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Agile 2008 Guide - Wednesday Afternoon

July 11, 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.

This part of the guide covers Wednesday August 6, 14:00 - 15:30 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 occupy the next 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

Typical Pitfalls in Agile Software Development

Jutta Eckstein

Come to this talk if you are one of the people responsible for or helping the Agile adoption in the team or organization.

Don't Sell Buzzwords to Business Leaders, Learn How to Describe and Demonstrate Real Value

Richard Sheridan
James Goebel

Come to this talk if you have problems explaining the official leaders why this or that change needs to be made.

Coaches Are Producers

David Hussman 

Come to this talk if you are a coach who cares to think about the nature of coaching. You will get a chance to learn a collection of coaching ideas and practices.

Open jam: Create your own session at the conference

A chance to discuss what interests you most.

Evolution of the Tools and Practices of a Large Distributed Agile Team

Fabrizio Cannizzo
Paul Moser

Come to this experience report if you are looking for an integrated Java-oriented toolbox for your distributed team.

Drifting Toward Invisibility: the transition to the electronic task board

Tom Perry 

Come to this experience report if you are challenged to move from physical to electronic tools. You’ll see what to beware.

Migrating from SharePoint to a Better Scrum Tool

Edward Uy
Rene Rosendahl

Come to this experience report if you intend to use Microsoft SharePoint or if you hate to use SharePoint. You will learn what to beware and how to leave it.

Narrative Testing: Tools for Story Test Driven Development

Michael Phoenix
Rand Huso

Come to this tutorial if you are well familiar with the test-driven development and are considering ways for taking it from unit level to acceptance level.

Refactoring Strategies & Tactics

Joshua Kerievsky 

Come to this tutorial if you know what refactoring is and would like to learn the deeper refactoring strategies from the expert.

TDD Clinic: C++

James Grenning

Come to this clinic if you don’t know much about test-driven development (at least in C++) and would like to learn how to do it in C++.

Clean Code Clinic: Refactoring Fest

Naresh Jain

Come to this clinic if you don’t have much practice with refactoring and would like to learn it.

Clean Systems: Clean Code at the Architecture Level

Dean Wampler

Come to this tutorial if you are coding on a daily basis and don’t feel like Agile methods empower you enough for keeping you architecture neat.

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 Automated Testing Strategies: Flipping the Testing Pyramid Right-Side-Up

Patrick Wilson-Welsh

Come to this tutorial if you know something about Agile testing and would like to understand the “big picture” about it.

How Am I Supposed To Act?

Michael Bolton
Adam Geras

Come to this workshop if you feel like you need to improve your improvisation skills. You will practice a theatre without preparation.

Skills for the Agile Designer

Rebecca Wirfs-Brock 

Come to this tutorial if you are an Agile team member looking for what is needed in order to become a senior team member.

Learning Collaboration and the Planning via the Process Game

Charles Suscheck

Come to this tutorial if you are a coach looking for exercises for teaching the importance of planning and collaboration. You will see how the Rummy game could be used for it.

Scrum Accelerator - The Game

Tim Walker

Come to this workshop (though description looks more like of a tutorial) if you are a coach or mentor looking for exercises to be used, when teaching Scrum.

Are we done yet?

Julie Chickering
Lisa Shoop

Come to this workshop if you are a coach looking for a game to teach the importance and meaning of DONE.

Come and Take It! Lean Pull Applied

Rod Coffin
Don McGreal

Come to this demo if you’ve heard about Lean, but didn’t have a lot of practice with “pulling” the requirements. You will experience the pull method live.

Agile and labour turnover - Should I stay or should I go?

Nicole Belilos
Willem van den Ende

Come to this workshop if you are a human resource person or line manager and would like to understand what effect Agile methods have on the labor turnover.

The Doctor is "In" - Using the Office Hours Concept to Make Limited Resources Most Effective

Andrea Leszek
Catherine Courage

Come to this experience report if you are a manager or coach who is concerned about sharing a valuable specialist between many Agile teams.

Agile infrastructure and operations: how infra-gile are you?

Patrick Debois 

Come to this experience report if you wonder how to build the infrastructure and frameworks while staying Agile.

Why Business Isn't Agile

Kevin Brennan

Come to this talk if you find it problematic to convince the business side to adopt the Agile-compatible practices.

When Agile Estimating is not Sufficient - Five Collaborative Techniques to use for Estimating Software Projects Up Front

Kjetil Moløkken-Østvold

Come to this talk if you are involved in preparing the upfront estimations for the Agile project and you are not completely happy with your current estimations practices.

