double-Cross (XX). XX was responsible for getting double-agent spies accepted and trusted by the Nazis that would provide misinformation to help the Allied efforts in the war while protecting British intelligence from similar counter-espionage. Now think about your Agile team. How would you identify a double-agent who was trying to make you trust them without having your teams best interests at heart? In this talk you will learn how to identify Agile double-agents.

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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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