Wendy Jacobs, JD, is a Product Management Leader, Coach, Mentor and Trainer. She has over 25 years of product development experience, specifically in Product Management. When not working or presenting on Product Management topics, Wendy spends her time with her two doodle pups Lily and Murphy or at Cleveland Guardians baseball games.
Author Archives: Bart Murphy
Dan Rice
Dan Rice is an Enterprise Agile Advisor and process improvement expert with CA Technologies. He works as a trusted advisor to architect agile solutions that solve the challenges organizations are facing and to help them realize revenue from their investments and deliver business value sooner. He has consulted with some of the largest organizations in the world to apply effective enterprise agile processes to ensure they realize the full value of their investment in agile. Dan has stood up, coached and helped many teams produce better and faster results. He has worked and consulted with both public and private companies in several industries including Software, Aviation, Telecommunications, Finance, Insurance, and Retail.
VIDEO: Jason Womack — Get Momentum: Five Questions to Ask to Get Started
VIDEO: Doc Norton — Building Blocks of a Knowledge Work Culture
VIDEO: Johanna Rothman — Becoming an Agile Leader Regardless of Your Role
VIDEO: Ryan Ripley — The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper
VIDEO: Guru Vasudeva — Agile & Lean: A Marriage to Maximize the Value of IT
VIDEO: Srini Koushik — Why IT Doesn’t Matter In Today’s Exponential Organization
VIDEO: Gil Broza — Being Agile: Having the Mind-set that Delivers
VIDEO: Jon Stahl — Leading Lean
VIDEO: Dave West — Scrum Turns 21: What is Next for Scrum for the Next 20 Years
VIDEO: Kevin Fisher — DevOps: Company Culture Can Make or Break DevOps Success
VIDEO: Christopher Avery — The Responsibility Process
VIDEO: Ellen Gottesdiener — Innovate and Invigorate Your Agile Discovery Practices
2016 Sessions
Ellen Gottesdiener — Innovate and Invigorate Your Agile Discovery Practices Video
Kevin Fisher — DevOps: Company Culture Can Make or Break DevOps Success Video
Dave West — Scrum Turns 21: What is Next for Scrum for the Next 20 Years Video
Jon Stahl — Leading Lean Video
Gil Broza — Being Agile: Having the Mind-set that Delivers Video
Srini Koushik — Why IT Doesn’t Matter In Today’s Exponential Organization Video
Guru Vasudeva — Agile & Lean: A Marriage to Maximize the Value of IT Video
Ryan Ripley — The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper Video
Johanna Rothman — Becoming an Agile Leader Regardless of Your Role Video
Doc Norton — Building Blocks of a Knowledge Work Culture Video
Jason Womack — Get Momentum: Five Questions to Ask to Get Started Video
Christopher Avery — The Responsibility Process
Gary Bernhardt — Reproducibility
Jeremy Willets — Introspection: The Key to Making Your Environment Conducive to Continuous Learning
Justin Browder & Bryan Schoeff — Perfect Strangers: How Project Managers and Developers Relate and Succeed
Dan Greenleaf, Andrea Boddeker, Scott Taylor & Brett Buchanan — Experiences of Portfolio Planning in a Lean Agile Environment
Rick Guba — Lean 101
Nick Martin & Adam Essenmacher — DevOps – The Promise of Agility, Delivered
Joe Beale — Introducing QA Into an Agile Environment
Ryan Cromwell & Dewayne Lane — Web Experience Workshop
Jeff Ivany, Jonathon Baugh & Lauren Cavileer — Digital Experience Workshop: Design Thinking, Lean UX, & Agile Delivery
Kimberly Clavin & Jonathan Stevens — Hands On With Techno-Fashion and Wearables/Women in Technology
Scott Preston — How To Build a Robotic Exoskeleton, aka Iron Man Suit
Dan Rice — Agile Portfolio Management – Build the right things
Tina Saunders — Navigating the People Side of Change on an Agile Project
Matt Barcomb — Using Flow-based Road Mapping & Option Framing
Steven Davidson, Ben Thorp, Zahid Hossain & Steve Carmichael — Agile Architecture
Dustin Potts – Agile Transformations – the Good, the Bad and the Ugly!
Eric Downey — Protocol Oriented Programming
Mike Doel — How Software Learns
Justin Searls & Todd Kaufman — TDD and Javascript workshop
Michael Mah — Beyond Productivity and Toward Market Dominance. What’s Next for Agile as the Great Disrupter
Jennifer Bentley, Connie Kobal & Larry Goldsmith — Visual Requirements Elicitation
Greg Dartt & Wendy Jacobs — Introducing Agile in a Non-Software World
Dante Vilardi — Crash Your Own Party: Functional Managers in the Next Wave of Agile Transformation
Alex Crabtree, Julie Dorazio, Christian Mavriplis, Andrew Lehman & Michael Vlasz — Business Intelligence Agility: Delivering Resilient Information Management Iteratively
Ben Blanquera, Alan Gilbert, Adam Torres, Matt Grover, Tim Heller & Zac Dziczkowski — World class engineering – a Startup Mentality to Speed, Scalability, and Solutions
Chris Nelson — Low Ceremony Microservices with Elixir
Dustin Williams — Applying the Open-Closed Principle: Never Write an IF Statement Again
Joseph Ours — How to Undermine Agile Transformations
Jeff Blankenburg — Fear
Doug Morgan & Dave Speck — Finding the Sweet Spot, the Art of Writing Scenarios
Jennifer Picolo & Benji Michalek –You are NOT Your User
Kimberly Clavin, Jill Yavorsky, Joy Kenyon, Katie Miller & Anna Weber — Women in Technology
Rob Tarr — Breaking up with Your Build Tools
Amitai Schlair — Shoestring Agility in a Velcro Organization
Jim Holmes — “OMG! This Codebase Sucks!” Paying Down Technical Debt While Continuing to Deliver Value
Keith Wedinger — Effective software documentation in an Agile environment
Amber Conville — Code Retreat
Brooks Myers & Jake Kuttothara — Mobile 3D Scanning: The Future of Digital Imaging
Michael Cao – How 3D Printing Actually Works
David Bernstein
David Scott Bernstein is the author of the book Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. It’s an insider’s view of the software industry drawn from his decades of hands-on experience as a software developer, trainer, and consultant to some of the biggest players in the business. David’s continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 8,000 professional developers since 1990 at hundreds of companies around the world including Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft. His consulting firm, To Be Agile (http://ToBeAgile.com), helps developers adopt Extreme Programming practices such as test-first development, pair programming, and refactoring.
Matt Barcomb
Matt Barcomb has over 18 years of experience as a product development leader who takes a pragmatic, systems approach to change. He partners with organizations to help leadership teams develop & deploy strategy, optimize product management & development, and evolve traditional HR functions into modern talent development practices.
