Agile teams form the building blocks for agility. Having strong agile teams allows an organization to overcome systemic issues and adapt the product development process to the needs of the business. Agile teams that are not self-organizing and continually learning can quickly become subsumed by the challenges around them. So what does it mean for a team to be agile? We look at the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Breakfast for agile champions workshop-sgsea2011Dave Sharrock
Breakfast - the most important meal of the day. Certainly, if you miss breakfast around mid-morning you can find yourself lacking the energy and motivation to keep on working; Missing out on a good breakfast can doom you to an ineffectual and frustrating day. The kick-off of a major transition has a similar impact on the success of the transition.
But how can we increase the chance of success on a large transition? What is a “good breakfast” when starting a large transition? What should be avoided? Drawing from our own experience of many successful transitions, and learning from the experiences of you, the audience, we will learn what works - and what does not work - when kicking-off large transitions
Thoughts on Lean Product Development at CAMUG, YYC Nov 2014Dave Sharrock
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Estimate Value to Deliver Value: Effectively Estimate the Value of Requiremen...Dave Sharrock
Agile organizations move work to dedicated teams, rather than move people to projects. In order to succeed, the Business Analyst needs to continually compare the value of different projects or work requirements to make sure that the teams are working on the most valuable items at any one time. But how can you compare new features that increase your profitability with platform migrations that increase your system stability or administrative features that reduce operational overhead? Where do BAs spend their time and how do stakeholders get their critical projects done?
The Experience Canvas provides a one-page requirement definition that allows stakeholders to effectively discuss and estimate the value of each requirement.
Using the Experience Canvas, we show how:
Stakeholders can compare and contrast the value of very different requirements with very different objectives,
Business Analysts can estimate return-on-investment using effort estimates from the team (investment) and value estimates from the stakeholders (return).
Product management as a discipline is undergoing a transition towards data-driven decision making. As the cost of testing product feature ideas falls, the role of a product manager becomes one based on testing many feature ideas, and rolling out proven features. In this presentation we touch on some of the trends behind this paradigm shift, and consider some tools the product manager can use.
Agile teams form the building blocks for agility. Having strong agile teams allows an organization to overcome systemic issues and adapt the product development process to the needs of the business. Agile teams that are not self-organizing and continually learning can quickly become subsumed by the challenges around them. So what does it mean for a team to be agile? We look at the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Breakfast for agile champions workshop-sgsea2011Dave Sharrock
Breakfast - the most important meal of the day. Certainly, if you miss breakfast around mid-morning you can find yourself lacking the energy and motivation to keep on working; Missing out on a good breakfast can doom you to an ineffectual and frustrating day. The kick-off of a major transition has a similar impact on the success of the transition.
But how can we increase the chance of success on a large transition? What is a “good breakfast” when starting a large transition? What should be avoided? Drawing from our own experience of many successful transitions, and learning from the experiences of you, the audience, we will learn what works - and what does not work - when kicking-off large transitions
Thoughts on Lean Product Development at CAMUG, YYC Nov 2014Dave Sharrock
The rise of the Lean Startup has led to a deeper understanding of the importance of validating business ideas, from new features to new business models. But many tools available to the Product Owner aren't adapted to rapid validation. Starting from the principles and practices of agile product management, from defining the product vision to creating story maps and refining the product backlog, you will learn about key practices that incorporate the lean startup principles, allowing a Product Owner to bring the build-measure-learn cycle alive and ultimately earn more value more quickly.
Estimate Value to Deliver Value: Effectively Estimate the Value of Requiremen...Dave Sharrock
Agile organizations move work to dedicated teams, rather than move people to projects. In order to succeed, the Business Analyst needs to continually compare the value of different projects or work requirements to make sure that the teams are working on the most valuable items at any one time. But how can you compare new features that increase your profitability with platform migrations that increase your system stability or administrative features that reduce operational overhead? Where do BAs spend their time and how do stakeholders get their critical projects done?
The Experience Canvas provides a one-page requirement definition that allows stakeholders to effectively discuss and estimate the value of each requirement.
Using the Experience Canvas, we show how:
Stakeholders can compare and contrast the value of very different requirements with very different objectives,
Business Analysts can estimate return-on-investment using effort estimates from the team (investment) and value estimates from the stakeholders (return).
Product management as a discipline is undergoing a transition towards data-driven decision making. As the cost of testing product feature ideas falls, the role of a product manager becomes one based on testing many feature ideas, and rolling out proven features. In this presentation we touch on some of the trends behind this paradigm shift, and consider some tools the product manager can use.
We often get asked why Scrum has only 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 3 ceremonies. In fact, our customers simply want to know why Scrum works. In these slides we try to explain the principles behind the prescriptions of Scrum, in the form of 5 Whys: Why Scrum? Why 3 Roles? Why 3 Artifacts? Why 3 Ceremonies? And Why agile engineering practices support Scrum?
