Agenda

Agenda:

Keynotes:

Let’s Help Melly (Changing Work Into Life)

Jurgen Appelo, Author “Management 3.0”, Co-founder, Agile and Lean network Europe

Many people in the world don’t really like their jobs. And most organizations are not healthy. They are badly prepared for increasing complexity and changing environments. Most managers know that organizations are complex systems. But few understand what that means for the way organizations should be managed. Complexity thinking suggests that we should seek a diversity of conflicting perspectives. It explains that organizations need experimentation, not just adaptation. And it says that most innovation happens by stealing and tweaking existing ideas to fit a new context. Ultimately, what organizations need is a “management workout”. A number of simple practices that make employees happy and the organization healthy, and which satisfy the rules of complexity thinking.

Succeeding with Scrum: It’s ALL about the people!

Bob Hartman,CSC,CST, President, AgileforAll, Member of BoD, Scrum Alliance

Is it possible to be doing everything Scrum says to do, and still fail horribly? Unfortunately, the answer is yes, and teams do it every day. Concentrating on doing Scrum well often means paying attention to all the meetings and artifacts while also making sure the roles all do their jobs. It seems to be all about doing things and this is where organizations get off track. Success with Scrum means understanding people. People do the work, not robots. Scrum requires understanding human nature and allowing people to do their best work in a meaningful way. This session draws from Bob’s experience as a Certified Scrum Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer to help attendees better appreciate and understand the people side of Scrum.

Enterprise Agility: The start line tricks for a perfect finish

Madhur Kathuria, CSC, Director, Xebia Agile Consulting and Transformation, Chairperson, ISEC

When starting with their Agile adoption, most organizations struggle with questions which can make or mar their chances of achieving their business goals through use of agile practices.This session draws on experiences from various consulting assignments to provide vital answers, clues , warning signs and success mantras to organizational looking to adopt to agility in a more effective way

Tracks:

Scrum Star-Trek:

“ISNIPER-How to make the change when change is hard”

Daniel Teng, CSC, Senior Agile Coach, Odd-e

If you give kids broccoli and tell them it is good for their health. Most likely, you will still get a no. The reason is quite simple, little kids don’t care about being healthy. This broccoli principles applies to agile adoption as well. Simply telling and pushing new ideas and practices don’t help very much because It is about changing people’s mindset and way of thinking. Push and enforcement will always get resistance.
The more push we have, the more resistance we will have as coach or change agent. To make it even worse, each individual, team and organization are so different, the culture is different, the business situation is different, the technology is different. Those are perfect excuses for not to change. One key factor for successful and sustainable adoption is to lit the desire to learn and improve, from individual, to team, to organization level. Rather than being pushed a lot of ideas, team will come for help and guidance, to pull idea from coach then apply in their context.

Having been engaged in transition projects for years, I experienced had some mistakes as well as some successes. When reflecting on such cases, I discovered several key success factors, which leads to a SNIPer coaching principle. SNIPer is the acronym of Small wins, No big term, Intervention based and Pain point focused.

In this session, The author will explain how come the SNIPer principle. By telling stories, I will share how this principle improves effectiveness of in my coaching.

“Why Scrum Works? -A Neuroscience Perspective On Scrum”

Tushar Somaiya, Agile Coach, Founder, ShuHaRi Agile

Have you ever thought why scrum works? That too from NeuroScience perspective?
We all acknowledge and understand that we have moved beyond and past machine age or service era and are living in what is called “Knowledge Era”. Focus of current times is shifting from behaviours to values. From people to brain. Yet, we know very little about people or brain or its working.
Through this talk, I will attempt to link hard neuroscience to scrum and its practices to see why it works or does not work. Also we would look at practices required beyond scrum to create an environment where scrum can flourish. Or even exists!