Matt enjoys challenging mental models, simplifying the seemingly complex, and uncovering the “why” behind the “what”. He shares his experiences and ideas at www.odbox.co or on twitter as @mattbarcomb
Alex Crabtree
Ryan Cromwell
Ryan Cromwell is the Technical Director at Sparkbox with nearly 15 years of experience delivering solutions ranging from real-time customer loyalty systems and elegant user experiences to streamlined statistical process control software. Having worked with passionate, high-performing teams, Ryan ventured into the world of Scrum.org training and Agile coaching to replicate those amazing experiences. Ryan’s passion remains delivering software others enjoy using. He is co-founder of Dayton Clean Coders, the Dayton Elixir virtual Meetup, co-organizer of Southwest Ohio GiveCamp, and all around software community ally. You can find Ryan at [http://cromwellhaus.com] and on Twitter as @cromwellryan.
Gregory Dartt
Greg Dartt is an Agile Coach at American Electric Power where he works in the Information Technology Program Management Office (PMO). Greg currently focuses on coaching teams in the art of product delivery through Agile. He holds degrees in Electro-Mechanical Engineering and Computer Science, and holds certifications as a Project Management Professional (PMP), Professional Scrum Expert (PSE), and Professional Scrum Product Owner (PSPO I).
Mike Doel
Mike is Managing Director at Mutually Human with twenty-five years experience in the industry. He obtained a BS in Computer Science and an MBA from Ohio State University as well as an MS in Computer Science from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He began his career in R&D facilities with GE and Bellcore. From there, he spent 11 years at CompuServe and AOL where he had the opportunity to participate in building out the infrastructure that supported the explosive growth of the Internet in the mid-to-late 90s. At AOL, he led teams both small and large whose missions included development of ultra-high volume web applications, broadband provisioning, registration & billing, and operations/monitoring tools. After leaving AOL in 2007, Mike co-founded a startup dedicated to timeshare rentals. In the last five years, Mike has worked in consulting with Edgecase, Neo, and now Mutually Human.
Eric Downey
I am an experienced iOS developer for the past 6 years. My specialty in iOS and Swift has allowed me to author a book that will be released later this year. Additionally, I am skilled in Javascript, Java, Ruby, and Python for 8 years. As the coordinator for ICC’s Tech Sig and as ICC’s Swift Expert, I constantly apprise myself on the latest in the information technology field. As a senior iOS developer and as a certified Scrum Master, I apply Agile methodologies to keep projects running smoothly.
Zak Dziczkowski
Zak is the co-founder and CEO of Garageio, a internet-enabled garage door opener which brings the internet-of-things to the garage. Garageio works with many major home automation systems, including Amazon Alexa. Zak is a electrical and computer engineer with over 12 years of hardware and software development experience. He has brought a number of high-tech products to market, and lives to create new technology. He is now working on a new platform for Garageio which aims to grow their offering to more B2B applications.
Alan Gilbert
Alan joined CoverMyMeds in 2012 as VP of Engineering, responsible for product development, support, and management. His team has grown from a handful of engineers to over 100 in less than four years. Still an engineer at heart, he has been developing and commercializing medical devices and software for over 25 years, holding positions at IBM, DuPont, Codonics, and CoverMyMeds. He has served on or led teams that brought dozens of medical products to market in over 100 countries and holds five patents. Alan also volunteers at community tech events and has served on tech-transfer committees at CWRU and OSU.
Larry Goldsmith
Larry is a Requirements Consultant with Nationwide. He holds a Project Management Professional (PMP) certification and has worked as a project manager or analyst for over 20 years. He has given presentations for many companies in Ohio and provided training classes in facilitation and communication skills. In 2015, he won the Toastmaster District 40 Humorous speaker contest.
Matt Grover
Matt Grover comes to Clarivoy with more than 20 years experience focused on creating digital solutions through strategic use of technology. As Chief Technology Officer, Matt stands at the intersection of our technical vision and the needs and expectations of our clients. A true visionary activator, Matt has the unique ability to bridge the gap between what is and what could be.
Before joining Clarivoy, Matt served as Executive Director of Technology for Resource/Ammirati. In that role, Matt guided clients through strategic technology roadmaps while also championing the company’s core technology vision and collaboration process, leading teams to develop complex and innovative digital experiences for dozens of clients including HP, P&G, Kohl’s, Nestlé and Bush Brothers, to name a few.
Matt resides in Worthington, Ohio, with his wife and four children.
Connie Kobal
Connie Kobal is a Requirements Consultant with Nationwide. She has over 30 years of experience of IT leadership with a background in project management, requirements analysis and facilitation. Connie was a 2015 International Association Facilitators’ Facilitation Impact Silver recipient. She holds a Certified ScrumMaster (CSM) designation.
Frank Lamantia
Frank is a natural problem solver who believes the engineering culture plays a pivotal role in resolving the healthcare identity crisis. With a focus on high-scale web application development, Frank knows how to build a powerhouse foundation of data on the backend to create high-value, actionable intelligence on the frontend. Prior to joining CrossChx, he held roles as a senior application developer, and a technical lead in the bioinformatics sector, where he oversaw more than 60 IT professionals both on and offshore. He is a proud graduate of The Ohio State University with a degree in computer science.
Dewayne Lane
F. DeWayne Lane is a developer at Knoxville Utilities Board focusing on web technologies and integrations to provide customers and employees with the applications that help them get things done. You can find DeWayne on Twitter as @fdlane
Dustin Potts
As a Chief Development Officer at JPMorgan Chase, Dustin Potts has directed the transformation of traditional waterfall development teams to Agile, Lean, CMMI® compliant, high-performing teams. He has more than ten years of experience leading successful Agile transformations at Fortune 100 companies and more than twenty years of experience in the IT industry. He is a frequent speaker at Agile conferences and has trained many on Agile techniques such as Scrum and X
Tina Saunders
Tina is an award-winning IT Management Consultant at CapTech, where she leads and coaches organizations through successful change strategies for complex IT implementations using both Agile and Waterfall methodologies. Her professional career spans over 25 years’ experience in the commercial, non-profit, and federal government business industries. She has devoted the last ten years to providing Organizational Change Management (OCM), Strategic Communications, and Project/Program Management services for government and Fortune 500 companies. She is especially passionate about Agile OCM, and how change management can successfully adapt to a sprint-based, fast-paced working environment.
