AGILE Australia 2009

TOPICS

Test driven development games

» Philip Abernathy | Director, WeYoda

Come and play in teams and discover through Scrum Ball and the Balloon Games all about learning in a test driven development environment!

Agile governance: governing and scaling for success!

» Philip Abernathy | Director, WeYoda

The talk will show how to setup Agile projects and govern them for success within a large organisation. How do you scale Agile projects to tackle large multi-million dollar projects, legacy mainframe environments and production support and maintenance? Philip Abernathy will also explore how the risks and pitfalls of going Agile at the project level but not at the governance level is a recipe for failure. He'll discuss the key question: how can we apply Agile and Lean techniques to the governance level in an organisation to deliver increased productivity and ROI?

Taking the leap of faith

» Mike Allen | Development Manager, Racing and Wagering WA

Replacing your core systems is a huge task, but doing it with a whole new methodology - well that's scary! Mike Allen from WA Racing and Wagering believes overcoming organisation resistance is one thing but getting your IT team on board is an entirely different challenge! Through this presentation Mike will share what it takes to get your IT team to take a leap of faith and embrace an entirely new way of working.

Panel: Distributed Agile

Lean thinking for lean times - why kanban is tTrendy in Agile software development

» Alan Beacham | Managing Director, KM&T Australasia
» Jason Yip | Lead Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Kanban is a growing trend in how Agile workflow is managed. It has triggered much controversy by challenging many concepts assumed to be fundamental to an Agile approach. This presentation will describe what Agile Kanban is, how it compares to conventional Agile, and how it compares to the kanban concept in traditional Lean. Is Kanban the future of Agile? Does Kanban extend the applicability of Agile? Does Kanban reflect the actuality or completeness of Lean thinking?

Build me the money, honey!

» Julian Boot | Majitek
» Marina Chiovetti | UCD Consultant & Agile Coach, ThoughtWorks

Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the norm for helping IT departments deliver great software… but what about the business? What about the product manager? What about the software itself? What can we do to ensure that we build the RIGHT software with the RIGHT features… the features that will make us the MONEY!

This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure they are building the MONEY (honey.)

Learning outcomes
* Understand how to focus your projects on helping solve your customers problems
* Know what Business Value Metrics are and how to calculate them and use them to drive product development and feature selection
* Use tools like the Project Pitch and Project Snapshot to help with scope management and story prioritization on a project
* Understand how Customer-Focused thinking can help steering committees and stakeholders make crucial decisions around scope and feature selection while driving continuous innovation

The inter-sprint break

» Simon Bristow | Project Manager, Aconex

Our presentation focuses on the topic of the inter-sprint break - a short period between the end of one scrum sprint and the beginning of the next. We show how taking some time out helps the teams be more productive, focused and motivated within the sprint, whilst still giving us the ability to address technical debt and concentrate on engineering quality, process and innovation outside the sprint. We showcase some of our inter-sprint activities such as Hackathon, QA Deathmatch, Testivus and Howhardi Gras.

Beyond the green fields of Agile: whole of life reporting and dealing with commercial off the shelf implementations

» David Broeren | Business Architect, NAB Wholesale

This presentation will provide a pragmatic, experience-based guide to establishing, running, controlling and delivering an Agile program within a traditional governance structure and for a package implementation. In attending this presentation you will be introduced to the following:

Understanding how to influence the traditional mindset of Project Control Boards and Investment Boards
Relating Agile projects back to Business Case commitments (i.e. schedule, cost and scope)
Working beyond the Agile delivery team, a framework to appreciating the levels of communication required for successful Agile delivery transition
Refining process and people to adapt for managing a Commercial Off the Shelf implementation

Agile mistakes and how to avoid them

» Rowan Bunning | Agility Consultant and Trainer, Software WithStyle

This session allows you to learn from the experiences of an experienced agile practitioner by presenting several common Agile mistakes as seen on several agile projects. It includes description of the "smells" that may indicate such problems and learnings that may help you to avoid or deal with similar problems on your Agile projects.

