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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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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