Much of the writing on minimum viable products (MVP) focuses on consumer internet products that are designed to target and satisfy a specific, narrow market need. Enterprise customers, however, tend to have more complex requirements and are unlikely to accept a basic product - especially via an RFP process, which is how most enterprises make purchasing decisions. This talk presents some techniques and tools to support building lightweight products that can cost-effectively address enterprise customers.

Speakers

Owen Rogers (@exortech)
Product lead, Pulse Energy

Owen Rogers is a Product Lead with Pulse Energy (http://www.pulseenergy.com/), a leading energy analytics software company for commercial buildings. For the past four years, Owen has been applying Lean Startup concepts to deliver software-as-a-service products to a rapidly evolving market. Before Pulse Energy, Owen was a consultant with Thoughtworks, coaching cross-functional teams in Canada, China, India and the UK. Owen worked with Naresh to organize the first Agile India conference, and he has spoken at a number of software conferences around the world.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-5-info

Cognitive scientists tell us that we are more productive and happier when our behavior matches our brain’s hardwiring—when what we do and why we do it matches the way we have evolved to survive over tens of thousands of years. One problematic behavior humans have is that we are hardwired to instantly decide who we trust. And we generally aren't aware of these decisions—it just happens. Linda Rising explains that this hardwired “trust evaluation” can get in the way of working well with others. Pairing, the daily stand-up, and close communication with the customer and others outside the team go a long way to overcome our instant evaluation of others. As Linda helps you gain a better understanding of this mechanism in your behavior and what agile processes can do to help, you are more likely to build better interpersonal relationships and create successful products.

Speakers

Linda Rising (@RisingLinda)
Independent consultant, Linda Rising LLC

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in a variety of domains. An internationally known presenter on patterns, retrospectives, agile development, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development, Linda has authored numerous articles and four books, the most recent: Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, with Mary Lynn Manns. Find more information about Linda at www.lindarising.org. 

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-6-info

If you're not looking to grow your team anytime soon, don't worry about attending this talk. When it came time to grow Obtiva in 2007, it was clear to me that we needed a two-pronged approach: we would hire the best people we could afford, and we would grow great developers through an apprenticeship program. In this talk, I will step through the evolution of this apprenticeship program, its progression from a team of 5, to consultancy of 50, to an engineering department of 500.

Speakers

Dave Hoover (@davehoover)
Learning Facilitator, DevBootcamp

Dave Hoover enjoys developing software developers while developing software. One of his life goals is to decentralize education. He writes about technology, learning, and apprenticeship. He helped grow Obtiva, Mad Mimi, Groupon, Code Academy, and Mobile Makers. He advises startups like StyleSeek in Chicago. He competes in endurance sports so that he can keep up with his wife and 3 kids.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-7-info

Find out how the Swedish police combined Kanban, Scrum, and XP in a 60-person project. This is a high-paced talk based almost entirely on photos, diagrams, and concrete examples. We’ll go beyond the basics and walk through the project step by step, from customer engagement, to the “daily cocktail party”, test, cross-team synchronization, multi-layer kanban boards, version control, metrics, and more. The project was finalist in the Swedish “Project of the Year” awards for 2011.

Speakers

Henrik Kniberg (@henrikkniberg)
Agile/Lean coach, Crisp

Henrik Kniberg is an Agile/Lean coach at Crisp in Stockholm. He enjoys helping companies succeed with both the technical and human sides of software development. During the past 15 years he has been CTO of 3 Swedish IT companies and helped many more get started with Agile and Lean software development. Henrik is the author of “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” and “­Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and “Lean from the Trenches“. These books are available in over 12 languages, have over 500,000 readers, and are used as primary guide to Agile and Lean software development by hundreds of companies worldwide.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lean Principles and Practices

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-8-info

Speakers

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-9-info

This mid 80’s declaration from the fashion industry has become synonymous with radical shifts in the norm of any field. Agile provided such a radical shift for traditional waterfall processes. Yet as Agile has matured, it is redefining itself at a pace that rivals the whims of the fashion industry. This presentation presents not only the (somewhat obvious) shifts from waterfall to Agile, but the second and third generation of shifts within the Agile community itself. Basics such as automated unit tests are falling away (“Deployment is the new unit test”). The overall message is to continue to question practices, and strive.

