Arlo Belshee - Sr. Program Manager, OData

There are many stages of practice for each practice. These are the details that get lost in most discussions. What does it mean to practice Continuous Integration, TDD, or Pairing? If you use a CI server, are you doing CI? That depends. The Civiliation games have a “Tech Tree” that show the hundreds of technologies available. They are broken into branches (sea exploration, flight, etc), with dependencies between the branches. We will build a similar tech tree for agile practices, showing how the agile practices interleave and how they change as you develop each branch further.

James Shore - Author, The Art of Agile Development

Agile methods work beautifully for a single team. But what do you do when you have multiple, interdependent teams, all working on a single product or product suite? How can Agile scale without losing sight of its core principles? In this session, we’ll examine how to apply Lean and Agile principles to the problems of large-scale Agile. We’ll combine a pinch of theory, a dash of experience, and a heaping helping of crazy ideas to give you something to try on your large-scale projects.

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Scott Chacon - CIO, GitHub

GitHub consists of a bunch of employees who have worked at other companies in the past and despised it. Okay, maybe they weren’t all terrible jobs, but a lot of us remain skeptical of most software development practices.

We do things differently at GitHub. We don’t have meetings, we don’t have managers, we don’t do traditional code review, and we aren’t always in the same room, much less on the same continent. And we couldn’t be happier about it. We ship code quickly, without a lot of red tape, and still maintain an incredibly high level of code quality.

It’s a great way to keep your developers happy, and we think it can work in your company, too.

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Willem Larsen - President, Language Hunters

Language Hunting is a group learning methodology developed to save endangered languages through the tools of accelerated learning. Effective group learning is synonymous with effective group communication and high performance. Willem Larsen, President of Language Hunters, will lead participants in an experiential understanding of how accelerated team learning works.

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Andre Dhondt - Executive/Agile Software Coach

Runners find that they can go faster with a lower perceived effort when they exercise in a pack. The same thing happens when our software teams gel, and when our management teams decide to work together for mutual benefit. We are, by nature, social beings—but culture teaches us to hold back and avoid deep connection. What do we need to do to bring back the tribal mentality so we can excel as teams? Find out what companies of all sizes, like Comcast (100k employees), ING Direct (2500 employees), and SmarTesting (30 employees) are doing to successfully adopt and improve Agile development!

Paraphrasing from Margaret Mead: “never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed [employees] can change the [company]”. This talk is based on personal experience as well as the work of Seth Godin, Jim Collins, Christopher McDougall, Dan Mezick, Christopher Ryan, Cacilda Jethá, and Katherine Kirk.

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Jim Weirich - Creator of the Ruby build tool, rake

Connascence (noun) is defined as (1) the common birth of two or more at the same tome; production of two or more together, (2) That which is born or produced with another, or (3) the act of growing together.

In software, connascence is a rough measurement of the amount of coupling amount the components of a software system. Components that are “born” together will often need to change together over time. Excessive connascence in our software means that the system is hard to change and hard to maintain.

At least that’s the theory. How well does connascence hold up as a measurement tool in evaluating real software? In this talk, we will examine two different architectures for a common web application and evaluate each with respect to the amount of connascence and coupling in the system.

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Manoj Vadakkan - Agile Coach and Trainer

Scrum attracts many organizations because of its apparent simplicity and its potential to deliver results faster. Many do not realize the cultural changes that they need to make in order to become a hyper-productive team. This session will discuss why cultural aspects are important and how cultural changes make the mechanics of Scrum effective. During this session, we will discuss the five Scrum Values and how those values will make the Practices in Scrum effective. We will also discuss potential dangers when Scrum is practiced without these values.

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Stacia Viscardi - co-author, The Software Project Manager's Bridge to Agility

“Culture Eats Agile Practices for Breakfast” (quote adapted from Peter Drucker)
Without the right mindset, Agile practices will stagnate, even hurt your agile transformation initiatives. Learn how to prepare for and implement sticking change in this one-hour lecture/workshop. Stacia will guide you through numerous tips and tricks resulting from real-life examples from the hard knocks of agile and management consulting.

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