Mistakes discussed include the following:
* Planning paralysis. We do Agile but… we're still not confident about our plan after two days of iteration planning!
* The vicious cycle of overcommitment. We do Agile but… we don't have time for bug fixing or improvement because we have too many new features to build!
* Misaligned sashimi slicing. We do Agile but… it takes several iterations before the customer sees any real business value!
* Command & control / micro-management. We do Agile but… our manager keeps suggesting tasks to team members!
* Team self-dis-organisation. We do Agile but… we don't have a co-ordinated way of finishing things off without significant delays!
* Individual heroics. We do Agile but… individuals hoard work and boast about it!
* Lack of risk management. We do Agile but… we're concerned about certain things and nothing is being done about them!
* Stalled improvement. We do Agile but… we're still got the same issues that we had a few iterations ago!
* Accumulating debt. We do Agile but… we don't have a clear picture of what we're going to have to do to make what we have (partially) done releasable!

From little things, big things grow

» Vaughan Coots | Front-End Systems Manager, Swann Insurance

After two failed attempts using a waterfall approach, Swann revolutionised their business with the delivery of a front end sales system that currently provides over 95% of annual sales. With changing markets and strategic direction in mind, Vaughan and his team embarked on a new programme of projects in early 2008. Over the last 18 months, the output of this programme has provided Swann with the ability to break into numerous new channels, a rare feat in the traditional insurance industry. In addition, his team has broken away from a traditional Java technology stack and have utilised Ruby on Rails as their technology for new web developments, in order to enhance time to market. Vaughan's presentation will stress the importance of breaking things into small chunks, getting some runs on the board and building on success.

Bringing IT back from the brink

» Nigel Dalton | General Manager, IT, Lonely Planet

When Nigel Dalton joined Lonely Planet in April 2007, the IT department was not the most loved! A great deal of money, angst and disappointment over outcomes ensured the IT department was not aligned to the business - key IT functions had been largely outsourced. Shortly afterwards, the hammer fell when the business was sold to BBC Worldwide in the UK. Since the sale, Lonely Planet has used Agile to transform their organisation. This presentation will outline diverse experiences and lessons learnt from applying Agile, including SAP development, GIS implementation, new guidebook product development, and the delivery of an entirely new website in only nine months. Nigel will explain how Lonely Planet achieved its transformation into an Agile organisation and how Lonely Planet has applied a mixture of business+processes+people management to deliver the best outcome, and through delivery has brought the IT department back from the brink.

Panel: The journey towards the Agile enterprise

» Beverley Head | Freelance journalist (Moderator)
» Nigel Dalton | General Manager, IT, Lonely Planet
» Katrina Rowett | Executive Manager, Business Technology, Suncorp
» John Sullivan | General Manager, Online Directory and Search, Sensis

Delivering Agile

» Justin Freitag | Solution Architect, Australia Post

This presentation will explore the challenges facing agile adoption within large organisations drawing on perspectives across business and IT. Whilst agile practices are familiar and popular within the development community, agile enthusiasts are often unprepared for the agile shock they face given an organisations deeply entrenched traditional roles and processes. As such, addressing adoption challenges and overcoming resistance to change within such organisations requires significant effort and should not be underestimated.

For agile to be embraced within an organisation it needs to form a comprehensive, well organised and suitable framework that is properly understood and can be applied to the organisations entire project life cycle. Paramount to this is an agile alignment effort that seeks to map traditional roles and processes against agile practices, focussing on the commonality, gaps and conflicts - harmonising where appropriate and isolating where necessary.

The aim of this presentation is to guide you through the challenges inherent in agile adoption and in doing so, help realise the tremendous value of agile within your enterprise.

Panel: Waterfall is from Mars, Agile is from Venus

» Peter Whitfield | University of Sydney (Moderator)
» Justin Freitag | Solution Architect, Australia Post
» Todd Porter | Smart Service Queensland
» Pritida Vinod | Senior IT stream lead, Westpac

What's it take to make an Agile transition?

» Shane Hastie | Chief Knowledge Engineer, Software Education

"Agile is a culture, not a methodology"

This talk examines the organisational, cultural and individual changes needed for a business to successfully embrace Agile methods.

A number of organisations have implemented Agile techniques on pilot projects or in small groups to great success, and then stumbled when trying to scale to a larger company-wide rollout. This has led to the myth that Agile only works well in small companies or in isolated groups within larger organisations.

The reality is that Agile can be and has been successfully rolled out across large companies, but it requires a commitment to organisational cultural change - successful Agile transformation goes beyond implementing the practices (which are very important, but not enough), it needs executive support, strong champions, and a willingness to embrace the values and principles that underlie the Agile manifesto.