Agile in Practice: What is ACTUALLY Going On Out There

Scott Ambler

Come to this talk if you would like to hear about the statistics around the Agile adoption: how wide it really is, what is usually effective, etc.

La technique d'interview des "Neuf Cases" pour mieux comprendre votre client

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Portia Tung

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

Becoming a fearless leader of change (to agile or any new idea) in your organization

Linda Rising
MaryLynn Manns

Come to this tutorial if you are one of those who are struggling with introducing change in the organization(s).

Dead Sheepdog: Ethical Dilemmas and Agile Software Development

Ken H. Judy
Steven "Doc" List

Come to this talk if during your office hours you often feel the ethical problems.

Successful Agile Transitions: Using Appreciative Inquiry to Discover What Works

Ellen Gottesdiener

Come to this workshop if you are a coach or manager who wants to transition to Agile without a lot of trouble.

Delivering Measurable Business Value with Scrum

Ryan Shriver

Come to this tutorial if you are a Product Owner who has problems with measuring or presenting the value being built by the Scrum team.

Prioritizing Your Product Backlog

Mike Cohn

Come to this tutorial if you are not sure how you should prioritize the requests in your Scrum Product Backlog.

Managing the Middle: Product Owners and the Politics of Backlog Management

Luke Hohmann

Come to this workshop if you are a Product Owner who has to manage expectations of many different stakeholders and/or customers.

Agile development within a distributed team

Jamie Allsop

Come to this talk if you intend to apply Agile methods in a globally distributed team. You will hear the lessons learned from 3 years of such a journey.

Updating "Patterns for Distributed Agile"

Keith Braithwaite

Come to this workshop if Agile works well for you and you feel like sharing your experience with the community.

Overhauling a Failed Project Using Out of the Box Scrum

Matthew D Edwards

Quite a typical experience report about reimplementing a failed project with the Scrum implementation.

Agile Project Leadership - my top 10 value driven principles

Lynne Ralston

Come to this experience report if you a leading a team (or teams) in an Agile-skeptic environment.

Cowboys and Indians: Impacts of Cultural Diversity on Agile Teams

Janice Aston
Lionel Laroche, & Gerard Meszaros

Come to this experience report if you are working in a multicultural environment.

Metrics for Agility

Dan Rawsthorne

Come to this talk if you have problems tracking (or presenting) the progress of the projects being developed by Agile teams.

Leading Volunteers with Agility

Mike Cottmeyer

Come to this talk if you are leading or plan to lead a team of volunteers (such as an open source project team?).

User Interface Design Studio

Jeff White
Jim Ungar

Come to this tutorial if you are a UI designer who struggles to integrate user centered design approaches with the Agile methods.

User Experience Design and the Agile Development Process

Maryam Najafi
Len Toyoshiba

Come to this experience report if you wonder how to make the Agile project deliver good user experience design.

Get in There, Mess Up & Find Shortcuts: A User Experience Journey

Josh Evnin
Marjorie Pries

An experience report on using the contextual enquiry method for delivering a good user experience.

Using Persona with XP at LANDesk

David Broschinsky
Lisa Baker

A typical experience report on using personas.

Assembling a Real-Time Collaborative Development Platform in the Cloud

Charlie Rudd 

Vendor demo about a tool that I failed to understand from the description and failed to locate on the vendor site. Come here if you feel the need to show respect to the conference sponsors.

Peer into the Crystal Ball: The Future of Agile Development in Visual Studio

Ajoy Krishnamoorthy

Come to this vendor talk if your development is based on the Microsoft tools. You’ll see how the upcoming version of Visual Studio supports Agile.

Comments

Some pitfalls become dogmatic patterns

July 12, 2008 by Daniel Pietraru (not verified), 18 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 1656

While agile was still in its infancy I was a very enthusiastic supporter. My experiences with XP years ago were all a success because we were ...well... agile. We were able to look at the book (a thin one) and pick what made sense in that particular scenario. Lately I see the late comers rushing into the Agile way of working. What happens is an explosion of books, and contradictory advice and also a mutation of Agile methods at the touch of old ways of doing things in the Enterprise. This got me frustrated to the point where I had to make fun of it: The Agile 800 Pounds Gorilla.
I would like to go to this conference and take the pulse of the movement first hand but time is scarce. Are the presentations gonna be released to the public after the conference?

Cheers,
Daniel

Indeed i happens. Just as

July 12, 2008 by Artem, 18 weeks 5 days ago
Comment id: 1660

Indeed i happens. Just as with many other innovations. In fact quite many sessions of this conference seem to touch the issue of introducing the lightweight agility on the enterprise scale. The Agile 800 Pounds Gorilla is fun - I enjoyed reading it :)

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