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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Selenium is a wonderful tool, but many of the ways to use it that work well when you have 5 tests, start to break down when you are dealing with a large application with 5,000 tests. In this session we will look at examples of how to write code that uses Selenium effectively even when dealing with a very large number of tests. We will cover techniques to deal with tests that seem to break for no reason, how to use page objects to make tests less brittle, and look at ways to get faster feedback from slow running tests. In particular we are going to be looking for ways to make our testing code more readable even for non-developers, so if you have an interest in how Selenium can be used, you’ll probably find the discussion easy to follow even if you don’t write code yourself.

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Tired of the same old retrospective format? Struggling to turn insights into actions? Having difficulties creating a safe, inclusive environment where people participate equally?

Join me for an interactive exploration of my top tips, strategies, and hacks for continuous improvement.

In this unique and engaging slideless session, you'll participate in a "choose your own adventure" experience that will allow you to influence where we focus our time. No standard one way presentation here; this is your talk, focused on your challenges.

We could run this session 50 times together, and each would be different.

You'll leave this session with practical tools and strategies that you can immediately implement with your teams to drive continuous improvement.

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Drunk Agile hosts Daniel Vacanti and Prateek Singh both have books out. Dan's book, Actionable Agile Metrics for Predictability Volume II takes a fresh look at Flow Metrics. How do we up our predictability game by combining our understanding of these metrics with techniques that have been in place for almost a century? Prateek's book 'Scaling Simplified' helps boil scaling down to its basics, giving readers a way to scale without bulky or costly frameworks. Come have a chat with Dan and Prateek (whisky not required) about their new books. Bring your questions about predictability, metrics, and scaling. Also, come help further the ideas for a new book that they have brewing.

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People were dying. Then Atul Gawande discovered an extremely simple solution that helps keep mistakes from occurring whether you are in the cockpit or the operating room. What he learned and how he applied it to save lives can help your Agile team become resistant to errors.

This is going to be an ultra-focused 30-minute lunch and learn where we are going to review The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande, look at how it can help Agile teams, do a quick game show quiz, and give away a copy of the book.

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Adding a new member to a team can be tricky, but a good onboarding process can set the team up for long term success and have a big impact on the culture. In this talk we are going to look at some ways to do effective onboarding as well as some practices to avoid.

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In 1925, Bruce Ingram was given a mummified hand with the words "Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence." Soon after receiving this grim gift, a mysterious fire burned down his house. Ingram rebuilt his house only to have it destroyed by water in a flood. Coincidence? You be the judge, but it was enough for Ingram who is said to have disposed of the hand and was able to keep his house in one piece after that.

In this talk we are going to look at some of the happenings surrounding the opening of Egyptian tombs that caused many people to believe they were cursed. From there we'll look at some of the coincidences around testing and talk about testing beliefs that can lead to "The Curse of the Testing Pyramid." Our goal is to look carefully at what type of return on investment we hope to get from testing and use that to drive the way we create and shape our tests.

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These three words strike fear into the hearts of development teams everywhere, yet Testing in Production can significantly accelerate product delivery by unleashing improvements in quality, feedback loops & infrastructure cost.

In this session you’ll see demos of real world, ultra-lean delivery pipelines. You’ll also see code examples that can get you to production without all those pesky Dev, QA, Staging, UAT, PreProd & Performance environments.

When you walk away from this session, you’ll have the confidence & strategies to start your journey towards implementing a true Continuous Deployment pipeline that culminates in automated Production Testing.

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In this session we are going to walk through steps for improving a typical Agile team and look at a general outline of how an Agile coach might approach helping a team begin to make incremental and continuous improvement in their ability to deliver.

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While everyone likes the idea of radiating information instead of creating lots of reports, many teams aren’t working in a way that actually allows information to be radiated. Other teams could but haven’t found a good way to actually radiate the information. Both situations leave in you a position where creating reports can take a great deal of time and effort without producing a lot of value or even transparency. Any small step we can take to make information more transparent and more meaningful simply in the way we organize our work is a worthwhile investment. When teams organize their work around the goal of transparency and accountability, it reduces the dependence on costly reporting which frees more time for doing the actual work.

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