Herding cats, or the art of scaling agile teamsDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
Leading Agile Change - AgileVancouver 2011Dave Sharrock
An often overlooked aspect of large agile transformations is how we lead that transformation. The elephant in the room, if you like, is that many coaches and transition consultants focus on helping teams become more agile, while not walking the walk themselves. It is extremely difficult to rely on many frameworks like Scrum or Kanban for managing the work of the transition team or leadership team in a large organization. We talk the talk with our teams, but don’t walk the walk.
How to form agile teams talks about the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Ever fought to replicate a successful pilot with a handful of teams to a functioning product delivery program across an enterprise? It's hard - and frameworks rarely make things simpler. In this talk, we'll examine the natural progression of an Agile transition, from isolated teams often held up as a pilot study, to synchronous agility where many teams collaborate to deliver a program, to the rarified world of networked agility, where we move back to the effectiveness of individual teams. While highlighting principles that distinguish each stage of growth, we also outline how to recognise where your transition is, and therefore where to move to next.
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an Agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
The Strategy Map visualizes management business plans by focusing on the four aspects of finances, customers, processes and development. The Strategy Map complements the concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and suits every business which concentrates on strategic management and plans future developments.
With the help of Strategy Map charts you can illustrate entrepreneurial goals which allow you to distribute projects and tasks in the best possible way so that plans can be efficiently implemented. Due to this strategic extension of BSC, you can create additional value and put business areas in a well-structured perspective with each other.
Is Agile in your DNA | Portland Global Scrum Gathering 2023Dave Sharrock
Agile has been around for a while. The Agile Manifesto was penned in 2001. By 2010 CIO Magazine had Agile identified as one of the top 3 trends any technology-minded leader should be actively incorporating into their organizations. And today, Agile is so well entrenched that it feels like we have always been Agile.
Now for the hard part. Agile is a mindset. A philosophy on how to approach product delivery. The practices and frameworks will fade in and out of the spotlight, but, as Marty Cagan has said, the core Lean and Agile principles are, hopefully, here to stay. But this is the riskiest part of the journey. We think we have this agility thing in our DNA and can start looking to the future. This is the moment that John Kotter described as institutionalizing change.
We will discuss how to understand where you are on your agile journey. Is agility in your DNA, or still an outlier in how you get work done? How can we visualize what agility looks like in our organization? How can we understand what remains to be done to lock in the agile mindset?
Specifically, we will look at five dimensions across your organization, and evaluate how strongly agility is in the DNA of your organization. From this perspective, we can identify opportunities to strengthen the change and where to move on, confident in the knowledge of a job well done. Come and learn how to peel back the covers on your organizational agility.
Product Owners plant the seeds for excellent agile delivery teams. Great POs know how to plant the best seeds, seeds that the team can swarm around and deliver quickly, that provide rapid feedback and learning, and that morph towards excellent customer experiences. In some situations we need a good PO, in others we need a great PO. The trick is to know the difference. Join me on a journey of discovery working with contemporary examples to find out how to be a great PO or a good PO, and why you might, at different times, want to be both.
We look at two key dimensions that determine whether you need good PO or a great PO, and how to tell the difference. First, what problem is the PO trying to solve? Are you rolling out changes to a mature product or battling to enter an emerging field? Are you scaling rapidly or slowly? Second, how is the PO making decisions about their backlog. Give a PO a project requirements document and a timeline, and what’s a PO to do? Even the best and most experienced POs will struggle to deliver an exciting customer experience that captures the heart of the customer.
Through the workshop, you will learn a simple model for identifying great POs based not on PO experience, but on how the PO makes decisions about their backlog. The best POs know how to combine data and stakeholder input to best effect.Finally, we consider the product problems you are trying to solve, the pace of change, and how this affects the PO - good to great - you want for your product.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
Epic budgeting is all about meeting deadlines. Working with agile teams that pull work while meeting stakeholder expectations around what gets done by what date. The challenge is that teams don't always pull as much as we want them too. So how do you hit a deadline without forcing work onto the team?
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is clearly more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic Budgeting allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Why stop at your IT department? Or an Agile approach to Change Management
Business agility is more than the organization’s IT shop adopting an agile delivery method. Business agility depends on three core capabilities: rapid delivery, strategic sensing, and customer rapport. As such it builds resilience to change as a strategic imperative and eventually it allows businesses to build a strategic advantage in driving change.
Investments in “agile” from an IT perspective will not increase business agility. So what does a company need in order to successfully drive change rather than react to it?
We’ll talk about how creating a resilient organization starts with rapid delivery and why many major organizations are turning their attention to less costly on-demand releases. We’ll look at how customer rapport is the new driver of operational efficiency, where not building something is invariably cheaper than optimizing the operational cost of building anything at all.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Epic Budgeting - how agile teams meet deadinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Team Member to Mgr: “Now I’m in a self-organized team, what do you do exactly?” Mgr: “Um, good question. Come to the talk and find out.”