Shane relates his experiences assisting a number of organisations in their Agile journey and provides some key pointers and practical advice which will help create an environment that enables Agile success.

7 habits of highly effective Agile developers

» Steve Hayes | Founder, Cogent Consulting

While it's well-recognised that all software development relies on technical excellence, less attention is paid to how moving to agile development changes the balance between technical skills, personal discipline and social skills. People who may be accustomed to working in relative isolation under directive management may struggle when they move to the collaborative, self-directed workspace that lets agile projects flourish. Steve will step through Stephen Covey's "Seven Habits of Highly Effective People", applying them particularly to the agile context. Steve will also bring in practices, techniques and perspectives from other areas of psychological and social research that will help people work more effectively in an agile team.

Agile for business as usual!

» Lachlan Heasman | Consultant, ThoughtWorks
» Jody Podbury | Team Leader Risk and Advice Solutions Delivery, Suncorp

Join us on our journey adopting Agile in BAU! We'll tell you about what we tried, what failed, what we tried instead, and its current evolution. It's the story of a transition from a directed and managed support group to a self-leading, self-governing and self-correcting team. Sharing the messages from our team, our customers and our management, we will focus on people, process, experience and outcomes.

Understanding just-in-time requirements to support lean software development

» Martin Kearns | Agile Practice Lead, Renewtek

Martin's session will use a workshop framework to help attendees reach an understanding of just-in-time requirements to support lean software development. Groups in the workshop will create a vision statement to a business need. Then we will follow several processes: after breaking the statement into an objective set and understanding the concept, we can then start creating a product feature break down at a high level (Epic). The solution concept will consider: relatively weight business value, penalty and size of effort. Attendees will develop several skills, such as: learning how to split an Epic into manageable pieces (creation of stories); creating a release plan and iteration plan; how to support the team with constructing the solution (support the team and definition of acceptance criteria).

Panel: Agile building blocks

» Richard Thomas | IT Course Coordinator, Faculty of Science and Technology, Queensland University of Technology (Moderator)
» Mark Mansour | Founder, Agile Bench
» Harry McKenzie | Chief Information Officer, Pickles Auctions
» John Townsend | CIO, National Offshore Petroleum Safety Authority (NOPSA)

Agile team based games

» Kane Mar | Certified Scrum Trainer, Scrumology

Join Kane for games including: "My friend, my enemy", "The Ball point game", and perhaps the "I don't see it" word game. In addition to playing the games, Kane will explain the purpose of each exercise and how it relates to team building.

Better software faster!

» Michael Milewski | Technical Lead, Realestate.com.au

In the beginning, Realestate.com.au ran a pilot project to evaluate switching project delivery methodology from waterfall to agile. Michael plans to share his agile adoption learnings covering Realestate.com.au's experiences in adopting agile techniques, including: interactions with coaches; interacting with non-agile teams; and how this assisted in bringing on a new development platform (ruby on rails), and integrating it into the legacy perl platform of one of Australia's largest web sites. Michael will share his story of the highs and lows of initial adoption of agile in a large Australian web company. This agile journey has only begun, but it has already achieved faster delivery, an achievement accompanied by less risk. Michael's presentation aims to show how Realestate.com.au started the journey, their initial steps and plans to succeed in reaching the end successfully and fruitfully.

After the consultants leave

» Adam Mostyn | IT Stream Lead, BT Financial

This presentation will cover the BT agile journey from 2006 to present day and beyond. The focus will be on the journey of change that BT is currently on, looking at what happened once the consultants left and we were left to our own devices. BT is currently trying to re-ignite the agile practices: this presentation will also explore what we are doing and why, and how it is starting to catch on again.

Being agile at the Google scale

» Dhanji R. Prasanna | Software Engineer, Google

Agile methods offer compelling alternatives to traditional, sluggish software development, and are particularly effective in dealing with quickly changing requirements, designs and system constraints. Nimble, small, versatile teams are more readily adaptable and accountable in the modern technology world. However, a little explored aspect of this is its scale--how do you translate the successes of small teams to vast applications with scores of developers and millions of users?

This session explores some ways in which we solve the developer scalability problem at Google: using agile software engineering principles such as type safety, low footprint, code testability and modular design.

