Agile Alliance’s premier event, Agile 2022 is back in Nashville, TN this year. Agile Alliance’s annual conference is dedicated to exploring, innovating, advancing Agile values and principles, and creating a space for people and ideas to flourish. The Agile2022 conference brings Agile communities together yearly to share experiences and make new connections.
Every time I attend this conference, I have to prioritize and miss out on some sessions to attend some others as multiple tracks run in parallel. So for now I am including all the sessions that I would love to attend and decide impromptu which ones to miss or attend.
Org Design Is Game Design: Make Yours a Cooperative One
Jessica Kerr, Monday July 18, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
How Code Practices Enable Agility
Amber Conville, Dustin Thostenson, Monday, July 18, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
Code writing practices are as varied as coding languages themselves. This session aims to discuss how code practices can enable agility — and if they can also get in the way.
David Wallace, Monday, July 18, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
While there have been many Agile frameworks since the publishing of the Agile Manifesto, they are not one-size-fits-all. One of the most common anti-patterns of the Agile mindset is to believe that one specific framework will solve all problems. This talk will help Agile practitioners understand why it is imperative to customize the frameworks and other tools you use. The talk will consider adopting the Agile mindset and creatively consider alternative solutions that are more customized for your team’s particular needs. The talk will also discuss a few real-world examples of what this looks like and will hopefully help attendees unlock the power of collaborative creativity in delivering custom solutions for their Agile teams and organizations.
What Parkrun Has Taught Me About Estimations, Pairing, Velocity, and Other Agile Concepts
Mia Horrigan, Matthew Hodgson, Monday, July 18, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
An avid Parkrun-er, the speaker, explains relative estimation as analogous to Parkrun. The requirement is the same – run a distance of 5 km. However, the time taken will vary widely between runners. Even though the parkrun is a set of 5kms, it takes the whole group to finish anywhere between 20 – 55 mins. So why don’t all runners finish at the same time? There are several factors to consider, including fitness, age, equipment, and expertise at running as well as the complexity of the course. The same is true with estimations for work products. There is natural variability between estimates by people based on context, team members’ capability, and so forth. This presentation is for people wanting to understand agile principles as it will share these and other training tips and techniques you can use with your teams.
“That Was Easy!” and Other Things Teams Say About Compliance
Brandon Carlson, Monday, July 18, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
The notion of ComplianceCompliance always makes Agile teams uneasy. In this talk, the presenter will discuss how to use existing and new tools to turn Compliance from a burden into a benefit. He will also discuss how you can integrate a compliance program into your CI/CD pipeline to cause no additional burden and make audits go more smoothly.
Woody Zuill, Monday, July 18, 2022, 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Too many meetings, technical debt, bugs, and multi-tasking, often hamper productivity, and often today’s temporary fixes become tomorrow’s problem. In this talk, the presenter will discuss how to Pay attention to what is working nicely and experiment with ways to make it even better. There are several benefits to this approach, and a big one is that as we “turn up the good” on things that are going well, many of the common problems fade away. The presenter will also look at examples of how this has worked out in practice and see how we can apply this in our daily work.
KonMari Your Backlog: Tidying Up Those PBIs
Julie Wyman, Monday, July 18, 2022, 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
The presenter wishes to apply the principles of the KonMari method to product backlog items (PBIs). She aims to start by exploring the costs of a large, cluttered product backlog and the benefits to be gained by tidying. The session will also hope to share step-by-step instructions on getting started, real-life examples, and potential pitfalls to avoid! By the end of the session, the presenter hopes you’ll know the next steps to take to realize the many benefits of a tidied product backlog – improved focus and visibility, increased self-organization, and easier decision-making.
Braving It Without Bulldozing It: Assertive Communication for a Win-Win Result
Jessica Katz, Monday, July 18, 2022, 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Assertiveness is the art of speaking boldly and with compassion, speaking confidently and humility, and speaking up while not over those around you. In this session, the presenter will discuss the essential tools to help work out this balance and build your emotional intelligence in conversations to be confident in your communications.