Learning Objectives:
* Be able to answer the question “What do you do as a manager of an Agile team?”
* Understand the difference between line management, functional management and program management.
* Learn how to influence behavior through visible progress and expectations management rather than telling teams what to do.
* Discover why a focus on flow and value delivery is critical to Agile leadership.
* Bring Dilbert cartoons into your management style without everyone calling you “the pointy haired boss.”
IBM Innovate2014 - Is Agile Compliance an Oxymoron? Dave Sharrock
Agile software development is a light framework that focusses more on early value delivery and incremental improvement than traditional tasks like detailed up-front planning, comprehensive specifications and technical documentation. But from the perspective of regulatory compliance, this planning and documentation serve a purpose. How can we reconcile agile approaches that value a working product over documentation with the need to meet regulatory requirements for, e.g. medical devices or telecommunications? I will discuss how to bring together the apparently conflicting needs of regulatory compliance and agile, and show by example how agile teams actually approach tough regulatory requirements in finance, healthcare and telecommunications.
Learning Objectives
- How to use agile in a highly-regulated environment
- How to incorporate strict regulatory requirements within an agile development approach
- The power of agile as a risk-limiting software development approach
Herding cats or flocking birds - agile portfolio managementDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, once the teams have established a predictable velocity, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, whether by timeframe or feature set. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, with the risk that the coordination cost becomes higher and efficiency falls. In this talk, we consider some ground rules for visualizing work across multiple teams and discuss how dependencies are coordinated across different teams and product lines.
The Good Shepherd - the Role of BAs in AgileDave Sharrock
Agile teams may be popping up everywhere, with ScrumMasters and Product Owners and Development Teams. But what role does the BA play? Should the BA join the team, working with the development team to deliver work requests? Or should the BA take on the role of Product Owner, working with the business to define the work requests and ranking them to maximize value delivery? Is the BA best suited to the ScrumMaster, guiding the team to predictable delivery? Or is there some other role we've not talked about? The answer, of course, is 'it depends'. We will discuss the different roles on an agile team, and investigate how the traditional responsibilities of a BA role fit within the agile context. What we want to understand is how the BA fits into the agile development process, considering how the agile team works, and how the responsibilities of the BA are addressed in an agile environment.
Agile methods are based on short iterations delivering functionality in increments, with small, well-defined work requests consisting of just enough requirements definition at just the right time. But with such a short-term focus, how can agile teams manage a product portfolio over months or even years? We'll talk about the building blocks of an effective agile portfolio management strategy, starting with the core tools of the Product Owner, and extending these to look beyond the next few weeks of work into planning and tracking a product release or portfolio over several months.
Giving Teams the Roots to Grow and Wings to FlyDave Sharrock
We introduce useful and proven practices that increase the sticking power of new agile teams, allowing them to stay agile long into the future. To create sustainable change, agile teams have to overcome organizational gravity that pulls them back into the old, comfortable ways of working. New agile teams are especially at risk of falling back after the coaches leave or the agile transition is declared ‘over’. By helping the team set expectations early, the +15 practices provide support just when the team is most vulnerable, and increases the chance of creating lasting change.
We introduce two concepts, the +15 Team and the +15 Flightplan, that support teams not just at the beginning of a transformation, when management attention and resources are focused on the effort, but much later on as the teams begin unlocking some of the more challenging engineering practices, such as continuous integration or continual refactoring which take time and repeated practice to achieve. You will learn how to work with a new team to apply these concepts, and how the team can use these to guide growth over time.
Successful Agile transformations are built on successful Agile teams; achieving sustainable success depends on helping those teams grow and evolve over time. But in order to be self-organized and self-directed, newly formed agile teams need an example to follow; they need to have a glimpse of where a team can get to after 3, 6 or 12 months of continual retrospection, learning and improvement. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are few examples of such success around them. In a large organization, the inertia of existing cultural norms is likely to weigh down on any visions of excellent execution, diluting the vision and ultimately limiting the success of the teams and the transition.
The +15 Team is a simple exercise to focus the team on developing good agile behaviors that provide the roots from which a team can grow. The +15 Flightplan is a workshop or game that delivers a long-term plan for agile maturity created by the team that allows the team to soar over time. Participants will be introduced to this technique as a way to better guide the team’s development over time as well as learn how and when to respond. Spending just minutes at every retrospective using these artifacts can make the difference between a team returning to old habits and performance levels or striding forward to become self-directed, high-performing agile teams.
The +15FLIGHTPLAN agile team behaviors, used to support and guide agile teams in developing a growth plan for long-term sustainable agility. Presented at Agile2012, in Dallas, Texas.
big bang delivery to continual value deliveryDave Sharrock
Recent years has seen an emerging new standard in software delivery, with Gartner claiming that over 80% of software development uses some form of agile methodology. Starting by understanding the mega-trends underlying this shift, from the commoditization of software changes, to the proliferation of development frameworks, to the increasing influence the customers of software have on the development lifecycle, we’ll consider the fundamental differences between a long big bang delivery lifecycle and a short incremental value delivery lifecycle, and its impact on information systems, security and controls.