Bryan Schoeff
Bryan Schoeff is a Senior Consultant at AXIA Consulting. Since joining as the 56th employee in 2014, he has done little to help scale AXIA to nearly 70 employees (ha!). For the last 14 years, Bryan has worked on technology projects as a Software Developer and Solutions Architect focusing on web and mobile technologies in the government and utility industries. He attended The Ohio State University where he studied Computer Science & Engineering and played trombone as a member of the marching band. Bryan lives with his wife and two children in Delaware, Ohio, where he enjoys running, playing soccer, and the occasional triathlon…..and also playing World of Warcraft, drinking Mountain Dew, and burning Gantt charts.
Adam Torres
Adam Torres is a passionate entrepreneur and Columbus Technology Advocate.
Adam’s passions for entrepreneurial endeavors and the Internet led to the formation of TeamDynamix in 2002. TeamDynamix is an Enterprise Service Management, Project Collaboration, Portfolio
Management, and Resource Management application targeted at Institutions of Higher Education. As Chief Executive Officer, Adam led TeamDynamix to 7+ years of 35% growth with profit margins of seven figures. All of this achieved without any outside funding and entirely through organic growth. In 2015, Adam led the way in selling the majority interest in TeamDynamix to a private equity firm in NYC. Since the acquisition, Adam has served as CEO and Chief Product Officer.
Adam began his career with Andersen in their business consulting practice. He worked on several Internet projects with clients ranging from Victoria’s Secret to British Telecomm. While at Andersen, Adam honed his Internet application skills which helped him receive two early promotions and performance awards.
Adam graduated Summa Cum laude from Ohio University with a degree in Management Information Systems in 1998. While at Ohio University, Adam was president of the Association of Collegiate Entrepreneurs, involved with the International Business Society, The Association of Information Technology Professionals, and served on the College of Business board of Presidents. Adam received the MIS Student of year award in addition to scholarships and distinctions while at Ohio University. Adam spent his Junior year studying international business in London before returning to Ohio University in the Fall of 1997 for a year of independent study focused at the newly emerging Internet application market.
Adam currently resides in the Victorian Village neighborhood of Columbus, OH with his wife and two children.
Guruprasad Vasudeva
Guru Vasudeva is Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer (CIO) of Application & Data Services at Nationwide, a financial services and insurance company with more than $25 billion in revenue for 2014.In this role, Guru manages a shared services organization that provides project management, application development, data & analytics, and IT help desk services for the enterprise. He is also responsible for the Lean and Agile transformation of application development and maintenance functions across Nationwide.
Prior to this role, Guru held several senior leadership positions at Nationwide including Enterprise Chief Technology Officer (CTO), Business Unit CIO, and Chief Architect. In these roles, Guru led several functions including IT strategy, enterprise architecture, cyber security, disaster recovery, large program management, and application development and maintenance.
Guru represents Nationwide in regional economic development activities in the Greater Columbus area such as the Columbus 2020 initiative. He is one of the architects of the Columbus Collaboratory, an entity formed by seven Fortune 500 companies headquartered in Columbus to focus on big data, cyber security, and talent development and attraction.
Guru has over 22 years of experience in operations and information technology. Before joining Nationwide, he spent six years at IBM as an executive architect focused on conceptualizing, selling, and delivering large Internet-based business solutions for insurance, retail, and government organizations. He has also worked for AT&T and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
A results oriented leader, Guru has demonstrated success in strategic planning and leading transformational initiatives, as well as running and continuously improving large-scale operations. He excels in applying process discipline and technology to deliver measurable business outcomes and realize competitive advantages.
He is co-author of the book, Patterns for e-Business – A Strategy for Reuse, which has proven effective in bridging the business and IT gap by quickly reaching IT solutions that satisfy business intent.
Guru holds a variety of awards, including the IBM Outstanding Innovation Award and the IBM Corporate Award. He earned an MBA in International Finance from the University of Cincinnati in Ohio, and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from the University of Mysore in India. Guru resides in Columbus, Ohio and is married with two children.
About Nationwide
Nationwide, a Fortune 100 company based in Columbus, Ohio, is one of the largest and strongest diversified insurance and financial services organizations in the U.S. and is rated A+ by both A.M. Best and Standard & Poor’s. The company provides a full range of insurance and financial services, including auto, commercial, homeowners and life insurance; public and private sector retirement plans, annuities and mutual funds; banking and mortgages; specialty health; pet, motorcycle, boat and farm insurance. For more information, visit www.nationwide.com.
Dante Vilardi
Dante is an enterprise agility coach with 16 years’ experience in IT and operations. He specializes in applying the Lean / Agile framework to data-driven technology programs. In both coaching and training contexts, Dante brings a product focus to Agile program delivery. He has a track record of successful Agile transformation in industries such as financial services, manufacturing, insurance and the public sector.
Keith Wedinger
Keith Wedinger is a Principal Consultant with Improving. He has over 26 years’ experience architecting, designing, developing and delivering high quality software solutions for several companies including Lexmark, Diebold, Limited Brands, Sterling Commerce and IBM. He is currently very passionate about architecting and developing software solutions that deliver exceptional ROI to his clients. He has presented at CodeMash, Columbus Code Camp, M3, StirTrek, That Conference and Code PaLOUsa. When not at work, he enjoys craft beer, dining and traveling with his beautiful wife Karen and spending time when he can with his two daughters who are currently away at college.
Dave West
‘To help people deliver software just a little bit better’
Dave West is the product owner at scrum.org. He is a frequent keynote at major industry conferences and is a widely published author of articles and research reports, along with his acclaimed book: Head First Object-Oriented Analysis and Design, that helped define new software modeling and application development processes. He led the development of the Rational Unified Process (RUP) for IBM/Rational. After IBM/Rational, West returned to consulting and managed Ivar Jacobson Consulting for North America. Then as VP, research director Forrester research where he ran the software development and delivery practice. Prior to joining Scrum.org he was Chief Product Officer at Tasktop where he was responsible for product management, engineering and architecture. As a member of the company’s executive management team was also instrumental in growing Tasktop from a services business into a VC backed product business with a team of almost 100.
Jeremy Willets
Jeremy Willets has been coaching Agile teams at Hyland, creator of OnBase, in Westlake, Ohio, for four years. In that time, he’s worked with various methods and methodologies to satisfy the needs of cross-departmental teams within a vibrant and growing organization. He’s passionate about continuous learning, which is what this newly created talk is all about!
Jason Womack
Jason W. Womack, MEd, MA is an avid practitioner who earned two Master’s degrees after studying US History and Spanish Literature as an undergraduate student at the University of California (Berkeley, Santa Barbara, San Diego campuses).
He earned his Masters Degree in Education to understand how to teach. He went back to school to earn his Master’s Degree in Psychology to find out how people most effectively learn. He applies this wealth of knowledge to corporate learning environments to help solve the day-to-day challenges of work/life balance in an era of increased personal accountability. Jason’s ability to deliver coaching and training programs in both English and Spanish make it possible to present this information to a wide range of associates – both in large group as well as one-on-one settings.
