Agile says that we need to prioritize collaboration with the customer. It also says that the best way to communicate is face-to-face. These principles and values are behind the creation of team rooms and daily 15 minute face-to-face meetings to coordinate work. But what does that mean for teams in hybrid environments where not everyone is co-located or where everyone has been sent home to work? Even post COVID lockdowns, we are likely to have more people working from home. How do we follow the Agile principles with a new way of working, leverage technology for the reality of working from home, and create strong team cultures in this new environment?

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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 talk covers the things they identified as well as my observations about some of the things that made them successful.

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Are you tired of having the same conversations, delivering "late" and being put under pressure for decisions you didn't even make? In this session, I'll walk through how we managed to flip the script in a highly regulated, risk-averse, financial institution by introducing probabilistic forecasting and flow metrics as well as ditching wasteful estimations.

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To kick off the first Agile LnL of 2023, we are going to take an example driven tour of the Agile principles. With real world stories of projects that both succeeded and failed, we are going to see how teams follow Agile principles for success and ignore them to their peril.

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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 talks 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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Team change is inevitable, especially when your company is hiring like crazy or when it is shrinking. Your teams might grow bigger and split. Some people might leave and then your teams merge together. What feels like tectonic shifts happen as you morph structurally to refocus people and work, continuously. It can be a wild ride. How can we bring a humanistic stance to this dynamic reteaming? How can the people be empowered to have ownership over their team change? How can we integrate the new people, honor who is already there and redefine our collective sense of “culture?” We will explore questions like these and will discover practical strategies to master dynamic reteaming.

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If Waterfall development represents one extreme of trying to plan ahead and Agile represents doing more planning just in time, what is the role of roadmaps in an Agile world? In this talk we look at the Agile principles that support and guide efforts in creating roadmaps and look at ways we can do enough planning to get value from our plan while avoiding the type of planning that is harmful.

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Agility starts (and possibly ends) with a mindset. With so many agile frameworks out there, some larger than others, how do you choose what is right for you? What heuristics do you use when choosing practices to implement? What are the risks associated with taking a bulk set of practices en-masse and applying them? Also, what does agility have to do with early 20th-century car manufacturers? Come find out as we talk about Ford's Frameworks and Toyota's Theories.

Prateek Singh has been leading and working on agile teams for almost two decades. Starting with XP, then Scrum and now working in Kanban system, Prateek has gained a breadth and depth of knowledge regarding agile techniques, practices, and implementation principles. Prateek has been a Director of Business Agility at UKG conducting training and coaching for teams regarding Kanban and Lean principles. Prateek has played the role of Software Engineer, Scrum Master, Agile Coach, Manager of Software Engineering, Director of Engineering, and Director of Business Agility in his career. Prateek is currently the Head of Learning and Development at ProKanban.org. Prateek is also the co-host of the Drunk Agile podcast.

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This is going to be a 30-minute lunch and learn where we are going to do short summary of the book The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team, walk through how some of the major points relate to Agile teams, do a quick gameshow to help remember the contents, and give away a copy of the book.

If you've read the book, it will be a good reminder. If you haven't, I hope it will encourage you to get (or win) a copy.

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One of the hallmarks of DevOps is making it possible to quickly and safely deploy new functionality to production. Doing so safely is dependent on a protective suite of automated tests that can check for any regressions in the intended functionality.

But who is looking out for the health and safety of those automated tests? Sure, they did their job when they were first written, but they need to keep doing that job as long as the application is in production. That should be years, if not decades. Those tests need to continue to provide safety even as the functionality shifts over time and team members who wrote them leave and are replaced.

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