Building Agile Organizations

Zuzuana Sochova, Agile Coach and Trainer & Eduard Kunce, VP-Software Engineering, CA Technologies, Czech Republic

There are many talks about implementation of Agile, Scrum and Kanban, about being successful with all the development practices, but very few sources are talking about Agile organization. How to build it, and what it really is.
Building an Agile organization is not just about using Scrum or Kanban in development teams and prioritizing functionality based on business value and fast customer feedback. There is something more, applicable to the whole organization level. Surprisingly using just few frameworks the organization could be transformed into agile company despite of current organization structure, power structures and company culture. Even the small companies are often struggling when it comes to the expression of Agile organization. And for huge enterprises it’s often even impossible to imagine how shall the company change. Does it mean we don’t need any managers? How shall we structure our teams and departments? Shall we change the org chart to matrix or the other way around? How shall we organize ourselves? We can’t afford any chaos, so how about keep all the agile just in out IT? Those and similar questions are often come up.
Based on our experiences with Agile transformations in both small companies and large enterprises we come to conclusion that Agile culture grows on top of the ability to build good teams. And as this competence is widely underestimated and rarely used on daily basis in the companies, we have developed the Tulming framework which extends the fundamentals of team theories, combines them with Agile principles and values and adopts them to create together an Agile mindset in the organization.
At the end of this talk, you will not only understand the Tulming framework, but you also get an implementation strategy that you can start immediately applying in your organization.

Value, Quality and Innovation

Dr.  Masa Maeda, Kanban Guru,  CEO and Founder, ValueInnova LLC

Value, Quality and Innovation are terms used quite often in the Agile community. Do we really know what they mean and their implications? Furthermore, their meaning has matured over time. In this talk I will bring understanding and awareness over all three and the high importance of using them as beacons to design, create and deliver the right products

“Cucumber Recipes”

Sonik Chopra, Agile Coach and Project Manager, Pitney Bowes

This session with cover the power of BDD with Cucumber and how it can benefit to projects.

After introduction on BDD, Cucumber and comparison with TDD, Sonik cover the main crux of this presentation. He will demo vast and powerful features of Cucumber  and how they can integrate with different Languages and platforms

“The Joys of Designing Agile Solutions for New-Age Problems”

Tathagat Varma, 24[7] Labs

Agile methods, and scrum in particular, help organize the work by prioritizing items could be done and delivered in a small timebox. While its simplicity and effectiveness is based on timeless experiences that make it an effectives approach for a certain class of problems where a product backlog exists in some shape or form, and there is some basis (scientific, data-driven or otherwise) for the product owner to prioritize features, it doesn’t really offer any clear guidance for a newer class of problems where, for example, there is the work is so radically new that there might not be a product backlog. For that matter, there might not even be a market, a customer or a product to begin with. Think of you specifying and designing ‘something’ when no such product ever existed – not just in the minds of customer but
even in the dreams of its designers! How can one have a ‘product owner’ or a product backlog when there is even no source of such information. All we have is a loose set of ‘ideas’ which might or not work. Distilling such innovative ideas in a product or a sprint backlog might be too premature. We clearly need a different approach than a thoroughbred Scrum.
In the last few years, the work on Customer Development and Lean Startup by Steve Blank and Eric Ries has led to putting a framework in place for solving such class of “VUCA = Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous” problems in a more systematic and result-oriented manner. These have greatly helped startups and entrepreneurs where failure rates tend to be extremely high traditionally.
In this workshop, we will experience to joys of creating a product starting with Design Thinking and apply principles of Customer Development and Lean Startup and explore the nuances of designing agile solutions for such new-age problems

How Do We Learn? – A Key Question for Practicing Scrum Teams

Raja Bavani, Chief Architect, Mindtree

How do we learn? This is one of the seemingly most simple but important question you and your team members need to ask yourself and think through. We are professionals. Obviously we know why we learn and what to learn. However, many of us seldom think enough about how we learn.