We all know the engineering practices we should be using, and many teams I meet say that they have plans to start unit testing or test automation, ‘in the next 6 months’. But for a variety of reasons familiar to all of us, like time pressure and ever increasing demands from the customer, these worthy plans rarely come to pass. Using experiences from starting agile teams, I’ll throw out some proven strategies for getting a toe hold in adopting great agile practices, as well as looking at real examples from the audience and how we might accelerate the adoption of good practices.
We often get asked why Scrum has only 3 roles, 3 artifacts and 3 ceremonies. In fact, our customers simply want to know why Scrum works. In these slides we try to explain the principles behind the prescriptions of Scrum, in the form of 5 Whys: Why Scrum? Why 3 Roles? Why 3 Artifacts? Why 3 Ceremonies? And Why agile engineering practices support Scrum?
Herding cats, or the art of scaling agile teamsDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
Leading Agile Change - AgileVancouver 2011Dave Sharrock
An often overlooked aspect of large agile transformations is how we lead that transformation. The elephant in the room, if you like, is that many coaches and transition consultants focus on helping teams become more agile, while not walking the walk themselves. It is extremely difficult to rely on many frameworks like Scrum or Kanban for managing the work of the transition team or leadership team in a large organization. We talk the talk with our teams, but don’t walk the walk.
How to form agile teams talks about the fundamental characteristics of high performing teams, and how to influence the team environment and selection in order to initiate a team for success.
Ever fought to replicate a successful pilot with a handful of teams to a functioning product delivery program across an enterprise? It's hard - and frameworks rarely make things simpler. In this talk, we'll examine the natural progression of an Agile transition, from isolated teams often held up as a pilot study, to synchronous agility where many teams collaborate to deliver a program, to the rarified world of networked agility, where we move back to the effectiveness of individual teams. While highlighting principles that distinguish each stage of growth, we also outline how to recognise where your transition is, and therefore where to move to next.
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, and planning and tracking is simple. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, and coordination costs increase and dependencies dominate. In this talk, we consider core principles and practices for scaling in an Agile world, and discuss how to move from a handful of teams to many teams and many product lines.
The Strategy Map visualizes management business plans by focusing on the four aspects of finances, customers, processes and development. The Strategy Map complements the concept of the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and suits every business which concentrates on strategic management and plans future developments.
With the help of Strategy Map charts you can illustrate entrepreneurial goals which allow you to distribute projects and tasks in the best possible way so that plans can be efficiently implemented. Due to this strategic extension of BSC, you can create additional value and put business areas in a well-structured perspective with each other.
Is Agile in your DNA | Portland Global Scrum Gathering 2023Dave Sharrock
Agile has been around for a while. The Agile Manifesto was penned in 2001. By 2010 CIO Magazine had Agile identified as one of the top 3 trends any technology-minded leader should be actively incorporating into their organizations. And today, Agile is so well entrenched that it feels like we have always been Agile.
Now for the hard part. Agile is a mindset. A philosophy on how to approach product delivery. The practices and frameworks will fade in and out of the spotlight, but, as Marty Cagan has said, the core Lean and Agile principles are, hopefully, here to stay. But this is the riskiest part of the journey. We think we have this agility thing in our DNA and can start looking to the future. This is the moment that John Kotter described as institutionalizing change.
We will discuss how to understand where you are on your agile journey. Is agility in your DNA, or still an outlier in how you get work done? How can we visualize what agility looks like in our organization? How can we understand what remains to be done to lock in the agile mindset?
Specifically, we will look at five dimensions across your organization, and evaluate how strongly agility is in the DNA of your organization. From this perspective, we can identify opportunities to strengthen the change and where to move on, confident in the knowledge of a job well done. Come and learn how to peel back the covers on your organizational agility.
Product Owners plant the seeds for excellent agile delivery teams. Great POs know how to plant the best seeds, seeds that the team can swarm around and deliver quickly, that provide rapid feedback and learning, and that morph towards excellent customer experiences. In some situations we need a good PO, in others we need a great PO. The trick is to know the difference. Join me on a journey of discovery working with contemporary examples to find out how to be a great PO or a good PO, and why you might, at different times, want to be both.
We look at two key dimensions that determine whether you need good PO or a great PO, and how to tell the difference. First, what problem is the PO trying to solve? Are you rolling out changes to a mature product or battling to enter an emerging field? Are you scaling rapidly or slowly? Second, how is the PO making decisions about their backlog. Give a PO a project requirements document and a timeline, and what’s a PO to do? Even the best and most experienced POs will struggle to deliver an exciting customer experience that captures the heart of the customer.