Speakers

Fred George (@fgeorge52)
Consultant, Fred George Consulting

Fred George is a consultant with over 44 years experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and over a dozen years doing Agile/XP. He counts at least 70 languages with which he has written code. A veteran of the IBM-Microsoft wars, Fred did early work in computer networking, LAN's, GUI's and objects for IBM. As an independent consultant from 1991-2003, he counted HP, Morgan-Stanley, American Express, IBM, and USAA among his clients. He gave the first Agile/XP experience report at OOPSLA in 1999 about an embedded system done in Java, and has mentored many clients in use of objects in Java under an XP process. He has shared the stage at JavaOne with Martin Fowler, acting as his foil, and assisted in XP Immersion sessions with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Robert Martin. Fred spent a year as a visiting lecturer at N.C. State University teaching Java programming to over 800 undergraduates, with a generous dose of object design, patterns, and XP practices thrown in. Fred joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, delivering yet more projects using agile processes. He has worked with clients in four countries since then, including a ten-month assignment in India (where he founded ThoughtWorks University), four months of projects in China, and a post in the London office. In 2007, he joined the London Internet advertising firm, Forward, bringing Agile practices to all aspects of the business, leaving to pursue industry change at the end of 2011. He has been writing about the post-agile work at Forward under the moniker of Programmer Anarchy. He believes in objects, Lean processes, fun in programming, and the client's successes. He holds a bachelors degree from N. C. State University in Computer Science, and a masters degree from MIT in the Management of Technology. Oh, and he still writes code!

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-11-info

At ThoughtWorks, we’re big fans of evolutionary architecture and emergent design, which allows great technological and business flexibility. But like many accelerants, it isn’t entirely free. This talk explores decisions made and consequences (both positive and negative) from a real world project that has used these techniques aggressively for 4 years.

Speakers

Neal Ford (@neal4d)
Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 250 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 1000 talks. Check out his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-12-info

How do you figure out where to start with XP/Agile practices? How to tell which practices should be used together, which can be safely set aside to begin with? How to predict the consequences, good and bad, of changing your software development processes?

These questions often confront managers new to XP or Agile processes. It turns out that there is a methodical and rigorous way of dealing with them: arising from the discipline known as "Systems Thinking", the use of Diagrams of Effects or Causal Loop Diagrams to understand the dynamics of software projects has, by now, become a standard tool in effective XP/Agile coaching.

This session introduces the notation and the modeling activity, then offers participant a chance to consolidate their learning by actually practicing DOEs.

Speakers

Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil)
Director, Institut Agile

Laurent Bossavit still likes to code though no longer doing so full-time. He was a recipient of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for contributions to Agile practice. He now heads Institut Agile, a privately funded, independent entity whose missions include growing the Agile business ecosystem, creating stronger links between the business and research communities interested in Agile approaches, and providing stronger empirical evidence on the benefits and limitations of Agile practices.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-13-info

Many development initiatives involve complex, challenging environments, which lead to projects not having the impact for which they were conceived. Karl Scotland introduces 5 leverage points from Kanban Thinking which can be used to intervene and achieve smooth flow, increased value, and improved potential. Karl shows how to design a Kanban System by studying the current context, creating a shared understanding of that reality, putting explicit limits in place, sensing the current capability, and continually learning to guide improvements. With these levers, you will be able to establish and evolve unique and relevant processes that will lead to greater success.

Speakers

Karl Scotland (@kjscotland)
Lean and Agile Coach, Rally Software

Karl Scotland is a versatile software practitioner with over 15 years of experience covering development, project management, team leadership, coaching and training. For the last 12 years he has been successfully applying Agile methods, and most recently has been a pioneer and advocate of using Kanban Systems for software development.Currently an Agile Coach with Rally Software in the UK, Karl is a founding member of the Lean Systems Society and the Limited WIP Society, and has previously championed Agile and Lean Thinking with the BBC, Yahoo! and EMC Consulting. Karl writes about his latest ideas on his blog at http://availagility.co.uk/

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lean Principles and Practices

Level

Expert

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-14-info

Speakers

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Expert

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-15-info

Using Measurement as levers rather than for feedback, is sin #1. What's the difference? Levers are employed to change someone else's behavior.Feedback is employed to improve your own performance. The distinction is subtle but critical.

One of the most basic tenants of Agile is to trust the insight of the people closest to the work. But, here's the dilemma... as Agile scales into the enterprise, organizations are demanding measurement. I have seen many presentations on measurement and they often start with a quote like this one from Lord Kelvin, "[When] you know something about [something]; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meagre and unsatisfactory kind." A measurement regime based upon this tenant is doomed to drive you to the "dark side". Rather, the introduction of measurement to the Agile domain requires that it complement and even amplify the qualitative insight of those closest to the work, NOT replace or counter it.

The above is just one example. This talk will walk you through the seven deadly "sins" to look out for when implementing an agile measurement regime, but it's not all fire and brimstone. We will leave you with a list of "heavenly virtues" or good practices to follow when implementing your measurement regime and we will present examples of companies that we have worked with and whose metrics regimes exhibit these virtues. This information should give you the means to bend your own execs towards risk evaluation rather than absolutes; toward measurement as an insight amplification and feedback mechanism rather than a club to beat people up; as something that your teams will seek out rather than something that they will dread.