 Team members in Scrum teams are busy delivering working software iteration after iteration. Do they get adequate time and opportunities to learn? Are they too busy delivering working software? Do they find it hard to ensure work-life balance? Do they feel that they learned nothing much at the end of their project?

The objective of this session is to find answer to these questions.

“Prosperity focus Agile Technology Leadership”

Schalk Cronjḕ, Director and Consultant, Ntaba UK

Scrum was good enough for the last decade. Agile techniques were good enough for the last decade. Even as the many groups are only now adopting Agile-type approaches, there are those that are looking forward to address future global competitiveness and sustainability in an Agile manner. With Agile fundamentally being the delivery of prosperity to all stakeholders, the obvious question is how to focus teams to accomplish this goal for the greater good. No teams work in isolation and are part of larger ecosystems, which continually induce opposing stressors into the system. Only by applying a system-thinking approach to Agile in an organisation, can one understand the stressors involved and also map out the positive impact on various stakeholders beyond organisational boundaries.

“Making of Innovative Solutions: Lean Start-Up and Design Thinking Practices”

Manik Choudhary, Agile Project Manager, SAP Labs

Manik will showcase Real Case Studies on how Innovative Solutions can be developed using a mix of tools and techniques from Lean Start-Up , Design Thinking, User Story Mapping and Lean & Agile Development.

Scrum From The Trenches:

Is Scrum Really For India?

Vibhu Srinivasan, MD, SolutionsIQ India

Scrum has been known now to be a well-accepted framework to do work in timeboxes. Scrum also brings with it a lot of discipline to get things done with a number of simple rules to follow. While the rules of the game are simple, it also asks for a lot of disciline to do the work together, be transparent and truthful about how work gets done.

This interactive presentation ponders over one simple question – “Does Scrum Really Fit the Indian Mindset”

The premise of this thought is the three years of work  that I have done exclusively with organizations in India.Prior to that I have spent for more than 10 years with organizations in the west.

Here are some very fundamental differences on how work gets done here in India.

1) Majority of software produce in India is still for the service industry, where fixed bid contracts are prevalent.

2) The Indian organization has people joining by the truckload

3) Titles are really important to the Indian Mindset.

etc..

This session boldly looks at some of these sensitive topics and comes to a conclusion. The conclusion needs your input as audience. So come participate,debate and lets come to a conclusive decision

“Know your MVP”

Unnat Gupta, Shree Damani, Thoughtworks

MVP is defined as : “that version of a new product which allows a team to collect the maximum amount of validated learning about customers with the least effort.”It doesn’t say a thing about the product being valuable to the customers or market segment.

MVP is minimum viable product *NOT* minimally marketable feature set / first release! MVPs are the experiments we learned from on the way to our first release of the software. To us the core of the difference between “Minimally Viable Product” and “Minimally Marketable Product” is in the purpose. An MVP’s purpose is to learn, an MMP’s purpose is to serve. Understand the problem vs address the problem.

“Making Agile Happen: The importance of Test Automation”

Sanju Burkule, CEO, OpexSoftware

This presentation is about sharing one of the biggest problems large companies face into “becoming agile”. The single biggest barrier that prevented us from being always releasable was testing. The sheer amount of test case, manual testing mindset, a separate non-agile automation team, huge backlog of testcases pending automation, slow in getting into nightly testing or continuous integration etc. These routine problems can drag a teams speed to become agile. In this short session, we will go through a couple of methods that have worked in the real world. Lets see how we overcame this challenge.

