Agile 2008 Sessions

Agile 2008 is almost here and I’m looking forward to presenting 3 sessions this year.

Managers Introduction to Test Driven Development (with Dave Nicolette)

Wednesday 6th, 16:00 – 17:30, Civic Ballroom South, Customers & Business Value Stage

The purpose of this session is to help non-technical managers understand the business value of one of the popular agile software development techniques. It is designed to help managers understand the impact on their projects when their technical teams use the agile technique, test driven development (TDD).  We begin by demonstrating the technique of TDD using a tool familiar to nearly all managers: Microsoft Excel. Clarke Ching developed a TDD exercise using Microsoft Excel that many others have used as the basis for demonstrations and presentations on the subject. We use this exercise to demonstrate the red-green-refactor TDD cycle with a tool familiar to nearly all managers so that they can see what the buzzword means and get a feel for the technique. This is followed by a presentation focusing on the effect of TDD on a project’s timeline, code quality, cost of development, cost of ownership/support, and longevity of the code in production. The core of the message is that TDD helps a team control the accumulation of technical debt in the codebase, and this in turn controls costs, reduces time to market, and results in a cleaner product that will have a longer production lifetime.

KFC Development – Finger Lickin’ Good (with Aaron Sanders)

Thursday 7th, 8:30 – 12:00, Essex Ballroom, Breaking Acts Stage

This workshop explores three important Lean concepts – Kanban, Flow and Cadence (KFC) – which can be combined to generate a more pipeline-based approach to software development, as opposed to the more common timebox-based approaches of more traditional Agile methods. We will describe our experiences implementing these ideas at Yahoo! and explain the concepts using examples, simulations and games. In addition, because this is a new and emerging way of working, there will be an opportunity for discussion between the participants about how the ideas might be applied in their own situations, in order to advance the art.

Integrating Scrum with the Process Framework at Yahoo! Europe (with Alexandre Boutin)

Friday 8th, 8:30 – 10:00, Kenora, Agile & Organisational Culture Stage

This presentation describes how Yahoo! International, and in particular, the Yahoo! Europe, has moved from having a very waterfall inspired process framework, to having one which is very lightweight and flexible, and thus compatible with Agile methodologies. This was achieved through Agile teams collaborating with the Process Group in its own iterative inspect and adapt cycle. The Process Group has evolved from being a control-oriented team, with a process-centric framework, to being a coaching-oriented team, with an organisational-centric framework. Thus, rather than telling teams how to run their projects, they help teams ensure they are meeting business needs.