Speakers

Steve Wolfe
Director, Product Marketing, Rally Software

Steve has over 20 years experience working on web services, desktop, and Unix software products in a variety of industries. His experience includes 7+ years on agile teams in Engineering Management, Project Management, Release Management, and Product Management roles. Steve's passions include helping organizations attain the Agile Business Intelligence needed to optimize decision making, steer planning, and improve team productivity. In his work, he strives to understand the needs of software teams and developers to help enable fast and effective software delivery using Rally products and services.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Enterprise Agile

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-16-info

"Mediocrity guaranteed." This sad tagline describes most of the processes we use today including typical agile process. It's easy to see why. Software development's an expensive risky business. To deal with the risk, the players involved adopt a client-vendor model where those in the client role give requirements and those in the vendor role estimate time and effort and agree to build what's asked for. In this model we clearly separate responsibilities so that we know who's accountable when things go wrong. Although we know things rarely go as planned, and innovative ideas rarely spring from such a relationship, we continue to work in processes where treating our coworkers as outsourced vendors is considered "best practice" and risking everything on the ideas of a select few isn't regarded as risky.

This talk is about an alternative way of working.

In this talk Jeff explores companies beginning to adopt a style of working where everyone in the organization gets involved with identifying and solving problems. You'll hear examples from real companies describing their practices for learning first-hand about customers and users, practices for collaboratively designing solutions for the problems found in the real world, and approaches to learning if what we created really benefited anyone. This new style of work is a process cocktail combining the best of agile development, lean software development and lean startup, user-centered design, and collaborative design thinking. This style of work isn't the traditional client-vendor model where knowing who's to blame is the primary concern. It's a co-making style of work where everyone brings their skills and experience to the table and together takes ownership for making great things.

Speakers

Jeff Patton (@jeffpatton)
Co-Founder, CoMakers

Jeff makes use of over 18 years experience with a wide variety of products from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records to help organizations improve the way they work. Where many development processes focus on delivery speed and efficiency, Jeff balances those concerns with the need for building products that deliver exceptional value and marketplace success.

Jeff currently works as a co-founder and principle consultant for Comakers LLC. He's an agile process coach, product design coach, and instructor. Current articles, essays, and presentations can be found at www.AgileProductDesign.com His writing appears in StickyMinds.com, Better Software Magazine, IEEE Software, Alistair Cockburn's Book Crystal Clear, and his forthcoming book User Story Mapping from O'Reilly press. Jeff's a Certified Scrum Trainer, and winner of the Agile Alliance's 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile Development.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

User Experience

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Tutorial

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-21-info

Most often we build products with minimal customer involvement. Lean Startups take a different approach and involve customers at every stage of product development. In this session, participants run a business based on the "Lean Startup" approach. The session starts off by playing a collaborative game that explores the marketplace. Participants organize themselves as self-organizing teams and try to run a profitable business by making "widgets". They sell the "widgets" to customer and during the course of game the teams learn what the customer wants (and is willing to pay for). The teams also track a few metrics to remain profitable. At the end of the game the facilitator debriefs with the participants on why Customer Validation is important. Note: This session is based on http://www.scrumalliance.org/events/618-nyc-scrum-user-group--august-meeting and my Agile DC session http://agiledc.org/presentation/lean-start-up-for-mere-mortals/

Speakers

Ram Srinivasan (@ramvasan)
Lean and Agile Coach, InRhythm

Ram Srinivasan is a transformation catalyst and works as an Agilecoach and trainer. He partners with his clients and uses his expertisein strategy, product management, Innovation Games®, and humanpsychology to create pragmatic solutions. He regularly conducts publicand private training sessions on Agile methodologies, Lean-Kanbansystems, coaching, facilitation, and Innovation Games®.

Ram has a project management background (PMP, CSP, PMI-ACP) and hasmore than 10 years experience working with start-ups, mid-size andlarge organizations (e-commerce, media, telecom, finance, andinsurance). He is an Innovation Games® Qualified Instructor, and isalso trained as an Organizational Coach (ORSC). His other interestsinclude lean start-ups, complex adaptive systems, change management,gamification, and conflict management.

