Agile 2008 Guide - Tuesday Morning

July 2, 2008 by Artem

Agile 2008 is the premier conference of the Agile world. There are going to be almost 2000 participants and about 400 different sessions to attend. It means plenty of interesting conversations and a lot of activities to choose from. However, it also means that you have to make a choice between many different options. During the main part of the conference you have to choose between 40 to 50 different sessions.

Here is the first part of the guide to the conference program. This part covers Tuesday August 5, 10:45 - 12:15 time slot. In the table below you can find links to the full description, author bio and the answer to the all important question "Why would you want to go there?" All the sessions with white background take 90 minutes, all the sessions with the colored background are shorter.

If you feel that some summaries are inaccurate, please, comment - I will correct the mistakes.

You can find more information about the conference at http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com/Agile2008

Topic	Speakers	Why you would want to go there
Expanding Agile Horizons: The Five Dimensions of Systems	Mary Poppendieck	Mary is always magnificent. Go to this talk if you have never been to her speeches earlier.
Open Source Businesses and Developer Careers	Dirk Riehle	Come to this talk you are thinking about shifting the company to open source.
Open jam		A chance to discuss what interests you most.
A Model for Questioning Agile	Jon Bach Scott Barber	Come if you are tired arguing what’s agile and what’s not agile. This talk will provide you with the framework for such discussions.
Trying to save a Scrum implementation using Lean Principles and Artifacts	Rafael Santos	Come to this talk if you are using Scrum, but still cannot achieve the consistent quality and continuous improvement. Rafael shares how in similar situation Lean methods helped his company.
Rethinking Unit Testing: xUnit.net	James Newkirk Brad Wilson	Come to this demo if you are a .NET developer and already practice at least a little of TDD.
APDT: An Agile Planning Tool for Digital Tabletops	Xin Wang Frank Maurer	Come to this demo if you want to spend half an hour watching a super cool technology that one day could make the life of the distributed teams easier. Or if your company could afford getting the just invented hardware.
See Large Scale Multi-Stage Continuous Integration in Real Time	Damon Poole Joshua Sherwood	Come to this demo if you understand benefits of continuous integration for a single team, but have (or expect) problems with the multi-team situation. You’ll see a demo simulating hundreds of active developers.
Tangible Bug Tracking using LEGO bricks	Takeshi Kakeda	Come to this talk if you feel like raising the quality by working on the fun factor. You’ll see how visualizing bugs in the fun way can help the process.
Test-Driven Ajax	Johannes Link	Come to this very practical talk if you a programmer involved in creating AJAX applications.
TDD Clinic: BDD & Rails	Gregg Pollack	Come to this practical developer training if you already know what TDD is. You’ll learn the next level of TDD – Behavior Driven Development. High programming skills are not needed.
Clean Code Clinic: TDD Ping Pong Match!	Andy Maleh Dave Hoover	Come to this practical developer training if you want to practice your TDD skills in a funny competition.
Continuous Testing: TDD Turned Up To 12	Ben Rady	Come to this demo if you are a developer already practicing TDD and willing to employ it as much as possible.
Live aid: participate in a real agile project at the conference		Come there if you want to feel the real agile team working. Note, that you might participate fully or drop for 10 minutes if you have a free time slot.
Agile Orientation and Psychological Needs, Self-Efficacy, and Perceived Support: A Two Job-Level Comparison	Tali Seger, Orit Hazzan, Ronen Bar-Nahor	Research paper.
Scrum in a Multiproject Environment	Artem Marchenko, Pekka Abrahamsson	Come to discuss this research paper if you want to learn from the practical experience of implementing Scrum in a multi-team multi-project situation in embedded industry. Or if you’d like to see me presenting on the stage :)
Automated Acceptance Testing: a Literature Review and an Industrial Case Study	Børge Haugset, Geir K. Hanssen	Research paper.
The Tester Who Came In From the Cold: Helping Testers Make an Agile Transition	Lisa Crispin Janet Gregory	Come to this tutorial if you come from testing or QA and struggle with integrating into Agile processes.
Systemic Coaching Techniques for Agile Coaches	Michael Spayd Doug Rosenberg	Come to this workshop if you are an Agile coach willing to improve your skills. You’ll be introduced a Relationship Systems Coaching Model, will learn the techniques and how to facilitate them.
(Re)Defining the Agile Coach	Erik Lundh	Come to this workshop if you are an Agile coach interested in improvement and sharing your experience.
Agility, Evolution, Emergence, and the Primodial Ooze	Brian Foote	This is a talk about the parallels between agile movement and evolution. Not sure who the target audience could be.. Maybe people who love discussing philosophical matters.