This session will have a technical focus and will briefly touch on open source technologies such as Guice, Google Web Toolkit and how they are used internally in massive applications like Google Wave and Adwords.

Agile software development in a regulated environment

» Victor Rodruigues | Cochlear
» Riaan Rottier | Cochlear

Developing software in a medical device company imposes a number of challenges on any methodology. There is a high level of dependency on hardware systems, long validation cycles and a strict regulatory environment which requires adherence to international standards and a high level of traceability. At Cochlear Limited (the largest cochlear implant manufacturer) we have been using Agile software methodologies for just over three years. During this session we will explain how we mapped our processed to industry standards for software development in medical devices. We will also focus on some areas of particular importance to software development in medical devices. We will share our experience in these areas with practical examples.

Achieving project success with Agile

» Craig Smith | Software Engineer, Suncorp

There are a number of key practices and concepts that can help agile teams achieve project success, whether they be new or seasoned in the agile methodologies. In this talk, we will uncover some of these practices by loosely grouping them under the three T's: Technique, Tooling & Team and use real-world examples from projects to demonstrate why they were successful and how they assisted in delivering a quality outcome.

Technique is where we will discuss a number of the agile practices, and lessons learnt on how to make them work effectively. Examples include how to perform effective standups, kickoffs and retrospectives, understanding the definition of done, effective iteration lengths and how to tackle design. We will also discuss approaches to introducing agile into your teams or organisations.

Tooling allows us to consider when a team should consider tools and technology to assist, and what types of tools make a team effective across the entire development and project lifecycle.

Team is about understanding your most important assets, why co-location is important, how to influence and attract quality staff and why the agile values are important to creating an empowered team.

Increasing business value through simplicity (lean and Agile)

» Jeff Smith | Group Executive Business Technology, Suncorp

In the current world of economic uncertainty and ever increasing technological advances, competitive advantage is being driven by who can deliver business value faster. Simplicity is hard, but an eco system of simplicity is key to accelerating throughput and motivating people to deliver quality solutions that increase the realisation of business value faster. Jeff Smith shares the experience of Suncorp's journey of infusing simplicity into the DnA of Business Technology through the introduction of Agile and Lean principles and methodologies.

People-driven Agile transformation

» John Sullivan | General Manager, Online Directory and Search, Sensis

John Sullivan will take us through his Agile journey at Sensis, which he will stress is all about People. He will share his perspectives on the people, personalities, relationships and communications necessary to drive an Agile transformation. How do you recruit for an Agile transformation? What are some of the issues around cultural change and fit? And most importantly, how do you sell change to people in an organisation who are used to another way of doing things?

12 Agile adoption failure modes

» Jean Tabaka | Certified ScrumMaster Trainer & Agile Fellow

Jean Tabaka, a methodologist and trainer specializing in Agile and collaborative software development environments will share her observations on what are the real problems with adopting an Agile approach?

Lean and Agile in the large - principles, practices and experiences for large scale software development

» Dave Thomas | Founder and Chairman, Bedarra Research Labs

Lean and Agile practices have made a major positive impact on productivity and quality of work for individual development teams. In this talk we focus on the challenges and practices needed for large organizations. Large scale software is typically built and maintained by hundreds or thousands of geographically distributed developers, uses multiple technologies and tool chains, often building a family of products using one or more platforms. Large scale software must respond to the business need to commit to delivery functionality and dates months ahead. Throughout the talk Dave will call on examples from large global organizations that have made the transition to Lean and Agile Development.

Dave will introduce new practices in Envisioning, Definition, Planning and End Game which compliment the Agile practices used for Development. These practices allow business to gain agility while addressing their needs for on time delivery and governance. He will discuss how to integrate best practices Lean Product Engineering while respecting and encouraging the wide adoption of agile practices.

The practices provide proven practical techniques for large scale Agile challenges such as Voice of The Customer: Tangible Requirements and Acceptance Testing; Role of Architecture, Models and Components, Management of Features vs. Components: Planning, Estimating and Resource Allocation: Dependency Management and Release Management; Scrum of Scrums and Communities of Practice, and Enterprise Development Dashboards and CMM Compliance. We describe the necessary organization structures, roles, artifacts and tooling needed to streamline large scale software construction.

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