AgileDotNet

Lunch & Networking

chris.weldon — Mon, 06 May 2013 15:24:49 +0000

Spend the lunch hour dining on a great catered lunch and network with peers and others from Improving!

Closing Keynote: The Continuous Improvement Framework from Scrum.org

kristin.kacir — Fri, 03 May 2013 23:17:17 +0000

The Continuous Improvement Framework (CIF™) helps organizations using Scrum manage their investment in becoming more agile – providing an effective way to continuously improve and gain a competitive advantage.
The presenters have been working closely with the creator of the CIF, Ken Schwaber, to evolve this next-generation system of thought, while applying it to projects and team in the real world. Come hear about their experiences and the potential for applying the CIF in your organization.

Opening Keynote: Trust As A Pillar Of Your Personal and Professional Ascension

kristin.kacir — Fri, 03 May 2013 23:15:01 +0000

Trust is the core of any relationship. But, how do you develop trust and how can you determine if someone can be trusted? Agile projects require trust during development, implementation, and maintenance. We begin our conference by looking at concepts, techniques, and actions that can be taken to enhance that trust and to make sure communications can be trusted. We also take a peek at a number of programs that occur later today and how they enhance our understanding of trust and how to most effectively manage trust within agile teams.

Dr. Michael Abelson

kristin.kacir — Fri, 03 May 2013 23:13:31 +0000

Dr. Michael Abelson is a seasoned keynote speaker with over 800 keynotes and seminars to audiences of all sizes. He is Emeritus from the Mays College of Business at Texas A&M University after over 30 years of educating over 50,000 undergraduates, graduates, and executives and receiving numerous educational awards . His consulting company, The Abelson Group, has over 1500 clients on 4 continents, in over 20 industries. He has worked with engineering, construction, and IT organizations of all sizes, including the Corps of Engineers, where his multiple projects include working with the Corps and the Undersecretary of the Army in the Pentagon.

He is our keynote speaker at AgileDotNet. He will excite, energize, and enlighten us by kicking off our conference and talking about how trust impacts all we do and will set up how trust is related to our day’s activities. Be prepared to have to think, but most importantly, how to apply and use yourself to build trust in others and outperform other’s expectations.

Retrospectives: Yesterday’s News or Tomorrow’s Headlines

chris.weldon — Thu, 02 May 2013 05:55:43 +0000

Does everyone hate coming to your retrospectives? Does no one talk when they do come? Are your retrospectives just reporting yesterday’s news? In an agile world, retrospectives are about having open and honest conversations that exam the past in order to shape the future. They are key to creating the type of continuous learning organization that agility promises.

Join Robbie Mac Iver to learn some innovative techniques that agile leaders can use to keep retrospectives fresh, purposeful, and safe. Robbie will define a framework to help plan your retrospectives, review a variety of tools you can start using with your teams today, and share keys for success. Help your teams thrive by using retrospectives create tomorrow’s headlines of your team’s successes.

Dev/Ops Interactions with VS 2012

kristin.kacir — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:18:03 +0000

In today’s world of software development the demands are going up. We must deliver faster, higher quality, and more secure applications. Our users don’t draw the distinction between an operations failure and an application code failure, and neither can we. We will need more reliable infrastructure, more responsive actionable data from production, and more collaborative evolution of our environments. We must build trust and cooperation between all aspects of our team to accomplish this. In this talk we will focus on how several of the historic problems can be conquered. We will leverage the ALM tools in the Microsoft stack to help make this interaction and collaboration more effective.

Works On My Machine vs. All Our Tests Are Failing

kristin.kacir — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:17:00 +0000

Solving the breakdowns between developers and QA.

Ever used a website and something fundamental is broken or tried a mobile app only to find that it doesn’t work quite right? We all have, but how many of us just blamed one side of the company (just the developers or the testers) we bought it from? This interactive session will dive into the areas that have historically been a problem for the developers and quality assurance members of a team, running the gamut from communication to effective tracking and reporting. We will cover some Microsoft tools that exist for the sole purpose of making this communication quicker, easier, and more effective as we answer the question, where can we get better on trust, interaction, and responsiveness?

Speaking Your Customer’s Love Language

kristin.kacir — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:11:15 +0000

We know that customer collaboration is key to software delivery success, but are we doing all we can to make sure we collaborate effectively? Successful collaboration is based on healthy relationships and one size doesn’t fit all. In this session we’ll explore the “love languages” that your customers might respond to and the tools that can help you speak that language.

Developer to Developer Accountability

kristin.kacir — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:09:47 +0000

Far too often developers get into the pattern of assuming that any task tracking they are doing is “for the chickens,” not for themselves.  But when done right, task tracking is for the team, first and foremost.  How can you make task tracking as painless as possible, and how can tooling help?  This session will discuss how a development team can use tools such as Team Foundation Server to keep themselves accountable to each other while remembering that it is first about Individuals and Interactions.

Agile Games

kristin.kacir — Wed, 01 May 2013 16:07:03 +0000

This fun, energetic, and hands-on session will explore the concept of experiential learning and how it helps in conveying agile principles, which are often abused and misunderstood.The audience will participate in games and exercises that will target each of the three major learning vectors: Physical, Emotional, and Impressional.