“Load and performance test in Agile Scrum Framework”

SRV Subrahmaniam, S Ravindra, Siemens

Handling testing of the Load and Performance related requirements within an Agile Scrum framework merits careful consideration. Typically in a waterfall model, Load and Performance tests (LPT) are performed after System tests and often take a long cycle time. LPT defects are by their nature, hard to uncover, hard to fix and hard to verify. Critical bugs may require tweaking of architecture and/or design which can have the significant functional impact as well, ultimately delaying the time to market. In this regard, LPT defects found late, present a significant risk to the project delivery. While challenges in a typical web software application may be less-given the wealth of test automation tools available, the hurdles involved in enterprise-grade systems involving physical devices are significant. The target environments are varied and complex – especially where use of simulators is limited. Hence the LPT need to be part of the Agile Testing carried out during the Sprints. At the outset, Agile tests which happen within the Sprints at user story level and end-to-end functionality should also cover Load and Performance tests – with the intent of seeking early feedback. It can be taken up when the minimum threshold of user stories are done. Test stubs and testing at component level can also be used. Bigger tests can be broken down into smaller pieces. These tests can be undertaken in the following Sprint. Thus LPT run for an entire Sprint duration in a suitable production-like environment, provides insight into the significant parameters on resource consumption and response times. The issues would go to product backlog for being taken up in subsequent sprints. The LPT tests in the forthcoming sprints can be a retest or running a new set of tests or repeating the tests in a different environment. This session covers these key aspects and also presents a case study where it was successfully implemented

“Behavioral Traits Of Agile Team.”

Nancy Sharma, Senior Consultant, Xebia

We talk of Agile Methodologies as the sane way of developing quality software. But is the team equipped to work in an Agile environment? By equipped, I do not mean white boards, TV screens, good microphones, backlogs etc but the other important aspect of making happy and successful Agile Teams – MINDSET. One of the most critical attribute to a team’s success yet the least talked about.
The behavioral traits are required at every role in an Agile team – Developer, QA, Scrum Master. How skillful your team may be technically, they are still bound to fail if they are not behaviorally equipped. These issues may sound trivial, but at times these are the sole reason for an agile team failing in a set up. And since we always assume these to be prevalent in an individual, we are less vocal about it.
In my presentation, I draw the attention to the various important characteristics which each one of us should posses. I would start by citing my experience in two different Agile Teams. What are the different behavioral anti patterns that can also exist in our teams. From there on I shall talk about the ways in which we can improve upon them to have an energetic, motivated and happy Agile Team!

“Learn Lean concepts through a Fun lean game”

Pankaj Kanchankar, Agile Coach, Thoughtworks

Lean especially Kanban focusses on removing Work in Progress (WIP) and help streamline the work flowing through teams / work benches. This game brings out the concept of “How more WIP is actually harmful to throughput”. It makes it very evident to participants and to audiences how having idle time for some of the team members is not always bad.

“The good and the effective Scrum Master: an agile retrospective case study”

Soraya Ploia, Julia Hipolito, NidT

This presentation aims to expose the differences between a good and an effective Scrum Master in an essential ceremony to ensure continuous improvement of the Scrum process, the agile retrospective. In order to do so, a case study of two projects developed at Nokia Technology Institute in Brazil during 2012 will be showcased. In both projects the retrospective techniques described in the book Agile Retrospectives by DERBY, Esther and LARSEN, Diana were applied. The results of these experiments imply that the role of the Scrum Master in the retrospective is crucial to ensure the continuous improvement process within the team

“Test Driven Development in Practice”

Srinivasa GV, SAP Labs

Test Driven Development is a design and an engineering practice integrated into Scrum framework. Using TDD, one can achieve clean code with a modular design. The author would take the audience through the sample problem statement and demonstrate how to implement a user story fulfilling the acceptance criteria in truly TDD way. Useful refacotoring short cuts supported by the eclipse IDE will be demonstrated to achieve highly modular and clean code.

“‘Arriving at team agreement to Sprint Ceremony ‘ – using Agile Innovation Game”

Priyank Pathak, Agile Coach and Consultant, Valtech

In this session participants will learn how to derive a business case for a product using simple method aka agile game. Agile innovation games are one of the most effective way to solve a business problem or derive a solution. (For detail refer: http://www.innovationgames.com)

Scrum Accomplished:

“The Agile Mindset – the key for lasting and successful Agile implementations”