Ram frequently speaks at local meet-ups as well as internationalconferences. He believes in contributing to the community and co-leadsthe webinar team for PMI Agile Community of Practice. He holds aMasters degree in Engineering from The University of Arizona and iscurrently based out of New Jersey. You can reach him atemail[at]ramvasan.com

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Activity/Game

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-20-info

We all know the benefits of short timeboxes for value delivery and so most people have a hard time understanding how Kanban, being iterationless, can be applied on software projects and other projects that benefit from disciplined continuous delivery. Iterationlessness is one of the main reasons why teams and organizations are often times reluctant to adopt Kanban. This talk is to bring understanding on how Kanban handles disciplined continuous value delivery even more effectively than well known agile methodologies.

Speakers

Masa K Maeda (@masakmaeda)
CEO and Principal Consultant, Valueinnova LLC

With 25 years of experience, Masa is the creator of Lean Value Innovation and a known figure in the Lean, Kanban, and Agile communities. He is currently an associate of David J. Anderson and Associates (Seattle); founder and president of Shojiki Solutions (Silicon Valley); co-founder and principal consultant of the Sego Innova enterprise group (Panama); and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium (Boston and Mexico). He is the founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Limited WIP Society and the Mexico chapter of the Agile Leadership Network. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ALN. He is also with UC Berkeley Extension and is an official service provider of the Lean-Kanban University. Masa did RandD at Apple Inc. and was a founding-team member at 4 startups in Silicon Valley that pioneered in the fields of genomics, online entertainment, online soicalization, and virtual worlds with secure online transactions. In Japan he did RandD at Justsystems, the topmost Japanese software company. Masa has a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Tokushima in Japan and a B.E. (honors) from the National University of Mexico. Masa is also a Kanban Trainer/coach, CSM and CSPO.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Lean Principles and Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-19-info

How to apply Scrum and agile principles when doing outsourced and "offshore" development? What should a commercial contract look like? What kinds of interactions should exist between the customer and supplier? Reflecting his time at Valtech, which helped created "agile offshore" at their center in Bengaluru India, and his consulting with various outsourcing-service consumers and suppliers in their adoption of large-scale Scrum, Craig introduces the key ideas for successful agile offshore development.

Speakers

Craig Larman
Management and Organizational-design Consultant, Craig Larman

Craig Larman serves as a management consultant, with a focus on organizational redesign and systems thinking, for high-value-throughput enterprises. His emphasis is scaling agile and lean thinking to very large, multisite, and agile offshore development (often, embedded systems, telecommunications, or investment banking), and coaching executive teams to succeed with larger enterprise-level agile and lean methods adoption; these topics are the subject of his latest two books:

• Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Thinking & Organizational Tools
• Practices for Scaling Lean & Agile Development: Successful Large, Multisite & Offshore Products with Large-Scale Scrum

Craig has served as the lead coach of lean software development adoption at Xerox, and serves as a consultant for large-scale Scrum and enterprise agile adoption at Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Alcatel-Lucent, UBS, Nokia Networks and Siemens Networks (now, NSN), Thomson Reuters, Statoil, Cisco-Tandberg, and at Schlumberger, among many other clients. Craig also serves as chief scientist at Valtech, a consulting, outsourcing, and skills transfer organization with divisions in many countries, with a division in Bangalore that applies agile methods to offshore development. In his role at Valtech, he created "agile offshore development" while living in India and China. His work focuses on product groups that involve a few hundred to a few thousand people, usually multisite.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Agile and Outsourcing

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-18-info

Speakers

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-22-info

"When we looked at the products we produced, we had to admit that they lacked greatness. Our customers were satisfied, but rarely were they delighted, enchanted, captivated by novel innovation or creative design. Our software looked like it was thought of one customer-driven feature at a time – which is more or less what happened. It became evident that conventional Agile/Scrum lacked the creative workflows to find the right product to build." So began the journey of one consulting firm from disciplined software development to disciplined creative innovation. These days the firm's customers aren't just satisfied, they are thrilled.

The defining characteristic of brilliant consumer products is the elegant combination of design and technology to create a product with a unified wholeness. It feels right. It works right. It makes sense. It's just what I wanted and I didn't know it until I saw it. In today's competitive environment, this sense of design is what makes products great and gives them staying power.

This talk is about returning the power of design to the people developing the product – it's about expecting our teams to grapple with the whole problem and engineer complete solutions.

Speakers

Mary Poppendieck (@mpoppendieck)
Founder, Poppendieck LLC

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager.

Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall." When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development.

Over the past several years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006, and a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Lean Principles and Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-23-info

Few topics have garnered as much attention in recent years than design and the notion that there is a kind of "design thinking" that can be effectively applied to the solution of complex, ill-formed, ambiguous, and "wicked" problems - the kind of problems dominating the attention of business today. This session will provide an understanding of what design thinking is, how it can be used, how it relates to and enhances various Agile practices and principles, and a set of patterns that provide a foundation for developing design thinking skills in individuals, teams, and organizations.