As an executive coach, Jason provides practical methods to maximize tools, systems and processes to achieve quality work/life balance. He has worked with leaders and executives for over 14 years in the business and education sectors. His focus is on creating ideas that matter and implementing solutions that are valuable to the organization and the individuals in those organizations.
Jason succeeds in the health and wellness areas of his life. While traveling worldwide, he trains and competes regularly as an age-group triathlete. Since 2003, he has completed four 1/2 Ironman distance races, several half-marathons and several smaller triathlons around the United States. Jason consistently places in the top 10% of his age group in both 5K and 10K races. In July, 2010 he earned first place in his age group at the Capital City Classic 10K run in Raleigh, NC. His Personal Record for the ½ marathon distance race is 1:30:37.
Jason’s articles on learning management and productivity tips are frequently published in trade journals and regional magazines as well as the Los Angeles Times. Several articles and interviews are available on the websites: http://www.womackcompany.com/, and http://www.jasonwomackblog.com/.
Gary Bernhardt
Gary Bernhardt is a creator and destroyer of software compelled to understand both sides of heated software debates: Vim and Emacs; Python and Ruby; Git and Mercurial. He runs Destroy All Software, which publishes advanced screencasts for serious developers covering Unix, OO design, TDD, and dynamic languages.
Gil Broza
Gil Broza helps software organizations build and lead engaged, solid, high-performance Agile development teams. He guides teams and their leaders in creating effective, humane, and responsible work environments so they truly delight their customers and make a positive impact. He is an “all-rounder,” working at all organizational levels and coaching people in both technical and leadership behaviors.
Gil’s recent book, The Agile Mind-Set, helps practitioners become truly Agile about their work. His earlier book The Human Side of Agile is the definitive practical guide to leading Agile teams. He is a regular contributor and three-time track chair for the Agile20xx conference, and one of the Agile writers at projectmanagement.com. His two-day experiential training Leading Toward the Agile Mind-Set is in high demand by several Fortune Global 500 organizations.
“OMG! This Codebase Sucks!” Paying Down Technical Debt While Delivering Value
10:00am – 11:15am
Sure, you know you need to clean up the lousy codebase that’s falling apart at the seams, but how are you going to figure out what to fix, how to fix it, who will fix it-and how you’ll get that done while meeting the other commitments of continuing to deliver new value to your customers?
We’ll discuss figuring out business’s goals and priorities, then look to things like codebase metrics, defect rates, and source code churn in order to determine what areas of the codebase to work on.
Armed with that information, we’ll talk about different ways to negotiate getting technical debt paid off while meeting your larger goals of continuing to ship value to your customers.
This talk won’t cover best practices (BECAUSE THERE AREN’T ANY) nor will it attempt to convince you there are simple fixes to an unhealthy codebase. What you WILL leave with are ideas on how you can approach creating a strategy for your current situation.
Visual Requirements Elicitation
1:00pm – 2:15pm
Is your goal to be more nimble and efficient with project delivery? Are you struggling with requirements gathering? Come learn how Nationwide turned monotonous poorly attended requirements elicitation sessions into fun productive events by injecting new life into requirements gathering by applying collaborative visual facilitation techniques. Nationwide will demonstrate how participants were empowered with engaging interactive activities to streamline the software development lifecycle. Requirements gathering was transformed from a waterfall process into an iterative agile process reducing Nationwide’s software development lifecycle by over 60 days. These visual facilitation techniques can be easily adapted for all organizations seeking to expedite the requirements gathering process.
All techniques are highly interactive and empower participants to collaborate in a group setting for the achievement of the defined goal. These visual facilitation techniques can be easily adapted for all organizations seeking to expedite the requirements gathering process.
Hands On With Techno-Fashion and Wearables
10:00am – 11:15am
A morphing of technology, convenience and aesthetics results in a wide range of possibilities in the world of wearables and techno-fashion. According to a recent ABI Research report, wearable health and fitness devices are expected to hit 169.5 million in five years, a huge jump from the nearly 21 million devices sold in 2013. This hands on workshop will immerse participants into the world of programmable e-textiles through a simple development board. Join in collaborating to invent and create your own techno-fashion project. Dream up a GPS dog collar or make a dazzling tiara. The technology is as easy as connecting a battery, copy and paste the code. Leave with resources on how to make your idea a reality.
How To Build a Robotic Exoskeleton, aka Iron Man Suit
1:45pm – 3:00pm
Thanks to advances in technology, anyone can have super powers. And best part is, it doesn’t even cost a fortune to build. This talk will feature Scott Preston and his exoskeleton, (aka Iron Man Suit). The talk will provide insight into the electrical and mechanical aspects of the suit as well as all the tools and machines used to build it. In addition to the Mark 1 suite Scott will introduce prototypes and designs for the Mark 2.
Mobile 3D Scanning: The Future of Digital Imaging
10:00am – 11:15am
Mobile 3D Scanning is the use of mobile devices to capture digital 3D models of physical subject matter and environments. Mobile 3D Scanning is the future of digital imaging and will play a significant role as we enter the era of mass customization. By working in conjunction with other next generation tools such as VR headsets, CNC machines, 3D printers and 3D modeling software, Mobile 3D Scanning will impact all aspects of consumer life in the coming years.
Knockout Concepts develops proprietary Mobile 3D Scanning technology in Columbus, Ohio. Join co-founders Brooks Myers and Jake Kuttothara as they discuss Knockout’s journey to develop their latest solution, the KS-1 scanner, and enjoy a hand’s on demonstration of this next-gen tech.
How 3D Printing Actually Works
1:00pm – 2:15pm
Most of us have seen a 3D Printer (3DP) in action, but how does a 3D image actually turn into a printed object? We will start by looking at how a 3D model is sliced and a tool path is created. Then explain model slicing settings and how it effects the parts. We’ll talk about some of the common types of 3DP including FDM, Polyjet, SLA, etc. And then we will finish with the current uses for 3DP from prototyping and low volume production to hydroforming and more.
Web Experience Workshop 10:00am – 11:30am
That’s when Sparkbox and KUB joined forces to build a modern, user-focused experience under the guiding principle that “Users should be able to come to our site, find what they’re looking for, do what they need to do, and get out and get on with their lives.” This new experience was founded in RWD, Atomic Design, Continuous Delivery, and collaboration. It was built on ExpressionEngine, Ember, Pattern Libraries, Heroku, and Github. And continues to be supported by a service architecture built years ago to coordinate a heterogeneous environment of Cobol, Mainframes, partner systems, and internet connected devices.
