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.

If you are truly working to get value from agile methods, and you have been doing it for some time, you probably have some questions which go beyond "my first agile project". If you are looking for a place to get answers or hear where and how others are struggling, come to this session ready to ask your tough questions. I have coached many communities (of all shapes and sizes) adopt, adapt, and evolve agility beyond the first project or the first few months, and I am sure there will be no shortage of examples and experiences for you questions. Also, I am sure you will learn from others in the audience as well.

Going beyond big A Agile, we will start with some the common questions I see people facing who have long running or large scale agile projects. From there, we will prioritize the questions from the audience and take them one at a time. Any questions which go unanswered will be fodder for the agile BOF (if it follows the session).

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.

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.