Speakers

David West
Consultant, Systems Design Studios, Ltd

Dave West has been a software professional for forty years, most recently as a consultant/coach in Agile, Design, and Enterprise-IT Integration. He has also been a professor for twenty years. He is the author of Object Thinking (Microsoft Press Professional) and has been a speaker at numerous conferences including SPLASH (nee OOPSLA), Onward!, Agile, and various PLoPs. He has graduate degrees in Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, and Cognitive Science along with an undergraduate education in Asian Philosophy.

Rebecca Rikner
CEO, Rikner.com

Rebecca is an award winning graphic designer and successful entrepreneur (she started her first design company at the age of 21). Her interests have expanded to include application of design principles to areas as diverse as web-sites, interactive events (she organized the highly successful patterns conference - The Design Pattern Roadshow), organizational structures, and business processes. Rebecca has extensive international experience, consulting on projects and organizing events in Scandinavia, India, Japan, and the U.S. She holds an Executive MBA degree from the prestigious Stockholm School of Economics.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Enterprise Agile

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-24-info

All changes are hard. Changes such as adopting agile methods are hard enough for a web application in a small company. Agile transformation in a big organization as ours is probably the most challenging and difficult changes for all, from top management to individual developers.

Agile values and principles sound all good but they are in conflicts with traditional thinking and way of working that we are all familiar with. What can help drive agile transformation in a company - no matter big or small?

We know that we want to have agile mindset and we want to build the agile mindset. Where could we possibly start?

This session is an experience session as an agile coach in Ericsson, on how we have successfully focused on behaviors of different roles (from managers, scrum masters, support functions, product owners, teams to individuals) to help build the agile mindset.

Speakers

Evelyn Tian (@TianEvelyn)
Agile Head Coach, Ericsson R&D China

Evelyn Tian has been working as an Agile Coach and is passionate about lean and agile transformation. She has been coaching organizations, management teams, development teams and individuals throughout the agile journey.

Evelyn is also a Certified Master Coach who draws pleasure from helping others and companies continuously improve, and generates positive energy.

Additionally, she is a trainer and facilitator for lean, agile, scrum, Kanban and leadership related training and workshop.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-25-info

Kenji will share the current Agile Adoption status, unique history and structure of Japanese software industry. He will also introduce Nonaka's concept of original Scrum and explore how it influenced the Agile movement. Prof. Nonaka is a grandfather of Scrum, who invented the word "scrum" in the classic 1986 paper "The New New Product Development Games".

Speakers

Kenji Hiranabe (@hiranabe)
CEO, Astah.net

An Agile software development practitioner and consultant in Japan. I think of software development as a form of communication game, and am always searching for better ways to make it more productive, collaborative, and fun. 2008 Gordon Pask Award Recipient for contributions to Agile practice.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-26-info

Speakers

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-27-info

Speakers

Time

05:00 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Expert

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-28-info

The Agile movement has been a step forward in helping us undersand how to improve the way we build software build. As Russell Ackoff would have said, we have learnt how to build the "thing right". However, some say that the Agile Manifesto provides less guidance on how to build the "right thing". This panel will explore whether Agile has resulted in lots of great software which has failed to delivered the anticipated outcomes or made any impact.

Moderator: Karl Scotland

Panelists: Linda Rising, Mary Poppendieck, Craig Larman and Jeff Patton.

Speakers

Karl Scotland (@kjscotland)
Lean and Agile Coach, Rally Software

Karl Scotland is a versatile software practitioner with over 15 years of experience covering development, project management, team leadership, coaching and training. For the last 12 years he has been successfully applying Agile methods, and most recently has been a pioneer and advocate of using Kanban Systems for software development.Currently an Agile Coach with Rally Software in the UK, Karl is a founding member of the Lean Systems Society and the Limited WIP Society, and has previously championed Agile and Lean Thinking with the BBC, Yahoo! and EMC Consulting. Karl writes about his latest ideas on his blog at http://availagility.co.uk/

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Panel

Level

Expert

Session Type

Panel

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-30-info

This is an immersive workshop that addresses an element often missing from agile retrospectives: the verification steps of inspecting and evaluating the improvement goal. We do this by applying the same ‘test’ conditions we apply to software, to the improvement process. This concept is already present in Lean problem solving techniques: A3 Thinking, which caters for significant problems at an organization level, and Kaizen, which is aimed more at individuals. This workshop adapts the experimental process for the agile team level, to create clear and testable retrospective goals, and follow through on evaluating the results.

Speakers

Cara Turner (@Cara_Faye)
Scrum Master and Coach, KRS Consulting

I'm a scrum master and coach with a passion for creating positive working environments for complex adaptive systems.