Simple and Effective Solutions to Agile Finance
Andrew Gosnell, Monday, July 18, 2022, 3:45 PM – 5:00 PM
Agile challenges today’s finance organizations that require innovative new approaches for success. Unfortunately, financial guidance related to agile is sparse and often lacks practical guidance for adoption. This presentation teaches the Agile Finance Framework with a focus on the theme of Goal-based Modeling, Benefit Refinement, and the Benefit Tracking Toolkit. The framework taught in this session utilizes straightforward approaches that maximize the financial success of agile in your organization.
A Radical Culture of Culture Building
Bethany Andres-Beck, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
Many organizations struggle to collaborate across organizational boundaries. We rely entirely on informal relationships or attempt to centralize cadence, planning, and decision-making. This informal-ness results in removed context and substituting metrics for relationships. Searching for an alternative, the present has discovered a tool for emergent governance: building a Culture of Practice. These self-organizing structures incentivize participation with natural rewards and promote experimentation rather than planning. Per the presenter, they require radical trust and an environment of sufficiency, and in exchange, they result in skilled, trustworthy organizations that, in short, are Agile. This talk will offer concrete examples of achieving such a goal across the organization with an up-front investment in such facilitators. It will also address the pressures that can lead this technique to fail and offer strategies for resisting the commodification of our development cultures.
Olivia Henry, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 9:00 AM – 10:15 AM
Organizations often result from unintentional design, leading to accidental complexity and the inability to maximize outcomes. As the Director of Engineering for a billion-dollar ads business, the presenter and his team decided to put their principles into practice by using two system design principles to organize its 100-person team – Domain Driven Design and BAPO (Business Architecture Process Organization). In this session, the presenter will discuss a real-world case study in applying these principles and how it’s progressing six months in!
“When Will It Be Done?!” and How to Remove This Thorn from Software Development
Zach Bonaker, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
It’s a very reasonable ask to know when something will be done. However, the urge to ask, “When will it be done?” is causing software projects to fail. In this interactive presentation, the presenter will present two simple ways to reframe estimation conversations, improving the ability to forecast and make better decisions. Furthermore, the presenter will discuss how reframing with the right questions improves relationships and increases trust, safety, and collaboration.
Agile DevOps Metrics: Let NUM8ERS Tell the Story
Jagdish Karira, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
Agile DevOps metrics enable product teams and leaders to measure critical business KPIs such as time-to-market, business agility, quality, productivity, predictability, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. Looking beyond vanity metrics, the presenter hopes to provide a practical approach for collecting metrics that enable transparency, establish trust and help product teams transform. These metrics provide meaningful, actionable, data-driven information to reduce lead time, failure rate, and time-to-restore. In addition, these metrics help us increase deployment frequency, productivity, quality, and throughput. The presenter will also provide examples of organizations where metrics-based rewards systems led to unintended consequences.
How Do I Get the Most from User Stories?
Inger Dickson, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
User stories are the basic building blocks that connect the “why” and the “what,” so developers can create the “how.” However, what if this vehicle isn’t communicating effectively? In this session, the presenter encourages everyone to bring user story doubts and curiosities and explore what isn’t working and what just might.
Developing a CLEAR Agile Product Roadmap
Robert Woods, Tuesday, July 19, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
We like to have a sense of predictability, quality, and adaptability in our efforts. So how do we keep everyone from the stakeholders to the team in sync with the outcomes we hope to achieve? What ways do we expect to get there, and what timelines can we expect to see results? How do we keep plans from being formed in a vacuum? How do we do data-driven decision-making, and how can we quickly adjust priorities when the need becomes evident? In this session, the presenter will discuss the CLEAR method to Agile roadmap development and its 5 step approach that ensures Product Leadership and their supporting teams are focused in the right areas. The talk will also discuss constructing a roadmap that allows for rapid and flexible delivery of valuable business outcomes.