Through the workshop, you will learn a simple model for identifying great POs based not on PO experience, but on how the PO makes decisions about their backlog. The best POs know how to combine data and stakeholder input to best effect.Finally, we consider the product problems you are trying to solve, the pace of change, and how this affects the PO - good to great - you want for your product.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
Epic budgeting is all about meeting deadlines. Working with agile teams that pull work while meeting stakeholder expectations around what gets done by what date. The challenge is that teams don't always pull as much as we want them too. So how do you hit a deadline without forcing work onto the team?
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is clearly more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic Budgeting allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Why stop at your IT department? Or an Agile approach to Change Management
Business agility is more than the organization’s IT shop adopting an agile delivery method. Business agility depends on three core capabilities: rapid delivery, strategic sensing, and customer rapport. As such it builds resilience to change as a strategic imperative and eventually it allows businesses to build a strategic advantage in driving change.
Investments in “agile” from an IT perspective will not increase business agility. So what does a company need in order to successfully drive change rather than react to it?
We’ll talk about how creating a resilient organization starts with rapid delivery and why many major organizations are turning their attention to less costly on-demand releases. We’ll look at how customer rapport is the new driver of operational efficiency, where not building something is invariably cheaper than optimizing the operational cost of building anything at all.
Epic Budgeting - or how agile teams meet deadlinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Epic Budgeting - how agile teams meet deadinesDave Sharrock
According to this year's State of Agile survey, the most common success measure for agile initiatives, at 53%, is on-time delivery. But if agile teams can choose how much work they take into a sprint, how can teams be sure of delivering pre-committed scope on time and on budget? There is more to agile delivery than product owners ordering a backlog of work for teams to work on.
Epic budgeting is one tool that allows the product owner to steer a product across the line, delivering the expected scope on time by managing scope creep or an unsustainable focus on the perfect over the pragmatic. During this session learn about how product owners and their teams work towards a fixed date or budget by applying double loop learning to epic sizing and breakdown. Expect some tales from real companies and a few light hearted moments. And I'm at least 53% certain we will finish on time!
Team Member to Mgr: “Now I’m in a self-organized team, what do you do exactly?” Mgr: “Um, good question. Come to the talk and find out.”
Learning Objectives:
* Be able to answer the question “What do you do as a manager of an Agile team?”
* Understand the difference between line management, functional management and program management.
* Learn how to influence behavior through visible progress and expectations management rather than telling teams what to do.
* Discover why a focus on flow and value delivery is critical to Agile leadership.
* Bring Dilbert cartoons into your management style without everyone calling you “the pointy haired boss.”
IBM Innovate2014 - Is Agile Compliance an Oxymoron? Dave Sharrock
Agile software development is a light framework that focusses more on early value delivery and incremental improvement than traditional tasks like detailed up-front planning, comprehensive specifications and technical documentation. But from the perspective of regulatory compliance, this planning and documentation serve a purpose. How can we reconcile agile approaches that value a working product over documentation with the need to meet regulatory requirements for, e.g. medical devices or telecommunications? I will discuss how to bring together the apparently conflicting needs of regulatory compliance and agile, and show by example how agile teams actually approach tough regulatory requirements in finance, healthcare and telecommunications.
Learning Objectives
- How to use agile in a highly-regulated environment
- How to incorporate strict regulatory requirements within an agile development approach
- The power of agile as a risk-limiting software development approach
Herding cats or flocking birds - agile portfolio managementDave Sharrock
Managing the evolution of a single product working with a small number of teams is somewhat straightforward. Working from a single backlog, once the teams have established a predictable velocity, the product roadmap becomes relatively easy to visualize, whether by timeframe or feature set. As we increase the complexity of the product, things become harder. Different teams require different backlogs. Different products require work from different teams. Before you know it, there are lots of independent moving parts, with the risk that the coordination cost becomes higher and efficiency falls. In this talk, we consider some ground rules for visualizing work across multiple teams and discuss how dependencies are coordinated across different teams and product lines.
The Good Shepherd - the Role of BAs in AgileDave Sharrock
Agile teams may be popping up everywhere, with ScrumMasters and Product Owners and Development Teams. But what role does the BA play? Should the BA join the team, working with the development team to deliver work requests? Or should the BA take on the role of Product Owner, working with the business to define the work requests and ranking them to maximize value delivery? Is the BA best suited to the ScrumMaster, guiding the team to predictable delivery? Or is there some other role we've not talked about? The answer, of course, is 'it depends'. We will discuss the different roles on an agile team, and investigate how the traditional responsibilities of a BA role fit within the agile context. What we want to understand is how the BA fits into the agile development process, considering how the agile team works, and how the responsibilities of the BA are addressed in an agile environment.
Agile methods are based on short iterations delivering functionality in increments, with small, well-defined work requests consisting of just enough requirements definition at just the right time. But with such a short-term focus, how can agile teams manage a product portfolio over months or even years? We'll talk about the building blocks of an effective agile portfolio management strategy, starting with the core tools of the Product Owner, and extending these to look beyond the next few weeks of work into planning and tracking a product release or portfolio over several months.