This presentation will share how these two organizations with different cultures and processes worked together to prepare, plan, develop, test, and launch the new KUB.org. We’ll explore the technologies, patterns, practices, and techniques used in delivering this leading energy industry solution.
What to expect() When You’re expect()ing
1:30pm – 3:00pm
Every day, brilliant programmers around the world write awful tests.
These days, most developers write tests. If anything, the number of ways to test your code has become overwhelming, no matter what language you’re using. Most teams, exhausted by navigating the countless paths before them, are content if things are tested at all, lacking the energy to really probe whether their tests are any good.
This workshop isn’t about how to write tests. Our goal is to equip participants with habits to continuously improve how they write tests as they practice. We’ll do that by demonstrating how we learn new things about testing, by leading interactive exercises, and by facilitating discussion among the participants.
In 2011, Todd Kaufman and Justin Searls founded Test Double, a software agency headquartered here in Columbus. Its mission: seek out what’s broken about software development and to do our best to fix it. Today, Test Double has a team of developer consultants stationed all over the US and Canada, working alongside businesses to make software that’s better for everyone.
Digital Experience Workshop: Design Thinking & Lean UX
10:00am – 3:00pm
Have you ever built the wrong product the right way? Are you confused about how to balance user needs and business needs?
In this short session we will be taking a raw idea and creating a scoped Minimal Viable Product (MVP) tested against real users!
You’re going to learn how to identify and manage stakeholder expectations, define features, prototype, test and validate your “big ideas” with a methodology akin to design sprints and lean UX. Leaving you with the tools needed to crush your next project.
Why IT Doesn’t Matter In Today’s Exponential Organizations
The 21st century has seen the emergence of a hyper-competitive marketplace characterized by innovative business models, better informed and demanding customers, nimble and smarter competitors and a rapidly changing regulatory and threat environment. In this dynamic global marketplace that is fueled by constant changes in the underlying social, economic, political and technical landscape. Competitive advantage, market valuations and reputations that used to take decades to build and develop are created and destroyed in a matter of weeks and months. Many of today’s successful Digital Businesses such as Wealthfront, Lending Club, Uber, AirBnB, Tesla and Kaggle were born Digital. They have a significant structural advantage that allows them to achieve Minimum Efficient Scale rapidly by leveraging today’s technology infrastructure and processes to act as challengers and disruptors in traditional industries. Salim Ismail from the Singularity University calls these companies Exponential Organizations (ExOs).
An Exponential Organization is one whose output (or impact) is disproportionally (10x) larger than its peer because of the use of innovative organizational techniques that leverage exponential technologies. In short, ExOs have Business Agility as a core capability that allows them to out-maneuver significantly larger and more established competitors in all industries. As today’s incumbents compete with this new breed of ExOs, they have to recognize that their fate is inextricably intertwined with technology and the road to becoming an ExO is paved by the smart and effective use of technology to reimagine every aspect of their business. However, many of these incumbents are saddled with IT departments, organizational structures, management models, operational processes, workforces and systems that were built to solve “turn of the century” problems of the past.
In this talk we will focus on why IT as we know it is dead and what today’s IT organization’s can do to go beyond operational excellence and deliver a distinctive strategic positioning through innovation and the pragmatic use of technology.
Get Momentum: Five Questions to Ask to Get Started
After more than 14 hours together, we’re all about to leave this year’s conference with more ideas than we can remember and more to-dos than we’ll have time to do. How do you prioritize? How do you make sure that what you DO do is the best thing TO do? And, what can you do as a result of attending this conference to continue learning, developing and experimenting with agile?
Jason knows how powerful a well-crafted and well-placed question can be. Starting in 2001, when a college professor asked Jason a single question that changed the direction of his life until just last month when his 4th book was published, Jason has been studying the impact of thinking about thinking. And, taking micro-actions to improve your work and your life. Be sure you get a copy of his book, and join him as he closes the conference sharing with us the 5 questions to ask to get anything started.
Becoming an Agile Leader Regardless of Your Role
Agile is about the ability to inspect and adapt to change. Can we become adaptable agile leaders? You don’t need to change your title. You might not need to change where you sit in the organization. You will need to change your mindset to have the courage to lead.
Johanna will discuss how you can develop an agile mindset, seeing and living the “art of the possible.” We’ll discuss how your mindset influences your change artistry tools, and maybe even what you call yourself. We’ll see how to learn from small successes and continue to make progress, as you change yourself and your organization. You can start your change by changing your mindset to be one of change artistry and leadership.
Building Blocks of a Knowledge Work Culture
Much of what we’ve learned about management and motivation isn’t necessarily wrong, it’s just inappropriate and ineffective for knowledge work. To create a truly impactful knowledge work environment, you need to use appropriate leadership styles and create an environment that allows people to achieve their highest potential. Doc takes a look at types of work, the management styles that work best for them, and the qualities necessary to create a high-performing knowledge work culture.
How to Undermine Agile Transformations
Undermining an Agile Transformation is something many people, unfortunately, experience. This leads to Waterfall projects in Agile sheep’s clothing. The fox is in the hen house and is running amok. The root mechanism to undermining agile is no different than undermining any other idea. In this talk, I’ll share my real world experience with agile transformations and the hidden mechanisms that make it harder than most people realize. The goal is bring to light the mechanisms that can cause so many transformation efforts to fail. We’ll cover some the techniques that transformation coaches accidentally use that cause them to undermine themselves. As Jerry Weinberg said, “No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem.” This remains true, but the question is how. We’ll cover the key critical escalating steps that are used to undermine agile as well as 6 ways agile coaches undermine themselves.
Fear
We make thousands of decisions every single day. Some take thought, and some are just instinctual. How many of those decisions are based on fear? Fear of the unknown, fear of embarrassment, or maybe just fear of spiders? We will look at ways fear shapes our everyday lives, and how we can control it to make more rational decisions. Don’t let fear shut you down, make it an opportunity for success.
Finding the Sweet Spot, the Art of Writing Scenarios
Does your team ever write scenarios that seem implementation heavy? How about scenarios that feel too vague? This session will take attendees through the art of decomposing user stories into well formed automatable acceptance criteria, from the point of view of a developer and a product owner. Together we will explore the gherkin syntax (given/ when/ then), the trades offs that exists when we change the words we use, and how this can affect the software you build. Attendees will walk away from this session armed with information to help them write better gherkin and make better informed decisions around the words they use.
World-Class Engineering – a Startup Mentality to Speed Scalability & Solutions
Facebook , Netflix, Amazon, Tesla. Spotify, Apple – what do all of these great organizations have in common? World class engineering! Purposeful engineering philosophies, cultures, tools, practices, and people have enabled ideas to go to reality and created market leaders. In this session we’ll explore practices local leading edge firms are using to support a agile, high value delivery organization.
