Events

Shy. Reserved. Introverted. You were hoping for passionate brainstorming and discussion of improvements, but you’re faced with awkward silences or only hearing from a few team members instead. In this session, we will review the parts of an effective retrospective and tips on how can you get the best from quiet team members during them.

When the codebase is ugly and deadlines are tight, most agile software teams don’t choose to address technical debt. Will this year be different for your organization?

Getting serious about technical excellence requires support from technical and non-technical roles. Join this learning lab to explore how technical debt occurs and get tips on how to help your organization turn it around.

Slicing user stories does not have to be painful. It can be a fun activity if you let it. Slicing stories can also be easy. Often not at first but using this simple slicing approach and pattern makes it easier over time. There are no stories that can't be sliced, so bring a story or two to this session. You can bring some that are not being completed in a sprint or ones that no one even wants to start given their "size". You will have an opportunity to slice those stories!

Strong working relationships with their team members are valuable assets for managers. There is a misconception that to build these relationships, you have to get deep into people's personal lives. In this session, we'll bust that myth by looking at how you can build connection and trust even if you only talk with someone about their work – regardless of whether or not you're their manager.

There’s a bunch of stuff that takes up your time and energy in your work, and it’s been growing. Unglamorous chores, administrative tasks, and bureaucratic activities… you may be feeling frustration and wishing you could say, “this isn’t part of my job!” In this session, we will review some of the other job roles that managers, Product Owners, and Scrum Masters commonly find themselves burdened with. We will walk through a structured reflection activity that you can use to evaluate your work activities. Gain insight into whether your tasks are adding value and decide how to prioritize them so your work is more sustainable.

Have you been on a quest to find a larger container of value beyond a user story? There can be value in grouping small slices of work (often user stories) into other “containers”. People do this to track work, communicate progress, see a big picture, focus on the simplest possible value, categories work, etc.   We will review each of these terms, define them, and talk about common issues. We will also share what we prefer and how that approach connects to stories and story slicing!

A well-managed backlog is one of the keys to effective workflow. Backlogs come in a variety of shapes and sizes. They are shaped by the beliefs and behaviors of the people maintaining them. Not all of these shapes, however, are beneficial. In this session, we'll explore some common backlog shapes along with their advantages and drawbacks. We will also look at how you can shift from where you are now to one that better fits your situation.

The idea of explaining agile to management is tricky in many ways.  One of the first things to do is to clarify assumptions. What and who is "management", what do they understand about agile, what do we understand about business, and what is important to them. These are quite often assumptions, not facts.  Then, we need to look at options to explain agile in a way align with the facts we know and what is important.  Simple. And who knows... maybe "management" is not the issue.

Company X delivered an innovative new feature, and now it’s a high priority for your team to deliver something similar. Seeing another company’s solution can push us to focusing on our speed of delivery. However, neglecting discovery work can lead to a mediocre customer response to our feature launch. This session will look at idea validation speed and the 3 types of assumptions we make when trying to catch up to our competitors. Discover what these assumptions look like in feature delivery and how to recognize which ones are the riskiest.

Working together effectively relies on people being able to say both "yes" and "no." But when was the last time you said "no" to your boss? And when was the last time someone gave you a "counterfeit yes" and didn't follow through with what they agreed to? This session will explore how power and positional authority affect people's ability to say no. We will also introduce three techniques to help you know that when someone says "yes," they mean it.