Giving Teams the Roots to Grow and Wings to FlyDave Sharrock
We introduce useful and proven practices that increase the sticking power of new agile teams, allowing them to stay agile long into the future. To create sustainable change, agile teams have to overcome organizational gravity that pulls them back into the old, comfortable ways of working. New agile teams are especially at risk of falling back after the coaches leave or the agile transition is declared ‘over’. By helping the team set expectations early, the +15 practices provide support just when the team is most vulnerable, and increases the chance of creating lasting change.
We introduce two concepts, the +15 Team and the +15 Flightplan, that support teams not just at the beginning of a transformation, when management attention and resources are focused on the effort, but much later on as the teams begin unlocking some of the more challenging engineering practices, such as continuous integration or continual refactoring which take time and repeated practice to achieve. You will learn how to work with a new team to apply these concepts, and how the team can use these to guide growth over time.
Successful Agile transformations are built on successful Agile teams; achieving sustainable success depends on helping those teams grow and evolve over time. But in order to be self-organized and self-directed, newly formed agile teams need an example to follow; they need to have a glimpse of where a team can get to after 3, 6 or 12 months of continual retrospection, learning and improvement. Unfortunately, in many cases, there are few examples of such success around them. In a large organization, the inertia of existing cultural norms is likely to weigh down on any visions of excellent execution, diluting the vision and ultimately limiting the success of the teams and the transition.
The +15 Team is a simple exercise to focus the team on developing good agile behaviors that provide the roots from which a team can grow. The +15 Flightplan is a workshop or game that delivers a long-term plan for agile maturity created by the team that allows the team to soar over time. Participants will be introduced to this technique as a way to better guide the team’s development over time as well as learn how and when to respond. Spending just minutes at every retrospective using these artifacts can make the difference between a team returning to old habits and performance levels or striding forward to become self-directed, high-performing agile teams.
The +15FLIGHTPLAN agile team behaviors, used to support and guide agile teams in developing a growth plan for long-term sustainable agility. Presented at Agile2012, in Dallas, Texas.
big bang delivery to continual value deliveryDave Sharrock
Recent years has seen an emerging new standard in software delivery, with Gartner claiming that over 80% of software development uses some form of agile methodology. Starting by understanding the mega-trends underlying this shift, from the commoditization of software changes, to the proliferation of development frameworks, to the increasing influence the customers of software have on the development lifecycle, we’ll consider the fundamental differences between a long big bang delivery lifecycle and a short incremental value delivery lifecycle, and its impact on information systems, security and controls.
We all know the engineering practices we should be using, and many teams I meet say that they have plans to start unit testing or test automation, ‘in the next 6 months’. But for a variety of reasons familiar to all of us, like time pressure and ever increasing demands from the customer, these worthy plans rarely come to pass. Using experiences from starting agile teams, I’ll throw out some proven strategies for getting a toe hold in adopting great agile practices, as well as looking at real examples from the audience and how we might accelerate the adoption of good practices.
Many agile teams start off well. But once the initial energy has dropped, and the team has gained some experience, what’s next? What do great agile teams do that good or failing agile teams don’t? You will learn how great agile teams develop the skills to continually improve, moving from good teams to high-performing teams that work ‘in the zone’. You will also develop a ‘flight plan’ for your agile team, creating the environment to stay in the sweet spot of high performance.
Adaptive software development processes epitomized by Agile methodologies are based on continual improvement – incremental changes that emerge as teams iterate and learn about the product they are developing. This appears to conflict with the world of the program office, responsible for defining the software development lifecycle (SDLC), in which a stable and repeatable development process with well-defined ownership and controls is a common objective. Using recent examples in which agile methods have been successfully introduced into large organizations with existing SDLCs, we consider the difficulties of creating a verifiable process when the process itself is continually being modified, and look at how software development can be managed and controlled without stifling the benefits of adaptive software development processes.
zkStudyClub - Reef: Fast Succinct Non-Interactive Zero-Knowledge Regex ProofsAlex Pruden
This paper presents Reef, a system for generating publicly verifiable succinct non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs that a committed document matches or does not match a regular expression. We describe applications such as proving the strength of passwords, the provenance of email despite redactions, the validity of oblivious DNS queries, and the existence of mutations in DNA. Reef supports the Perl Compatible Regular Expression syntax, including wildcards, alternation, ranges, capture groups, Kleene star, negations, and lookarounds. Reef introduces a new type of automata, Skipping Alternating Finite Automata (SAFA), that skips irrelevant parts of a document when producing proofs without undermining soundness, and instantiates SAFA with a lookup argument. Our experimental evaluation confirms that Reef can generate proofs for documents with 32M characters; the proofs are small and cheap to verify (under a second).
Paper: https://eprint.iacr.org/2023/1886
Le nuove frontiere dell'AI nell'RPA con UiPath Autopilot™UiPathCommunity
In questo evento online gratuito, organizzato dalla Community Italiana di UiPath, potrai esplorare le nuove funzionalità di Autopilot, il tool che integra l'Intelligenza Artificiale nei processi di sviluppo e utilizzo delle Automazioni.
