In this AgileLnL we are going to explore five simple tricks that can help bring agility to your team. I've sorted a number of things I often do when coaching teams to identify the ones that were the easiest to try but seemed to have the biggest impact on aligning the team with the Agile principles.

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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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Test-Driven Development is a process that has obvious parts (the well-known Red-Green-Refactor), but also has subtle nuances that make the difference between a good process and a great one. Ted's "Predictive TDD" builds on TDD, adding an important step to the process: predicting how a test will fail. As part of teaching TDD, Ted created a game that's not only fun, but provides a great opportunity to discuss how TDD works.

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In this 45 minute session, we are going to discuss ways to create a sense of urgency that will help create a healthly working environment for your team. We'll also look at pitfalls -- things to avoid that create unhealthy urgency and drive counterproductive behavior.

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You've probably heard about "splitting" user stories, but often the idea is mentioned without any real concrete idea of what it involves. In this talk we are going to look at why splitting user stories is valuable, some theory about how to do it, and then look at some real world examples of splitting users stories.

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Your daily standup 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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In this session, we are going to look at the differences between estimating and forecasting. We will start out looking at examples of sizing work to make sure there aren’t hidden parts and then look at estimation approaches and finally at ways to produce forecasts that let us better predict the future. If you are looking to create more transparency and drive more efficient software development, this session will give you some good theory as well as simple concrete steps to accomplish your goal.

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What does a cult that clears runways in the forest and wears coconuts like headphones have to do with Agile? You’ll find out in this talk that is a refresher of the foundation of Agile with a focus on the why behind all the different practices used by teams. No tales about pirates this time, but we’ve got stories about toothpaste tubes assembly lines, a manager who offered to buy a rocket for our Agile project, and a modern real-life version of the emperor who had no clothes fairy tale.

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Come test your Agile knowledge, impress your co-workers, and win fabulous prizes! For this lunch and learn session, we are going to take a break from listening to people talk about Agile and instead play some game show-style quizzes with prizes and bragging rights for the winners. We'll cover topics from past lunch and learns, the Agile Manifesto, and maybe just a bit of random Christmas trivia thrown in for good measure. Hope to see you there!

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Continuing our walk through all 12 Agile Principles, this week we will be looking at Principle #7 - Working software is the primary measure of progress. Is this principle so obvious that it doesn't need to even be mentioned? We'll explore how teams sometimes let things other than working software become their primary measure of progress and talk about how to avoid that danger on your own team.

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