Twin Cities Software Symposium

October 2 - 4, 2009 - Minneapolis, MN


Hilton Minneapolis/Bloomington Hotel
3900 American Boulevard West
Bloomington, MN   55437
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NOTE: You are viewing details about a past event. We will be back in MinneapolisOctober 4 - 5, 2013.
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Taking Agile From Tactics to Strategy

Teams adopting agile should begin at a tactical level, but they shouldn't end there. The Agile Manifesto operates at many different levels. Learn to apply the principles of agile at a strategic level. Otherwise you can have a great agile ground game and still lose.

Many programming teams now embrace agile at the tactical level, which is the right place to begin. Applying the ideas in the Agile Manifesto, good teams embrace practices like

  • story point estimation
  • burndown tracking
  • technical expertise
  • behavior-driven development
  • daily standups
  • pair programming
  • continuous integration
  • spiking
  • refactoring
  • customer always available
  • well-understood roles

The Agile Manifesto can be applied at a strategic level, too. However, the tensions are different. Feedback cycles are longer, objectives and results are less clear, and roles and relationships are unknown or changing. In this talk you will learn how to apply agile at the strategic realm, using practices like:

  • measure the immeasurable
  • pair everything
  • choose meaningful standards
  • build for tomorrow (but not next year)
  • retrospect well
  • spot the trends
  • use the right medium
  • want to succeed (not as obvious as it sounds!)

With the right practices in place, agility can help you choose objectives, as well as attain them.


About Stuart Halloway

Stuart Halloway is the CEO of Relevance, Inc. (www.thinkrelevance.com). With co-founder Justin Gehtland, Stuart helps companies adopt agile, as well as innovative technologies such as Clojure and Ruby on Rails. Stuart is the author of Programming Clojure, Rails for Java Developers, and Component Development for the Java Platform. Prior to founding Relevance, Stuart was the Chief Architect at Near-Time, and the Chief Technical Officer at DevelopMentor.

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