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Agile 2008 Guide - Wednesday Morning

July 7, 2008 by Artem Marchenko

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.

This part of the guide covers Wednesday August 6, 10:30 - 12:00 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 orange background take 180 minutes (and therefore continue from the previous time slot), all the sessions with the light blue or light green background take less, than 90 minutes.

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

Boosting your testing productivity with Groovy Canceled

Andres Almiray
Ixchel Ruiz

Come to this tutorial if you are programming in Java, use automated testing and are unhappy with the flexibility of your testing tools.

TDD Clinic: incremental design with Mock Objects

Steve Freeman 

Come to this clinic if you are a Java developer willing to learn how to drive effectively the design with the help of test-driven development.

Clean Code Clinic: Dealing with CRRAP - Microtesting Legacy Code

Michael Hill

Come to this clinic if you are a developer having to deal much with the legacy code.

XUnit Test Patterns and Smells; Improving Test Code and Testability Through Refactoring

Gerard Meszaros

Come to this tutorial if you are a developer working or going to work in a test-driven way. You will learn ways for improving your approaches to testing.

Value Stream Mapping - Extending Our View to the Enterprise

Alan Shalloway

Come to this tutorial if you are applying Agile methods in your team and your biggest constraints are out of the team, or if you want to understand better what is the most important optimization point for your team.

Jeu de Direction

Yves Hanoulle
Bernard Notarianni

Come to this workshop if you speak French and understand the description.

Fashion Cycle

Tobias Mayer 

Come to this funny session if you are familiar with Scrum and/or XP and would like to practice it in a funny way. Come if you like fashion clothing.

Overcoming Resistance to Change

Dave Nicolette
Lasse Koskela

Come to this workshop if you are involved or going to be involved in the organizational change. You will learn what kind of resistance to expect and how to cope with it.

Building Your Coaching Skills

Johanna Rothman

Come to this tutorial if you are a technical leader who is not exactly a coach, but from time to time needs to coach your team members. You will learn when to do it and how.

Barely Sufficient Portfolio Management

Todd Little
Kent McDonald

Come to this tutorial if you struggle to integrate your product into a bigger picture. You will earn about product, project, and portfolio management issues in order to optimize overall return.

Mental Models: Sparking Creativity Through Empathy

Indi Young 

Come to this workshop if you want to improve your understanding of your users’ motivations and reasons.

Who Do You Trust?

Linda Rising 

Come to this talk if you cannot understand why particular people in your team don’t seem to trust another people without the obvious reason.

10 ways to screw up with Scrum and XP

Henrik Kniberg 

Come to this talk to learn about the small and not so small mistakes that can undermine your Scrum or XP adoption.

Pressure and Performance: The CTO's Dilemma

Diana Larsen
James Shore

Come to this talk if you want to better understand the executives’ and senior managers’ role in the Agile world.

Open jam: create your own session at the conference

A chance to discuss what interests you most.

Tools, Frameworks and Libraries: the Devil's work or Manna from Heaven?

Mike Hill

Come to this workshop if you have problems choosing between and adopting multitude of libraries, testing frameworks and another tools.

Agile Developer Practices for Dynamic Languages

Paul King 

Come to this talk if you want to apply Agile methods for development done in dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python or Groovy.

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.

Legacy Code Keynote

Michael Feathers

Come to this talk if you have plenty of legacy code to support in your organization. Michael is a known subject matter expert.

Sleight-of-Quality : A Magical Approach to Testing

Jeremy Kominar
Michael Bolton

Come to this talk if you like talking about the philosophical basis of QA and testing.

An Agile Classroom Experience: Teaching TDD and Refactoring

Brandon Carlson 

Come to this experience report if you are involved in teaching students/beginners how to program.

Transitioning a Team to Agile Test Methods

Susan Shaye

Come to this experience report to hear about moving a large and old (20 year old) project to Agile.

An Agile Classroom Experience

Pat Reed

Come to this experienced report if you are involved in teaching (not necessarily in teaching software development).