📕 Vedremo insieme alcuni esempi dell'utilizzo di Autopilot in diversi tool della Suite UiPath:
Autopilot per Studio Web
Autopilot per Studio
Autopilot per Apps
Clipboard AI
GenAI applicata alla Document Understanding
👨🏫👨💻 Speakers:
Stefano Negro, UiPath MVPx3, RPA Tech Lead @ BSP Consultant
Flavio Martinelli, UiPath MVP 2023, Technical Account Manager @UiPath
Andrei Tasca, RPA Solutions Team Lead @NTT Data
SAP Sapphire 2024 - ASUG301 building better apps with SAP Fiori.pdfPeter Spielvogel
Building better applications for business users with SAP Fiori.
• What is SAP Fiori and why it matters to you
• How a better user experience drives measurable business benefits
• How to get started with SAP Fiori today
• How SAP Fiori elements accelerates application development
• How SAP Build Code includes SAP Fiori tools and other generative artificial intelligence capabilities
• How SAP Fiori paves the way for using AI in SAP apps
Why You Should Replace Windows 11 with Nitrux Linux 3.5.0 for enhanced perfor...SOFTTECHHUB
The choice of an operating system plays a pivotal role in shaping our computing experience. For decades, Microsoft's Windows has dominated the market, offering a familiar and widely adopted platform for personal and professional use. However, as technological advancements continue to push the boundaries of innovation, alternative operating systems have emerged, challenging the status quo and offering users a fresh perspective on computing.
One such alternative that has garnered significant attention and acclaim is Nitrux Linux 3.5.0, a sleek, powerful, and user-friendly Linux distribution that promises to redefine the way we interact with our devices. With its focus on performance, security, and customization, Nitrux Linux presents a compelling case for those seeking to break free from the constraints of proprietary software and embrace the freedom and flexibility of open-source computing.
In his public lecture, Christian Timmerer provides insights into the fascinating history of video streaming, starting from its humble beginnings before YouTube to the groundbreaking technologies that now dominate platforms like Netflix and ORF ON. Timmerer also presents provocative contributions of his own that have significantly influenced the industry. He concludes by looking at future challenges and invites the audience to join in a discussion.
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
State of ICS and IoT Cyber Threat Landscape Report 2024 previewPrayukth K V
The IoT and OT threat landscape report has been prepared by the Threat Research Team at Sectrio using data from Sectrio, cyber threat intelligence farming facilities spread across over 85 cities around the world. In addition, Sectrio also runs AI-based advanced threat and payload engagement facilities that serve as sinks to attract and engage sophisticated threat actors, and newer malware including new variants and latent threats that are at an earlier stage of development.
The latest edition of the OT/ICS and IoT security Threat Landscape Report 2024 also covers:
State of global ICS asset and network exposure
Sectoral targets and attacks as well as the cost of ransom
Global APT activity, AI usage, actor and tactic profiles, and implications
Rise in volumes of AI-powered cyberattacks
Major cyber events in 2024
Malware and malicious payload trends
Cyberattack types and targets
Vulnerability exploit attempts on CVEs
Attacks on counties – USA
Expansion of bot farms – how, where, and why
In-depth analysis of the cyber threat landscape across North America, South America, Europe, APAC, and the Middle East
Why are attacks on smart factories rising?
Cyber risk predictions
Axis of attacks – Europe
Systemic attacks in the Middle East
Download the full report from here:
https://sectrio.com/resources/ot-threat-landscape-reports/sectrio-releases-ot-ics-and-iot-security-threat-landscape-report-2024/
Epistemic Interaction - tuning interfaces to provide information for AI supportAlan Dix
Paper presented at SYNERGY workshop at AVI 2024, Genoa, Italy. 3rd June 2024
https://alandix.com/academic/papers/synergy2024-epistemic/
As machine learning integrates deeper into human-computer interactions, the concept of epistemic interaction emerges, aiming to refine these interactions to enhance system adaptability. This approach encourages minor, intentional adjustments in user behaviour to enrich the data available for system learning. This paper introduces epistemic interaction within the context of human-system communication, illustrating how deliberate interaction design can improve system understanding and adaptation. Through concrete examples, we demonstrate the potential of epistemic interaction to significantly advance human-computer interaction by leveraging intuitive human communication strategies to inform system design and functionality, offering a novel pathway for enriching user-system engagements.
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
After immersing yourself in the blue book and its red counterpart, attending DDD-focused conferences, and applying tactical patterns, you're left with a crucial question: How do I ensure my design is effective? Tactical patterns within Domain-Driven Design (DDD) serve as guiding principles for creating clear and manageable domain models. However, achieving success with these patterns requires additional guidance. Interestingly, we've observed that a set of constraints initially designed for training purposes remarkably aligns with effective pattern implementation, offering a more ‘mechanical’ approach. Let's explore together how Object Calisthenics can elevate the design of your tactical DDD patterns, offering concrete help for those venturing into DDD for the first time!