I place particular value on facilitation as a tool for harnessing the knowledge of teams and to direct meaningful and situationally relevant change, and ultimately find autonomy, mastery and purpose in our work.

I'm committed to sharing agile knowledge via coaching and mentoring in the Cape Town agile community and as a member of the Scrum User Group South Africa (www.sugsa.org.za).

The software industry has been my home for 10 years, with a prior background in fine art and collaborative creative projects, which feed directly into my experience of software development.

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-32-info

Agile has bred new ground for Tool vendors, Process Gurus, and other such specialists. However, this influx of “technology” has not created the process improvements promised for most projects. In this presentation, we debunk the myth that Agile can be successful in an organization simply by choosing a new tool set or designating Agile Masters of various varieties.

Speakers

Fred George (@fgeorge52)
Consultant, Fred George Consulting

Fred George is a consultant with over 44 years experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and over a dozen years doing Agile/XP. He counts at least 70 languages with which he has written code. A veteran of the IBM-Microsoft wars, Fred did early work in computer networking, LAN's, GUI's and objects for IBM. As an independent consultant from 1991-2003, he counted HP, Morgan-Stanley, American Express, IBM, and USAA among his clients. He gave the first Agile/XP experience report at OOPSLA in 1999 about an embedded system done in Java, and has mentored many clients in use of objects in Java under an XP process. He has shared the stage at JavaOne with Martin Fowler, acting as his foil, and assisted in XP Immersion sessions with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Robert Martin. Fred spent a year as a visiting lecturer at N.C. State University teaching Java programming to over 800 undergraduates, with a generous dose of object design, patterns, and XP practices thrown in. Fred joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, delivering yet more projects using agile processes. He has worked with clients in four countries since then, including a ten-month assignment in India (where he founded ThoughtWorks University), four months of projects in China, and a post in the London office. In 2007, he joined the London Internet advertising firm, Forward, bringing Agile practices to all aspects of the business, leaving to pursue industry change at the end of 2011. He has been writing about the post-agile work at Forward under the moniker of Programmer Anarchy. He believes in objects, Lean processes, fun in programming, and the client's successes. He holds a bachelors degree from N. C. State University in Computer Science, and a masters degree from MIT in the Management of Technology. Oh, and he still writes code!

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Expert

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-31-info

The concept of "value" is central to agile and lean software development - but how do we decide what is valuable, and on what basis? I will argue that determining value is not the responsibility of everyone - not just the "product owner" - and that in order to deliver value, the most important thing is to be able to measure it transparently, and to establish a fast feedback loop so we can quickly determine if what we're doing is in fact valuable. In this talk I will discuss several approaches to measuring value, how to maximize creating it, and how doing so affects the way teams work.

Speakers

Jez Humble (@jezhumble)
Principal, ThoughtWorks

Jez Humble is a Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010). He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-33-info

Speakers

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-34-info

Self-organization, or autopoiesis, is an essential aspect of agile teams, but remains a somewhat vague concept. This presentation will provide a solid understanding of what self-organization means and how it arises in biological and social systems, yielding seven principles that can be used to form a practice of nurturing and assuring self-organization. Some practical guidelines for coaches and managers will conclude the session.

Speakers

David West
Consultant, Systems Design Studios, Ltd

Dave West has been a software professional for forty years, most recently as a consultant/coach in Agile, Design, and Enterprise-IT Integration. He has also been a professor for twenty years. He is the author of Object Thinking (Microsoft Press Professional) and has been a speaker at numerous conferences including SPLASH (nee OOPSLA), Onward!, Agile, and various PLoPs. He has graduate degrees in Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, and Cognitive Science along with an undergraduate education in Asian Philosophy.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-36-info

ThoughtWorks’ Technical Advisory Board creates a “technolgy radar” 3 or 4 times a year, a working document that helps the company make decisions about what technologies are interesting and where we will spend our time. This is a useful exercise both for you and your company. This session describes the radar visualization, how to create litmus tests for technologies, and the process of building a radar. You need two radars. As an individual, a technology radar helps guide your career decisions and focus your precious R&D time. For your company, creating a radar helps you document your technology decisions in a standard format, evaluate technology decisions in an actionable way, and create cross-silo discussions about suitable technology choices. Attendees will leave with tools that enhance your filtering mechanisms for new technology and help you (and your organization) develop a cogent strategy to make good choices.

Speakers

Neal Ford (@neal4d)
Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 250 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 1000 talks. Check out his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-37-info

As more and more companies are moving to the Cloud, they want their latest, greatest software features to be available to their users as quickly as they are built. However there are several issues blocking them from moving ahead.