The use of Ritual in Agile currently and identifying improving ways to harness the power of ritual	Mark Smith	Come to this workshop if you would like together with a group of colleagues work on identifying the uniting power of team rituals
Agile Game Development	Clinton Keith	It is a talk by the High Moon Studios CTO. A person who more or less introduced agile to the video gaming industry. Clinton will share the experiences learned on the way. Come to this talk if you would like to hear a successful start-to-finish adoption story.
Introduction de la scène des Chansons Françaises	Emmanuel Gaillot	Come to this introduction if you speak French and understand the description.
Implementation Agile Internationale	Alexandre Boutin	Come to this talk if you speak French and understand the description.
Test-Driven Requirements: beyond tools	Gilles Mantel	Come to this workshop if you would like to explore the best practices of capturing the requirements. Not a tool specific workshop.
Behaviour Driven Development using Plain Old JUnit	Elizabeth Keogh Dan North	Come to this practical workshop if you would like to practice the Behavior-Driven-Development. Focus will be on BDD done with JUnit, but the session should be useful even if you want to learn “just some BDD”.
Culture Stage Introduction	Marc Evers Linda Rising	This talk introduces the Agile & Organizational Culture stage. Come to this session if no other 30 min slot attracts you or if you came to conference and still don’t have any plan.
Throwing the Agile Transition Party	Michael Hill	Come to this talk if you would like to learn an experienced coach way of transitioning teams to XP. Discussion is supposed to be included, but since the talk was shortened from 90 mins to 60, I am not sure whether there will be time for many questions.
Learning Kaizen from Toyota (with MindMaps)	Kenji Hiranabe	Come to this workshop if you’ve heard about the Toyota Production System (TPS), but don’t know much about it. During this session you will explore similarities between TPS and Agile
Jazz improvisation as a metaphor for understanding agile development organizational behavior	Charles Suscheck	Come to this talk if you are a manager of Agile team(s) or soon-to-be-Agile team(s) willing to understand the dynamics of your team(s) better.
The Myth and Magic of Self-Organizing Teams	Kevin Wagoner	Come to this talk if you would like to learn how to help your teams become self-organizing. Kevin will share the 20 Scrum teams experience.
Practices of an Agile Team	Fumihiko Kinoshita	Come to this experience report to learn about practices that worked well for a particular agile team.
Agile Project Experiences – The Story Of Three Little Pigs	Craig Smith Paul King	Come to this experience report if you’d like to see how Agile practices can differ depending on the nature of the project even when it is done in the same organization
Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century	Jean Tabaka Chris Louvion	Come to this tutorial if you would like to see how the experienced coaches solve the problems arising in the non-trivial situations. The tutorial is based on the practical experience and plenty of examples are expected.
The Leadership Imperative: Creating a Culture of Trust	Pollyanna Pixton	Come to this workshop if you are an organization leader who wants to create an environment that encourages creativity and innovation.
Converting Business Value into Actual Money	Luke Hohmann	Come to this tutorial if you would like to shift from prioritizing by intangible “customer value” to ensuring that providing this value indeed helps you getting more money for your products.
Establishing an Agile Portfolio to Align IT Investments with Business Needs	Joseph C Thomas Steve Baker	Come to this experience report if you would like to listen about how a Fortune 250 company IT embraced Agile methods
Using Agile for Buy vs. Build Decisions	Mike Register Tod Golding	Come to this experience report only if you are into making many buy vs. build decisions.
Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work	Mishkin Berteig	Come to this experience report if your stakeholders can’t fix their priorities even for a week.
Feature Injection	Chris Matts Julie Chickering	Come to this tutorial if you are involved in the business analysis and have to come up with the minimum marketable features for your products.
Pragmatic Personas: Connecting With Developers Via TDD	David Hussman	Come to this tutorial if you are dreaming about connecting your product managers and developers. David is an outstanding speaker and pleasant person himself. Even if you don’t know much about personas, you are guaranteed to learn a lot of very practical ways of building the right software efficiently.
Agile Distributed Teams	Douglas Shimp	Come to this talk if you want to realize the benefits of Agile in the distributed environment and you are really unable to collocate most of the teams.
Creating Proximity over a Distance	Jutta Eckstein	Come to this talk if you are implementing Agile development in the distributed environment and want to learn practical tips such as: who should be traveling, why an when, what social problems to watch for, etc.