Survival Metrics: Helping Teams Pivot to Change Instead of Planning to Failure
Wednesday, July 20, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
Product teams that recognize a change in direction are needed often don’t have a way to make that change quickly and safely. While the agile manifesto asks us to “practice responding to change over following a plan,” you cannot do that if you are unsure when to respond to change. This session will walk us through the steps to pivot rapidly with politically safe and data-informed decisions. The presenter will also show how to avoid sunk cost fallacy by having a pivot story and benchmarks before you need to change so you can be more agile.
Modelling Business Architecture & Team Topologies with Event Storming
Nick Tune, Zsofia Herendi, Wednesday, July 20, 2022, 2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
In this hands-on workshop, business, product, and technology leaders will learn about modern techniques used to design digital operating models for a fast flow of changes. The presenters will show how Event Storming is used to map out end-to-end business processes collaboratively and build a shared understanding of how the organization works. Attendees will then work in small groups to slice the Event Storm into business capabilities aligned to the business strategy. Following the identification of possible domain boundaries, the next step is to assess if the domain boundaries are appropriate value stream boundaries, aka team boundaries.
Test Your Unit Tests: Mutation Testing
Gene Gotimer, Thursday, July 21, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
A mutation testing framework like PIT from pitest.org tests your JUnit tests and shows you what you are and aren’t testing. If your unit tests all pass, mutation tests change a copy of your source code and rerun the tests to see if they catch the injected errors. If not, the mutation survives, and the code isn’t tested, even if code coverage tools suggest otherwise. The presenter will show you how to use mutation tests to build confidence in your unit tests. He’ll demonstrate using PIT mutation tests against JUnit tests and show how to use it to turn legacy code into safe-to-refactor Java.
Dustin Thostenson, Thursday, July 21, 2022, 10:45 AM – 12:00 PM
In this skit-based presentation, “Skylar” faces one problem after another. After they navigate each issue, we’ll pause to reflect. How could they make such a quick decision with confidence? Were they guessing? Is this something I could use in my day? The presenter will show the model guiding the decision both while Skylar is solving problems and while we reflect on them. The session will cover over a dozen models you could use immediately. The sessions will show how to avoid analysis paralysis and help others lead confidently.
In Pursuit of Value – The Unfortunate Reality for Many Scrum Teams
Rishi Markenday, Tomasz Maj, Elena Chong, Thursday, July 21, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
Agile is a great foundation to increase productivity and ensure continuous improvement. However, are we seeing better customer outcomes and company performance from adopting agile? In Agile teams, we often see that customers are not connected to teams, most team members don’t talk to the customer, and customers aren’t present at Sprint Reviews. In addition, there is no clear, measurable definition of success beyond the velocity of work completed. Producing things faster is the aim, rather than aiming for defined outcomes. In this session, the presenters discuss their research and initial findings. They will describe how companies typically have four key missed opportunities to focus on value and what organizations, teams, and individuals can do to add value by incrementally capturing those missed opportunities.
Inspect and Adapt Your Way to Customer Engagement
Kimberly Scribner, Thursday, July 21, 2022, 2:00 PM – 3:15 PM
Agile Marketing is a significant shift in how we think about and approach traditional marketing. This talk is intended to show the tools of Modern Marketing to understand what agile marketing means, how to activate agile marketing teams, and the tools and frameworks for embracing a more efficient and customer-centric way of working.
About the author
Vinayak Joglekar, Chief Technology Officer and Head of India Operations
Vinayak is the Chief Technology Officer and Head of India Operations at Excellarate (the combined entity of Synerzip and Prime Technology Group). Vinayak built and scaled Synerzip’s project teams by attracting and retaining top-notch talent in the fiercely competitive market in India. He took the entrepreneurial leap in 1983 after he quit a programmer-analyst position in Alfa-Laval.
Vinayak is a certified J2EE programmer and an architect with an active interest in Social, Mobile, Cloud, and Big Data technologies. Apart from being the CTO, he mentors bright minds in software development and product delivery.