Moderator: Ben Blanquera
Panelists:
Alan Gilbert – VP Engineering and Analytics, CoverMyMeds
Adam Torres – Founder, TeamDynamix
Matt Grover – CTO, Clarivoy
Tim Heller – VP Engineering, Fuse Cardinal Health
Zac Dziczkowski – Founder, Garageio
Frank Lamantia – VP Engineering, CrossChx
You are NOT Your User
Gathering requirements from project sponsors, SME’s and power users is great until you realize that the most valuable assets were the least voiced and most overlooked contributor to the project: the end-user. Ultimately it is the end-user who has the problem because their current business practices aren’t meeting a business need. Learn ways to empathize with your end-user to get them to TEACH you about their struggles and observe their behaviors to detect underlying issues that have yet to be identified as a problem (inefficient, ineffective and could just be outright wrong!). Then use agility in your analysis to fail fast and learn cheap! No software required! Learn and iterate until you get it right leaving your project sponsor and your end-user in delight.
Breaking up with Your Build Tools
Building websites is becoming more and more complicated. We’re compensating for this with build tools like Grunt and Gulp. And as our toolset continues to evolve, we become more and more locked into the decisions we made at the beginning of the project. How many times have you needed the latest version of Jasmine, but the Gulp plugin you are using has you locked into an older version? Or, you found the perfect tool, but it’s only set up to work with another build tool? Have you joined another project, or revisited an old one, only to realize that you don’t have any idea how to start it up? These frustrations don’t need to hold back a web development project any longer – maybe we need to simplify.
Let’s simplify our build processes. Using NPM scripts means we don’t have to find plugins for Gulp, Grunt, or whatever other build tool we’re using to simply to run NPM modules. This means fewer dependencies and a much easier upgrade path to newer versions of the modules we need. Let’s create a common development story for multiple projects that makes it easier to onramp new developers, start new projects, and revisit old ones.
You’ll walk away with an understanding of how to leverage NPM to better utilize the wide range of tools available to you to build a better web.
Shoestring Agility in a Velcro Organization
At an Agile-unfriendly Fortune 100 bank, with little budget or domain expertise — and no testers! — our tiny team’s discipline and creativity enabled us to safely and reliably manage risk, deliver value, and earn precious trust. In a project-oriented, non-software-savvy, risk-averse yet risk-unskilled large organization, our efforts were not always understood or appreciated. But Agile practices helped us do just what the organization required: make the best of our limited resources, meet stringent constraints on speed, visibility, and control, and deliver as much value as we possibly could. When under deadlines, we shipped on time and on spec; when free to react to the changing needs of the business, we shipped dozens of high-quality monthly releases, consistently mitigating change risk and minimizing cycle time. I’ll share a few of our most effective maneuvers.
Agile & Lean: A Marriage to Maximize the Value of IT
Five years ago, Nationwide embarked on a journey to implement agile and lean practices at an enterprise scale. Join Guru for a look into the real-life experiences of leading this transformation across several application development and maintenance efforts. He will highlight the integration of agile and lean practices and the importance of lean leadership to measure and track the economic value of these techniques. Along the way, he will also reflect on the versatility of lean and his personal journey applying lean concepts.
The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper
“I get all that. BUT how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?”
Leaders must answer the “better, faster, cheaper” question if they want their agile transformation and projects to move forward.
To prepare leaders for this critical question, we explore how “better, faster, cheaper” translates to an agile organization, the metrics a leader can use to track progress towards “better, faster, and cheaper”, and how leaders can demonstrate the benefits gained from their agile activities.
Effective Software Documentation in an Agile environment
In the most recent Stack Overflow developer survey, poor documentation is cited as the #2 challenge at work for developers. So how does this impact your Agile project? Imagine having your key contributors spending hours or even days each time new developers join your team to bring them up to speed on how to checkout, work with, build and test your project. Or imagine having these key contributors spending valuable time during every sprint answering the same questions about your project over and over again because there is no documentation. This happens today countless times because most development teams do not effectively document their development projects.
So, what constitutes effective development project documentation? The goals are: (1) on-board new team members quickly and as painlessly as possible with minimal assistance from current team members and (2) provide a central repository for answering questions about working with your development project. Come to this session and learn how to effectively document your development project to meet these goals.
Introducing Agile in a Non-Software World
Facing an ever growing backlog of work and a shrinking capacity to manage it, an IT Demand team recognized a need to become leaner. The team embarked on a journey to implement Agile practices to grow beyond the basic huddle board. As a result, they now sprint against a dynamic yet ordered backlog that brings more stability and predictability to their work.
In this session, we will share one team’s Agile journey. Please bring your curiosity and questions to explore Agility outside a software delivery team.
Crash Your Own Party: Functional Managers in the Next Wave of Agile Transformation
Talk about a bad rap: no name in Agile world gets less praise than that of the tenured, home-grown functional manager. Scrum provides no role. Coaches ask them not to interfere with self-organizing teams. Executives provide little direction. Everyone worries they may be roadblocks to the Agile future. Sound right? Well, they may be about to prove us so wrong.
In this survey, enterprise agility coach Dante Vilardi explains how partial transformations frustrate today’s functional managers, and yet how they just might become stars in the next wave of Agile growth. Many organizations set out into the Agile frontier relying mainly on self-organizing teams. In most cases, this isn’t enough. Dante argues that managers, once mobilized for the task – and aware of their value as “positive disrupters” – can bring sustained focus on key functional capabilities that fuel transformation up and down the organization.
This presentation will ring true with seasoned agilists, who will come to see functional management and transformation through a common lens. It will build from established theories of self-organizing systems, the influence model of change management, and Toyota’s improvement Kata. It will challenge over-reliance on cadence synchronization, team autonomy and matrixed management.
Women in Technology
In 2015, women made up 57% of the professional workforce yet only 25% of professional computing occupations were held by women. What is currently being done to address the gender gap? What can individuals do to help in both short and long terms? How can we retain women that have chosen this career path? In this panel, we’ll hear from some of the amazing women who are working in the diversity and technology space. Following the panel perspectives, we’ll open up the floor for a Q&A, leading into a group dialogue centered on common experiences.
Business Intelligence Agility
Skeptical that Agile can be applied to strategic goals and projects such as Business Intelligence and data architecture? Agile doesn’t have to be fragile. You can build a robust data architecture and business intelligence practice using Agile.
Come join Alex Crabtree and the IGS Business Intelligence team as they guide you through tactics and strategies that work well with Agile and some that you should avoid. You’ll learn how to deliver strategic enterprise data models, partner with other Agile development teams, run full regression tests with every release, increase your data quality, and make your business partners happy.
Stop being that “reporting” team that’s hindering your Agile development. Take the lead and become the IT partner that drives your organization forward.