One key issue is the massive amount of time it takes for someone to certify that the new feature is indeed working as expected and also to assure that the rest of the features will continuing to work. In spite of this long waiting cycle, we still cannot assure that our software will not have any issues. In fact, many times our assumptions about the user's needs or behavior might itself be wrong. But this long testing cycle only helps us validate that our assumptions works as assumed.

How can we break out of this rut & get thin slices of our features in front of our users to validate our assumptions early?

Most software organizations today suffer from what I call, the "Inverted Testing Pyramid" problem. They spend maximum time and effort manually checking software. Some invest in automation, but mostly building slow, complex, fragile end-to-end GUI test. Very little effort is spent on building a solid foundation of unit & acceptance tests.

This over-investment in end-to-end tests is a slippery slope. Once you start on this path, you end up investing even more time & effort on testing which gives you diminishing returns.

In this session Naresh Jain will explain the key misconceptions that has lead to the inverted testing pyramid approach being massively adopted, main drawbacks of this approach and how to turn your organization around to get the right testing pyramid.

Speakers

Naresh Jain (@nashjain)
Tech-Startup Founder and Agile/Lean Evangelist, AgileFAQs

Geek at heart, Naresh is a tech-startup founder, building two lean-startups in India. Part of his time is also dedicated to help Software companies as an Agile/Lean Coach/Consultant. From Organizational Transformation to enhanced Developer productivity, Naresh helps organizations embrace, scale and sustain essential Agile and Lean thinking.

Over the last decade, as an independent consultant, Naresh has helped many fortune 500 software organizations and many startups deliver mission critical software solutions. Having played various roles of Founder, Agile Coach, Quality Evangelist, Technical Lead, Product Owner, Iteration Manager, Scrum Master, Developer, QA, Recruiter, Build Master, Mentor & Trainer, he is well equipped to help the entire organization rapidly adapt Agile and Lean methods.

Naresh was the Chair for the Agile India 2012 Conference, largest conference on Agile and Lean in Asia. He founded the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) in 2004. He is responsible for creating and organizing various international conferences including the Simple Design And Testing Conference (SDTConf) and Agile Coach Camp. He started many Agile User Groups including the Agile Philly User Group and groups in India.

Naresh is also the author and contributor to various open source tools like FitNesse, Panopticode, ProTest, DBFit, Qwick, to name a few.

In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community. At the moment, this is the most prestigious award in the Agile Community.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Agile Testing and Quality Assurance

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-59-info

Software Offshoring has its own challenges. Most of usbelieve that by practicing agile with onshore customers, we could overcome mostthe traditional challenges in software offshoring. But is it a reality to practice agile in onshore-offshore engagements? This session will closely look at the experiences of tryingto be agile in offshore services with various global markets . This is anexperienced sharing session from another offshoring destination about where it failed, challenged or being successful.

Speakers

Thushara W (@thush)
Chief Project Officer, Exilesoft (Pvt) Ltd.

Thushara Wijewardena has been playing various roles in project management profession over 10 years. During that time she has employed a variety of traditional and Agile processes for projects across geographies and business verticals. As the Chief Project Officer of Exilesoft, Thushara enjoys her day-to-day work with a pool of technical specialists and a diversified clientele/integrated teams distributed in Norway, Australia and Sweden.

Thushara is a speaker and a panel discussion member in many international conferences including P2P conference Cairo, Agile 2010 and 2011 In USA, Oredev developer conference in Sweden and Agile India 2012,Bangalore. Further she has experience of conducting PMI ACP workshops, agile seminars and community forums in NY, Oslo and Sweden.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Agile and Outsourcing

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-39-info

Speakers

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-40-info

User stories are a deceptively simple concept. Identifying a small bit of "software to build" as a user story seems easy enough, but agile teams everywhere struggle to really get the value out of them. User stories are simultaneously simple and sophisticated. They're full of paradox and contradiction. This talk is about that.

In this talk you'll see how user stories were built for conversation and how those conversations affect the details we write down. You'll learn why requiring more details in your stories don't help them get better. You'll learn how stories both shrink in size and grow in detail over time. You'll learn how stories can be "done" without software being finished. And finally, you'll learn how stories need to both be independent, and part of holistic story map describing your product. You'll leave with a deep understanding of why user stories are one of the best inventions of the agile community and how you can use them more effectively on your agile project.

Speakers

Jeff Patton (@jeffpatton)
Co-Founder, CoMakers

Jeff makes use of over 18 years experience with a wide variety of products from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records to help organizations improve the way they work. Where many development processes focus on delivery speed and efficiency, Jeff balances those concerns with the need for building products that deliver exceptional value and marketplace success.

