For some, life just doesn’t seem fair. They compete accessing the same science and technology, subject to the same rules and regulations, chasing the same opportunities, yet there’s those few who somehow seem to get more value out the door, better easier and quicker, with appreciation showering over all their stakeholders. How’s that happen? The very best are just “smarter at getting smarter” having build their “social circuitry” of processes and procedures, not to force control and conformance but to make it way easier to solve hard problems faster, delivering solutions that are wildly appreciated. How’s that happen? It’s with repeatable reliable approaches for making problem solving easier to do, problems easier to solve and problems more obvious early, before they have chance to become big.

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User stories drive the process of creating software. Good user stories help develop software efficiently, but poor user stories can lead to lower return on investment and even cancelled projects. We will look at a number of example user stories from robotic milking machines to online shoe stores to discover the key to creating stories that effectively represent complex work with simplicity.

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The typical recommendation is that role of software leaders is just empowering teams and removing roadblocks. While this can work in organizations where small teams can work independently, I believe it is just wrong for large complex organizations. In these cases, if the organization is going to deliver the results the business deserves leaders are going to have to play a much more active and adaptive role.

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Attendees have asked for more examples of creating and splitting user stories. In this talk we are going to walk through the evolution of an application story by story. We'll look at how to split stories down to the smallest thing that can be experience as progress and how that enables growth of an application where each story can be delivered in a few days while demonstrating clear value to the user.

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How do the licenses work that govern open source software? What are the rights and responsibilities of a software developer when they incorporate open source code in their project? And what are the best practices when utilizing or developing an open source library? Join us to delve into the history, requirements, and best practices of open source licenses.

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Your daily standup (face-to-face) meeting can be your most important secret weapon for getting work done quickly and efficiently, but this doesn’t happen by accident. Effective daily standups are the result of a lot of intentional decisions to help your team reach its peak potential. In this talk, we’ll look at the goals of the daily standup and then work through how different approaches and common practices support or detract from those goals.

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I’ve worked with a number of incredible Scrum Masters over the years. For this talk I asked several what they feel is the most important secret behind their success. This session covers the things they identified as well as my observations about some of the things that made them successful.

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Why do some projects seemingly use failure to propel them forward while others wrest defeat from the jaws of apparent victory? In this talk, we are going to look at how a healthy, proactive approach to risk and failure can give software projects the momentum and solid foundation to deliver for our customers. We'll also look at how an unhealthy approach can hide pitfalls that result in canceled projects or, worse, spectacular failures. You'll leave with a better understanding of how to assess the health of your team's approach to failure and concrete ideas of how to make your process more resilient by leveraging good failures to avoid bad ones.

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Test-Driven Development has been around for decades and is considered a best practice, yet it still sees very little adoption. It is one of the most impactful practices software teams can adopt, but the challenges to introducing it often leave this practice abandoned. In this talk, you will get acquainted with TDD and learn an approach to successfully introduce it to a company at both a leadership and technical level, even if you can't code! You will leave equipped to talk through the TDD process, its nuances, common struggles, metrics for success, and even the role of AI.

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For April Fool's day we are going to look at a few case studies and situations and identify which ones are examples of agility and which ones were written as an April Fool's joke. Then we'll dig into some of the differences between situations that help achieve agility and situations that push teams away from it. There will be fun to be had and silly prizes given away. If you only like serious discussions of Agile, this might not be best talk for you.

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