Okay, round 3 of the Agile 2008 session picks. Agile 2008 is the premier conference of the Agile world. There are about 400 different sessions to attend, which is why I’ve taken about 2 days to wade through all the options. Earlier I posted my faves for Tuesday and Wednesday.
Thursday
Early Morning
- New arrows for the Agile quiver: Now that the team’s head is in the game, how do you get their heart in? by Jim McCarthy. My focus thus far with Agile has been more on the mechanics, than on the motivation.
- Paving the Way for Agile Testing by Eric Jimmink. How quality starts by getting a better definition of Done, and improving teamwork in testing.
- User Story Mapping: Making Sense Out Of Your User Story Backlog by Jeff Patton. 3 hours of participants functioning in small teams to build a “story map” then learning to leverage that story map to tell bigger stories about their product, plan incremental releases, and thin releases down to more economical feasible sizes while retaining usefulness to users, and value to stakeholders. Yeah, getting lost in a mountain of stories is all too familiar.
Tough choices. Leaning towards Eric and the panel in the next session, otherwise user story mapping.
Before Lunch
- From High-performing to Hyper-performing Agile teams, panel discussion. Presentation of 3 unique case studies, by 3 top notch agile guys, each showcasing how to crank up the agile performance.I want to hear “techniques for working with many and varied clients simultaneously: how to maintain consistent and predictable velocity, how to scale teams without losing efficiency,and how to move developers fluidly between multiple teams and multiple products.”
After Lunch
- From Concept to Product Backlog – What Happens Before Iteration 0? by Gerard Meszaros, Janice Aston. “This tutorial provides an overview of what needs to go on “behind the scenes” between when a project is conceived and when development can start in earnest. It identifies the artifacts that may need to be produced, whether and when they should be produced, which activities can be used to produce them and who should be involved in those activities.” ‘Nuff said.
Late Afternoon
- Estimating Considered Wasteful: Introducing Micro-Releases by Joshua Kerievsky. No story estimates, no velocity calcs, no estimate reconciliation, multiple releases per week – what is going on here?
- Exploring User Stories Through Mind Mapping by Kenji Hiranabe, Takeshi Kakeda. I’m a huge fan of mind mapping. Looks like a technique I could use remotely, given I don’t meet face to face with clients much.
Friday
- Collaboration Explained – Tools for Facilitating Real Agile Teams by Jean Tabaka. She’s one of the best on this topic.
- Effective Pairing: The Good, The Bad, And The Ugly by Dave Nicolette. I don’t code, but pairing is something teams I work with often have little experience with. Will likely go to this topic due to popularity by rest of my co-workers.
- Dude, Where’s Our Release Plan? by David Hussman. Release planning is underutilized / undervalued in our projects.