David Hussman

Presentations

What Stops You From Delivering? : Flow and the Theory of Constraints

What stops you from delivering to your customers and what truly prevents incremental learning in your project community? How much of it lies in coding issues? Do you even need to write code to learn where to go or how to get there?

For many companies, being agile means producing working code from an iteration. While working code is a measure of progress, and provides a tool to validate success, it is not always your best investment. Your best investment lies in combining 1) what helps you learn about your product and your market and 2) what you need to do to deliver it, and what is constraining either of these.

Using ideas taken from successful agilists, Theory of Constraints and the Lean Start up Community, this session will challenge you to think about what truly stops you from producing what is valuable when.

Will we use techniques that examine delivery and development constraints that start at product ideation and end with real user feedback? Along the way, we will discuss how agile methods can help and hurt your ability to build the do the right thing at the right time.

Products and People over Process and Dogma

The time has come to shift our focus away from process to products and people. 10 years into the agile movement, the fresh, lightweight process once created are gaining weight and often calcifying to a dangerous degree. Where meaningful and lasting agility thrives, agile practices are powerful tools but not the focus of daily discussion.

Real value flows as development agility augments design thinking to continually discover your product context: users, use and market. From design thinking to lean start-ups to the value of simple checklists, this talk will challenge you to stop focusing on improving your process and start focusing on improving your product. Come ready to think, question and rethink your use of agile practices.

Tuning Your Agility

If you consider yourself an experienced agile practitioner and you’re looking to improve your skills, this session is for you. We will cover tools for evaluating your team’s agility and the use of various agile practices. We will examine your agility from four perspectives: growing community, planning products, incremental delivery of value, and the deeper challenges of continuous improvement.

Stop in and learn how to get more done with your existing processes and learn new techniques and tools which draw from the core agile tenets, the source of on-going success and ever-increasing agility.

Problems with “The Agile”

In the late 90s, various groups of seasoned developers grew tired of working hard and failing harder.XP showed its value fast and its popularity grew faster than its creators could imagine. Today, Agile is often a thing. I cringe each someone asks for help getting "The Agile". Agile (big A agile) is now certified, sold, and often abused.

In many companies, agility is dying under the growing weight of Agile. In many situations, developers are back in the back seat as people focus on “doing Scrum” instead of “building the right thing, the right way”.

This session is for developers looking to bring sanity, agility and success to places where big A Agile has become a calcified and codified process.

WHAT'S A DEVELOPER TO DO?

So where are you in this mix? Are you an old school XPer, living out a life of quiet desperation? Are you a passionate rebel, scarred from pushing and challenging the sluggish ceremonies that surround you? Or, are you new to the programming world and this entire thread seems like the crazy rants of an frustrated old man?

So what can the working dude(tte) can do to foster real agility?" Bring your complaints, your frustrations, and your questions so we can discuss ways to use agile methods to raise levels of sanity and scientific thinking without being relegated to the land of “oh, its just those programmers complaining again”.

Building Better Backlogs

If your product backlog is a glorified todo list, you are not alone. Valuable deliveries start with meaningful product planning but many teams are working off lists of tasks which when assembled do not product the right product. This session reviews common challenges with product backlogs and user stories and provides tools and examples for producing better backlogs.

You will learn and try practices like collaborative chartering, pragmatic personas, and story mapping. Chartering focuses meaningful discussions around the core values of the product, and personas launch rich discussions about your target market and their needs, including “who’s buying and why.” Using the charter and personas, you we will create story maps that visualize user experiences, expose cross team connections (and dependencies) and organize user stories in a way that feeds product planning.