Fostering Software Craftsmanship in a Corporate Setting

Scott Dillman

Come to this talk if you are interested in creating or promoting the culture encouraging the permanent software development skills improvement. You will hear about specific example from the large companies such as Travelers Insurance and Google.

Stuck in your own code? Alleviate cognitive friction today!

Régis Medina

Come to this talk if on a daily basis you have problems locating the right code, understanding the APIs, etc. You will learn the techniques for making your code usable.

Can IT Projects be insured?

Graham Oakes

Come to this workshop if you feel like exploring the possible tendencies the software contracting model.

The State of IT - Is Agile a symptom of an industry in a midlife crisis?

Olav Maassen
Machiel Groeneveld

Come to this talk if you feel like discussing the tendencies in Agile in particular and software development as a whole.

Scaling Agile: Finding your Agile Tribe

Erik Moore
John Spens

Come to this experience report if you want to know which kind of people you need to scale Agile project to 30+ people.

Agile Discipline: The Price of Agile Is Eternal Vigilance

Joe Ryan
Rob Scudiere

Come to this experience report if you have a number of Agile teams in your organization, but are not sure how to integrate their different styles. You will how the VeriSign Enterprise security managed to do it.

"Come Together, right now" – How the songs of The Beatles helped our Product Owners and Teams Live

Anne Moon 

Experience report about a successful project start (vs. just sending developers, managers and Scrum Masters to different trainings).

MyBoeingFleet and Agile Software Development

Joe Fecarotta

Come to this experience report if you are working in a heavily matrixed distributed organization that has to cope with the difficult organizational processes.

SOX Compliant Agile Processes – A Financial Company Story

Sumit Gupta

Unfortunately I failed to understand what is particularly useful in this experience report.

Crafting User Stories – Four Experts and The Audience Weigh In

Joshua Kerievsky

Come to this panel to discover whatever you wanted to know about user stories.

Building Great Products, Incrementally: An Agile Product Owner's Primer

Alex Pukinskis

Come to this tutorial if you are going to become a Product Owner or if you are a Product Owner and you don’t feel being enough in control for the features your team develops.

Remote mentoring a distributed agile team

Jagadish Shrinivasavadhani
Vinod Panicker

Come to this experience report to learn how people managed to share experience and coach a team over in China from India.

Practical Considerations for Distributed Agile Projects

Jane Robarts 

Come to this experience report to learn what is better to consider before planning and initiating the distributed Agile project (US, India, China experience).

Maximizing Productivity Across the Globe

Mark Summers

An experience report about distributed Agile between UK, Romania and India (Indian party adopted it during the journey).

Distributed agile teams and alternative contractual forms: what works best?

Greg Hutchings

Come to this talk if you are the one involved in improving agile practices and relationships in the large distributed programs. Special attention will be devoted to the different contract types and their impact on quality, motivation and success.

Dependency Management in a Large Agile Environment

Eric Babinet
Rajani Ramanathan

Come to this experience report to see how salesforce.com manages to run 30 Scrum teams working in a single release branch.

Product Manager; surviving the big bang approach

Rasmus Mencke 

Come to this experience report if you are a Product Manager. You will see how salesforce.com manages to apply Scrum almost overnight and how the Product Managers’ life changed.

Using lightweight analysis techniques to workshop shared solutions

Luke Barrett

Come to this tutorial to learn how a shared understanding about the business problem and possible solutions can be created easily and early.

AccuRev Demo in an Agile Environment with Expert Q&A

Alex Forbes

Come to this talk if you are looking for a tool to support your Agile team. You’ll see a live demo covering many aspects.

Building Process-Enabled Content Applications Using an Agile Development Platform

Andreas Dangl

Come to this demo if by mistake you came to this conference looking for a platform for the web applications.

About the Author: As the Editor-in-Chief for AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com, Artem is charged with overseeing the direction for content, advertising, and the overall management of the site. Nowadays in his day life, Artem is a product manager in a global telecommunication company where he leads the development of a product developed in extremely distributed environment. Artem has been applying Agile and researching Agile since 2005. Contact Artem

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