Climate Impact of Software Testing at Nordic Testing DaysKari Kakkonen
My slides at Nordic Testing Days 6.6.2024
Climate impact / sustainability of software testing discussed on the talk. ICT and testing must carry their part of global responsibility to help with the climat warming. We can minimize the carbon footprint but we can also have a carbon handprint, a positive impact on the climate. Quality characteristics can be added with sustainability, and then measured continuously. Test environments can be used less, and in smaller scale and on demand. Test techniques can be used in optimizing or minimizing number of tests. Test automation can be used to speed up testing.
Encryption in Microsoft 365 - ExpertsLive Netherlands 2024Albert Hoitingh
In this session I delve into the encryption technology used in Microsoft 365 and Microsoft Purview. Including the concepts of Customer Key and Double Key Encryption.
Observability Concepts EVERY Developer Should Know -- DeveloperWeek Europe.pdfPaige Cruz
Monitoring and observability aren’t traditionally found in software curriculums and many of us cobble this knowledge together from whatever vendor or ecosystem we were first introduced to and whatever is a part of your current company’s observability stack.
While the dev and ops silo continues to crumble….many organizations still relegate monitoring & observability as the purview of ops, infra and SRE teams. This is a mistake - achieving a highly observable system requires collaboration up and down the stack.
I, a former op, would like to extend an invitation to all application developers to join the observability party will share these foundational concepts to build on:
PHP Frameworks: I want to break free (IPC Berlin 2024)Ralf Eggert
In this presentation, we examine the challenges and limitations of relying too heavily on PHP frameworks in web development. We discuss the history of PHP and its frameworks to understand how this dependence has evolved. The focus will be on providing concrete tips and strategies to reduce reliance on these frameworks, based on real-world examples and practical considerations. The goal is to equip developers with the skills and knowledge to create more flexible and future-proof web applications. We'll explore the importance of maintaining autonomy in a rapidly changing tech landscape and how to make informed decisions in PHP development.
This talk is aimed at encouraging a more independent approach to using PHP frameworks, moving towards a more flexible and future-proof approach to PHP development.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !KatiaHIMEUR1
Today, after several years of existence, an extremely active community and an ultra-dynamic ecosystem, Kubernetes has established itself as the de facto standard in container orchestration. Thanks to a wide range of managed services, it has never been so easy to set up a ready-to-use Kubernetes cluster.
However, this ease of use means that the subject of security in Kubernetes is often left for later, or even neglected. This exposes companies to significant risks.
In this talk, I'll show you step-by-step how to secure your Kubernetes cluster for greater peace of mind and reliability.
Securing your Kubernetes cluster_ a step-by-step guide to success !
Growing Agile Teams Poster
1. Growing Agile Teams team name:
☐ Specialist knowledge shared
☐ Acceptance test-driven dev
☐ Limited manual testing
STEP 4. Scale ☐ Automated testing of NFRs
grow knowledge, share learning, ☐ Communities of Practice
expand capabilities ☐ Shared Definition of Done
☐ Stable and verifiable builds
☐ Cross-cutting concerns
☐ Entire team works on release
☐ Everyone experiences SM ☐ Business value drives work
☐ Team owns environment ☐ Visible measure of value
☐ Velocity guides release ☐ Swarms on committed PBIs
☐ Owns external dependencies
STEP 3. Maximize Value
organize to deliver maximum value ☐ Reduces technical debt
☐ Grow engineering practices
☐ Automated PBI testing
☐ Team takes 6-10 PBIs ☐ Business value understood
☐ Predictability over 90% ☐ PBIs done in priority order
☐ PBIs reviewed as done
STEP 2. Gain
Experience ☐ Shared code ownership
people, process and work all settling
in, focus on learning
☐
☐
Technical debt identified
Bugs actively fixed
agile teams first focus on
☐
☐
1-3 improvement actions
Release Definition of Done
smoothing flow and
enhancing quality, leading to
☐ Cross-functional Teams
☐ Regular backlog
☐
☐
Working Agreement
PBIs for 1-2 sprints
maximizing of value delivery
grooming
☐ Impediment backlog
STEP 1. Organize ☐ PBIs broken into tasks
☐ Active Learning Cycle maximizing value
preparing the structures, work and ☐ Transparent team
☐ Definition of Done
people capacity
☐ Definition of Ready enhancing quality
☐ Daily stand-ups
☐ Potentially shippable
☐ Sprint burndown
☐ Vision and requirements
smoothing flow
☐ Focus on 2-3 PBIs
more each stage acts as a scaffold, offering guidance and more
directive support, for different phases of a team’s agile journey guiding
copyright 2011 agile42 consulting ltd
the accompanying Growing Agile Teams worksheets provide more details behind the checklist for each step