DevOps – The Promise of Agility, Delivered
Achieving true agility is about more than just having sprints, planning meetings, retrospectives and the rest of the “ceremonies” present in most agile implementations. Does your software suffer from long drawn-out deployment cycles? Is it riddled with bugs when in production, yet tests fine “on my machine?” DevOps with Continuous Delivery is often the missing piece to the puzzle.
In this presentation you will gain a basic understanding of what is required to have an effective delivery pipeline that would enable your team to release software that drives business success on demand, from any version to any environment, with confidence. I promise, your team can achieve this with the right tools, right processes, and most importantly, right mindset to make it happen.
Applying the Open-Closed Principle: Never Write an IF Statement Again
Violations of the open-closed principle (the O in SOLID) are the plague of OO programming. Unlike the Andromeda Strain before it, the symptoms of this disease, innocuous IFs and CASEs, are quietly waiting for just the right moment to render your software unmaintainable. The agents work slowly and quietly, in the shadows, like digging a hole with a soup spoon. One day you wake only to realize you’ve sunk into a pit of technical debt. OK, it’s probably not that bad, but violating the Open-Closed principle does have the potential to shorten the life of any OO code. The key is to identify violations as they are occurring so that we keep the power to extend the software without also needing to change it. This session demonstrates refactoring techniques to eliminate violations of the principle and some tips for identifying the early. Examples are provided mainly in Groovy, but analogous code will be provided in a variety of other languages.
Breakout 13
Being Agile: Having the Mindset that Delivers
Are you excited about adopting Agile? Have you put in place the roles, artifacts, practices, and tools? Are you then realizing the promised benefits – happy customers, quality product, reliable delivery teams, and faster releases?
If instead of an emphatic “yes,” your honest answer is “only some of the benefits,” “inconsistently,” or “we did, initially”, then you’re not alone. Most organizations experience this due to an Agile implementation that is mechanical, rigid, driven by tools and so-called “best practices.” But Agile is much more than a process; it’s first and foremost a mind-set that permeates your actions. Without the mind-set, the practices don’t matter, and you won’t achieve *and sustain* great results.
In this talk, Gil Broza will guide you through an exploration of the values, beliefs, and principles that define Agile thinking. You’ll learn how to choose Agile-minded methods, process, and practices for your needs and context. And with the deep understanding of what makes Agile work, you’ll be able to support mindful implementation and the necessary culture change.
Scrum Turns 21: What is Next for Scrum for the Next 20 Years
90% of Agile teams are using Scrum. With over ½ a million people trained and certified, Scrum has become, for many the de-facto standard in Agile team organization. But what is next for Scrum? In this talk we discuss the success and future of Scrum and what needs to happen to Scrum to continue its relevance. We describe how skills, scaling and DevOps need to be weaved into Scrum to not only ensure its relevance for the next 21 years, but also help the profession of software development improve.
Leading Lean
I believe that leaders must practice what they preach. If they want teams to be transparent and lean, they need to practice themselves and lead by example. We have found this easy to do in complicated systems systems like application development, but how do leaders of social systems incorporate Lean principles? This talk will share some proven techniques that amplify learning, uncover waste, improve your standard work, limit work-in-progress, improve accountability, make decisions faster, and uncover difficult topics.
Agile Portfolio Management – Build the Right Things
Are you building the right things to accelerate growth, revenue and profit? Are you responding to new market pressures and stakeholder needs with speed and transparency? Businesses that follow traditional portfolio management strategies create annual budgets, do big upfront planning, and are addicted to resource management. These traditional approaches produce plans that are risky and delay time to market. To succeed today business strategists must develop a new mindset. Agile portfolio management strategies are adaptive focusing on value, incremental funding, continuous planning, delivery groups and speed to market. Every industry is subject to disruption. Only a true agile business is equipped to respond. Apply agile portfolio management strategies and create realistic high value action plans that will inspire your organization, delight your stakeholders and position you to be the disrupter.
Navigating the People Side of Change on an Agile Project
Agile development works in very fast, iterative sprints, releasing a product as quickly as possible. It is an excellent way to develop a system; but presents challenges when managing the people side of such fast-paced change. Organizations need time to analyze people impacts, and plan for a smooth transition to a known end state. Yet Agile development is quick, with the end state constantly changing. So, how do you prepare for the people impacts with an unknown future state, working with iterative bits of critical information, and only weeks or days between the finished end product and a release date?
In this presentation, learn the successful strategy that produced less than 10% user errors on Day One; floor supervisors owning the problem solving by Day Two; and business-as-usual ownership of the system and processes by the end of Week One.
Using Flow-based Road Mapping & Option Framing
If you’d like an alternative to typical, quarter-by-quarter, schedule oriented road mapping (and all the associated waste) then this session is for you. Matt Barcomb will introduce a Cadenced Flow approach to flow-based road mapping. He will first cover how to layout and execute a road map based on models that better fit software planning as well as how to transform your existing plans. Next, using options thinking to frame work will be explored and how to use starting and stopping triggers for options, reducing the need of blind budgeting or project practices. Finally, Matt will wrap up by touching on a few key metrics that will let you monitor and evaluate your new road map.
Agile Architecture
Creating the correct architecture and making the right architectural decisions before, during and after a project are vital to ensuring your product’s success. Architecture must meet the needs of your customers today while enabling changes in the future that have not even been thought about today. These decisions impact not just a single project, but the entire environment and company. Architects must constantly balance their current infrastructure with emerging technologies, the latest in security trends, industry best practices and competitor solutions. As the needs of customers and technology evolve, it is important for architects to create an environment that supports a Lean-Agile approach to delivering value. Architects need to become enablers of delivery, not roadblocks. Come hear from our panel of real world architects who deal with these challenges on a daily basis.
Agile Transformations – The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly!
So you want to transform to Agile! You’ve gone to all the conferences, read all the books, and learned about all the good things to come when you transform to Agile. But has anyone told you about the bad, or even the ugly of Agile transformations?
In this session we will review the good, the bad, and the ugly of Agile transformations and give you techniques to help you over come them.
Protocol-Oriented Programming
Protocol Oriented Programming. What is it? How does it work? And why is it so great? As of Swift 2.0, Apple introduced their new concept of protocol extensions, which has changed the face of iOS development. I will be going through an introduction to protocols in a pre Swift 2.0 era and how they have changed post Swift 2.0. I will also go through the more advanced features of Protocol Oriented Programming such as associated types and how protocols can be used in iOS unit testing. Then I will wrap it up with a game framework that I have built in a protocol oriented way.
