Description:

Agile Coaches may be asked to have many skills, but which skills are most important to you? Do you need a teacher, facilitator, mentor, consultant or something else?

Understanding the different “hats” an agile coach may wear, helps in hiring the right coach, upskilling your current coaches and setting expectations with your teams. This understanding also helps Agile Coaches have better conversations with leadership by framing and naming the different characteristics, skills and outcomes needed to wear each hat.

An experienced Agile Coach will put on 12 different hats and discuss the pros and cons of wearing each one.

While this is a presentation, the use of many hats and props will provide unique visuals and allow the audience to connect to the various skills, behaviors and outcomes associated with each hat an agile coach may wear. While a presentation doesn’t allow for Concrete Practice, it does allow for Connection, Concepts and Conclusion.

During this session, a seasoned Agile Coach will put on 12 different hats with appropriate props while discussing the distinct differences of each. Some of the hats such as a teacher you expect. Others such as the “Yes Person” may come as a surprise.

1.       Teacher (Graduation Cap)

2.       Mentor (Hogwarts Wizard’s Hat)

3.       Facilitator (Party Hat)

4.       Coach (Ted Lasso’s Hat)

5.       Consultant (Surgery Scrub Cap or my Judge’s Wig)

6.       Dojo Coach (Karate Kid Headband)

7.       Project Manager (Hard Hat with Head Lamp)

8.       Auditor (Green Accountant Hat)

9.       Agile Police (NY PD Hat)

10.   Spy (Sherlock Holmes Hat)

11.   Deliver This Product! (Crash Helmet)

12.   Yes Person (Propeller Beany)

Key Takeaways:

• Understanding the various agile coaching skills

• Taxonomy for better discussions with agile coaches and leadership

Description:

Is what a business analyst (BA) does on an agile project much different from what is done on a waterfall project? Yes and No. Do the three amigos include the analyst or not? It certainly does! Although how the work is done depends on the team and project. During this session we’ll review how the role of a BA on an agile project can vary, how BAs impact the development team, the various roles a BA does, and what makes a BA good at their jobs. All analysts bring excellent communication, collaboration, and trust to their work on project teams – but how we communicate and collaborate will differ. This session is targeted at anyone on a project team that has never worked with an analyst before.

Key Takeaways:

• Understand the progressive elaboration with analysis staying several sprints ahead of development

• Understand the Roles a BA plays on a project other than BA

• Know and utilize the skills an analyst brings to the team

Description:

We are very aware of biases that are a threat to delivering software quality. But those biases can also be used to our advantage and there is a name for it: nudging.

Biases have been the subject of quite some talks on stage nowadays. Biases that are a threat to delivering high-quality software. And for sure there is a lot to worry about, we all know for example that we assume that we know exactly what our stakeholders want, and we still produce not working software. But is it also possible to use those biases in the favor of quality and testing? In fact, there is a way that biases are used positively, and it has a name: nudging. Nudging uses ‘choice architecture’, which means creating a situation where you can make an unconscious choice for a good purpose. It is used a lot in marketing and politics, for example how a grocery store, using green arrows to the fruit and veggie aisles, increase the sale of healthy food. I looked at different opportunities that nudging gives us for the sake of better agile testing. For example, in a refinement or in a discussion about bugs or when we are delivering our results to our team or our stakeholders. In my talk, I will elaborate more on what nudging exactly is, the ethical questions around nudging, and how we can apply nudging while testing. It will be an exploration so bear with me.

Description:

Teams using Scrum sometimes struggle with operational or emergent work blowing up their sprint plans. As DevOps delivery is increasingly used by organizations the need of Scrum teams to accommodate operational work also increases. After all, it does not matter how interesting that new feature is if production is down. By combining the disciplines of Scrum and Kanban teams can find that happy balance of planned work and emergent work while still maintaining discipline and continuous improvement.

As an example, we will build up a hybrid process for a hypothetical team to discuss the reasoning behind different combinations of practices that could be used. I will review 3 categories of hybrid ScrumBan delivery methods that are typically seen in the industry.