Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.

Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.

Imagine you want to use agile methods and you’re looking for ideas from introduction to iteration, this is the path we will take. We start by will examining ideas for selecting which practices will improve your existing strengths and address your existing issues. From there, we will walk through growing product and customer knowledge, creating a collaborative work area and two levels of planning: planning to discover and planning to deliver.

While actors and use cases often left users behind, personas and story maps bring the users to life and help mine real value. This session will teach you how to craft personas and use them to drive value into your development stream. The tools presented will help you better understand your buyers and users and build strong product backlogs and product road maps.

The session starts with an overview of what personas are and why people use them. From there, we will start from the beginning: who do you use to pattern your personas and who has the best skills to create them. Once we have created a few personas, we will explore how they can be used to craft story maps, create acceptance tests and help keep the user's experience, and their needs in the minds of the development community.

Being agile does not mean living life one iteration at a time. Agile projects without a long view can run into the common design problems of the past. Planning iteration by iteration is often foolish and feeds the myth that agile projects do not think beyond a few weeks. Successful agile projects plan within iterations and across iterations. The later planning is called release planning and it is the forum where agility first engages architecture and other cross cutting concerns.

Architects who think that agile projects evolve code one test at a time are only partially correct. Agile projects review and evolve architecture with unit tests, acceptance tests, architectural spikes, and continuous review of the system's ability to adapt and respond.

There is a home for architects and architecture on agile projects, and other traditional roles, but the there are some new variations. This session will talk about the relationship of agile methods and architecture and design and how they can work together to make stronger products and systems. The session will draw on information and anecdotes will come from projects of all sizes within companies of all sizes, including some large and complex systems.

People ask me all the time, "How do you get people to buy in the use of agile methods?" While this is easier than it once was, there are still many challenges, and agile snake oil sales are on the rise. If you are looking to sell agility or deeper your agile investment (or your sales force), this session will provide you with tools that will help you frame your sell points, select your sales tools and communicate the value (of a practice) over the mechanics.

This session will start out showing how agility sells (or does not) and where the sales have added value or simply added noise. From there, we will talk about the value of various practices as we re-frame them into valuable items which sell. Lastly, we will finish up talking about how to sell each of these to the various buyers within organizations: managers, directors, tech leads, developers, business partners and more.

Agility comes in many forms. While you may start out using XP or Scrum, long term success will mean finding a groove which fits your company. This session provides a path for adopting or adapting agility which draws on the strength of the successful practices being used.

If you are wondering how successful communities find a collaborative groove, this session has many answers and ideas for those interested in producing successful agile communities. Working in pairs and as a large group, you will take a stab at defining how you might produce, learning about your individual strengths and challenges. Everyone will leave with some collection of skills proven as useful guiding newly forming project communities as well as long running projects and their extended communities.

Whether it was intentional or not, the agile community has been borrowing successful ideas from the lean manufacturing for years. Lean practices, like finding and removing wasteful work, can be applied without needing special permission or certification. Ideas like kanban (visual planning aids) and kaizen (continuous learning) are simple, helpful tools that are easily applied and produce great results.

This session will discuss how lean thinking has influenced agile methods and how you can use simple lean ideas to produce better software more often. We will not get stuck on wasteful discussions about "what is Scrum?" or "what is agile?" Instead we will talk about (and try - time permitting) a collection of useful lean practices and tools.