How Software Learns
We now take it as a given that software products must evolve, and rapidly, if they are to succeed. But how do you know which parts of your code base are likely to undergo radical transformation and which will will change more slowly? Fortunately, we have other examples we can look to for answers. In 1994, Stewart Brand described how buildings adapt over time when he published “How Buildings Learn”. In this talk, we’ll examine the nature of change in construction and other industries. The patterns seen elsewhere tell us a great deal about how we should approach building software in need of continuous adjustment and revision.
Reproducibility
To write code efficiently, we need to be able to rely on our tools. Editors always save files when we ask them to, version control systems restore old files when we ask them to, and so on. This is reproducible: the tool reliably does the same thing when given the same inputs. Many tools lack this reliability, but there does seem to be a positive trend, which we examine in this talk. First, we compare the designs of Git, React, and Bundler, each of which relies on reproducibility and was a huge improvement over its predecessors. Then, we imagine what other benefits might come from continuing to focus on reproducibility in our tools.
The Responsibility Process
Let’s have a conversation about taking ownership of life and work. Far too many good, motivated, hard-working people get stuck in jobs they don’t want, projects gone bad, work problems and careers they don’t enjoy, and companies they resent. It happens to individual contributors and it happens to leaders. It can happen to us all. Mastering self-direction and leadership starts with mastering responsibility. Mastering responsibility releases the victim mentality, turns coping into growing, and transforms talking about problems into solving problems. Those who practice responsibility identify and own what they really really want — and go for it. They change how they organize, follow and participate in their world, which in turn leads to enjoying far greater productivity, self-direction, shared leadership, and good will. When you learn about, apply, and practice The Responsibility Process (discovered, documented, and perfected over the last 30 years) you too can discover for yourself how you are far more powerful and able than you likely give yourself credit for. The Responsibility Process fosters a natural pattern in your mind; a process that you can repeat and rely on to create change and behaviors that matter.
DevOps: Company Culture will Make or Break DevOps Success
There is no doubt that DevOps is exciting: new tools with cool names, bringing automation to repetitive manual tasks, all geared to enable your team to be much more responsive to customers. But the promise of DevOps will quickly unravel unless leadership works to foster a culture of trust. Learn about the 13 behaviors that build trust.
Introspection: The Key to Making Your Environment Conducive to Continuous Learning
The heartbeat of the IT world isn’t technology; it’s the people. After all, we work in companies to have company! Whatever our relationship with each other – be it as a peer, manager, or coach – learning is often the essential unit of currency that’s necessary to move our relationships and businesses forward. Unfortunately – and sometimes unexpectedly – the people you work with probably aren’t very good at learning. How can we teach our colleagues, direct reports, and team members to be better learners; and even blossom into continuous learners? I’m a firm believer that practicing introspection is the first step to making your environment conducive to continuous learning.
Perfect Strangers: How Project Managers and Developers Relate and Succeed
Project Management is a waste of time and Developers are lazy introverts—at least, it depends who you ask. In this session, we discuss how Project Managers and Developers generally view each other and their projects, and propose strategies to create a happy, healthy, and successful project environment.
This conversation is valuable for individuals at all stages of their Agile journey. The issues being addressed may be more familiar to those who have been on the path longer, but the strategies proposed will be relevant and actionable for anyone when they inevitably encounter those situations.
Attendees will be guided through several common Agile processes to help gain a better understanding of the different ways Project Managers and Developers approach projects and their processes. Upon breaking down where conflicting views emerge, they will be equipped with some strategies to work through those differences and to help them build stronger and more effective teams.
Beyond Productivity & Toward Market Dominance: What’s Next for Agile
In a landmark Agile Columbus Agile productivity study sponsored by COHAA and QSM Associates, researched discovered that participants achieved 31% faster time-to-market and 4x quality using Agile methods. But what if productivity and velocity alone aren’t enough?
What’s next for Agile organizations to up their game? How can company leaders…
– Channel Agile teams toward greater market share
– Achieve better predictability
– Lower defects
– Achieve higher profitability
This talk will look at the notion of “Beyond Productivity” and what lies next for cutting-edge Agile thinkers.
Portfolio Planning in a Lean Agile Environment
Selecting and funding the right projects is one of the most important decisions in any IT organization. However, in many organizations these decisions are made by a small group of executives with input from a small group of SMEs, making this one of the most opaque processes in the industry. There are many theories and approaches for selecting the best projects, including some that suggest funding value streams instead of projects. The real question is, “How are projects selected and funded in the real world.” Come hear from our panel of leaders on how their organization selects and funds projects, and get a rare glimpse into the real world process.
Lean 101
Organizations committed to operational excellence know developing along a process improvement model poses many opportunities and challenges. A transformation model is a crucial as effective change agents execute toward meeting goals. Two worst-case scenarios, however, often loom: A misunderstanding of what Lean is might derail the focus, or check mark tool mentality might lose problem solving focus. GE Aviation faced both of these challenges in its lean journey before drastically refocusing its transformation. In this session, longtime GE Aviation leader Guba offers up the company’s Lean journey and lessons learned as a best-practice benchmark in lean transformation, highlighting its underlying principles.
Low Ceremony Microservices with Elixir
Much ink has been spilled discussing the benefits of breaking a monolithic application into micro services. However, these benefits often come at great cost in additional complexity. In this session we’ll look at how we can build Elixir applications that leverage the underlying strengths of the Erlang platform to let us have our cake and eat it, too. We’ll demonstrate how we can build an application as a “monolith” and break pieces off into micro services will surprisingly little effort. We’ll dig into the key challenges of micro services including deployment, management, and versioning and see how the OTP framework gives us battle tested solutions out of the box. As developers, we no longer have to choose between getting things done and having an architecture that won’t fall over as our application grows.
Introducing QA Into an Agile Environment
Agile teams are all about poly-skilled individuals picking up tasks and performing them based on what is needful. At least, that’s how it is advertised. In reality, there are several reasons why testing is often a specialized activity even on agile teams. As a result, when a dev shop decides to make the switch to an agile methodology, QA is often the most difficult part of the journey to navigate.
I will describe in detail how I have helped navigate it successfully at two separate clients that are as different as can be. In the process, I will outline the various roles that a QA professional can and should play on an agile team and how they can make the process run more smoothly. If this is done right, the tester can become the developer’s best friend.
Innovate and Invigorate Your Agile Discovery Practices
Agile product discovery is essential for continuous delivery of high-quality solutions. Yet many teams struggle to collaboratively discover inventive and valuable product requirements. Instead, they become reliant, and at times overly reliant on user stories, story maps, and personas. While these techniques are useful, they are not sufficient for the complex products most teams wrestle with today. Join Ellen Gottesdiener as she shares how to reach beyond discovery-as-usual. You’ll learn how your team can apply creative ways to enlighten and energize your agile product discovery, to bring requirements to light, explore true value, and build better products.