Jeff currently works as a co-founder and principle consultant for Comakers LLC. He's an agile process coach, product design coach, and instructor. Current articles, essays, and presentations can be found at www.AgileProductDesign.com His writing appears in StickyMinds.com, Better Software Magazine, IEEE Software, Alistair Cockburn's Book Crystal Clear, and his forthcoming book User Story Mapping from O'Reilly press. Jeff's a Certified Scrum Trainer, and winner of the Agile Alliance's 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to Agile Development.

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-42-info

Software development is different from many other disciplines. It is unique because it is an engineering discipline that offers us a magical medium to express ideas that can come to life, in ways so different from the arts, music or written word. This duality of creativity and rigor creates such powerful and complex opposing forces that successful management of software projects is, perhaps, impossible. Agile software development has certainly prodded us to look in a promising direction, but I think we are still a long, long way from achieving that balance. In many cases, the way agile processes are implemented just increase this tension. To release some of that tension, takes an immense amount of courage and boldness from, both, the manager and the architect. In this talk, we will explore the duality and the interplay of the architect and the manager. Along the way, I will point out some agile landmarks that we need to stop and reconsider. I will also highlight some tweaks that I make to find my own balance. In doing so, I hope to scratch a little bit at the philosophical and quite literal question: "Are we there yet?".

Speakers

Aslam Khan (@aslamkhn)
Software Developer, factor10

After more than 20 years of developing software, I find that each time I learn something, it reveals is another mountain of things that I still don't know. More importantly, I have learnt that we can use software development to break down stereotypical social barriers, carve out new social contracts, and to restore dignity to individuals. I still spend my time trying to be a better developer, crawling with people that are trying to run, and sharing my lessons from software development and life equally. I currently head the South African operations for factor10, a leading software development consultancy founded in Sweden. I blog reasonably (in?)frequently at http://aslamkhan.net.

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-43-info

Kenji shares the roots of Lean concepts including Kaizen(Continuous Improvement), Gemba(Go see), Muda-Dori(Waste Elimination), WIP limitation, Pull production system, and “People” as the center of the process via a Japanese video showing a factory reconstruction to Lean.

Speakers

Kenji Hiranabe (@hiranabe)
CEO, Astah.net

An Agile software development practitioner and consultant in Japan. I think of software development as a form of communication game, and am always searching for better ways to make it more productive, collaborative, and fun. 2008 Gordon Pask Award Recipient for contributions to Agile practice.

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Lean Principles and Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-44-info

There’s a lot of buzz on Kanban right now in the agile software development community. Since Scrum has become quite mainstream now, a common question is “so what is Kanban, and how does it compare to Scrum?” Where do they complement each other? Are there any potential conflicts? Can an organization combine these techniques? The purpose of this session is to clarify Kanban and Scrum by comparing them, so you can figure out how these may come to use in your environment.

Speakers

Henrik Kniberg (@henrikkniberg)
Agile/Lean coach, Crisp

Henrik Kniberg is an Agile/Lean coach at Crisp in Stockholm. He enjoys helping companies succeed with both the technical and human sides of software development. During the past 15 years he has been CTO of 3 Swedish IT companies and helped many more get started with Agile and Lean software development. Henrik is the author of “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” and “­Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and “Lean from the Trenches“. These books are available in over 12 languages, have over 500,000 readers, and are used as primary guide to Agile and Lean software development by hundreds of companies worldwide.

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-45-info

Speakers

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Expert

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-46-info

Learn early, learn often. The faster you can learn from your customers the more effective your team can be in ensuring it is building the right thing. A core part of learning is done by listening to your customers and ensuring you are capturing customer feedback. The speaker will walk attendees through several tips for building, capturing and scaling feedback loops for software teams, using practical examples of what we've learned with software projects at Atlassian. Links to video Atlassian Summit 2010: http://www.atlassian.com/company/about/events/summit/2010/presentations/collaborat ion-and-projects/confluence-state-of-union.jsp Atlassian AtlasCamp 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ytdvekqf9s Atlassian Summit 2011: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVaH3zBTg#t=16m15s Atlassian Summit 2012: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2rPrHIlPL0&feature=playerdetailpage#t=1471s Feedback loops lightning talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0jn4TE30rU

Speakers

Sherif Mansour (@sherifmansour)
Senior Product Manager, Atlassian

Sherif Mansour has 11 years of experience in software development. He is currently Senior Product Manager for Atlassian, responsible for Confluence, a popular social collaboration tool for product teams. Sherif also recently played a key role in developing one of Atlassian’s new products: Team Calendars. Previously, he served as Atlassian’s Cross Product Integration Manager, ensuring a high quality experience for customers. Prior to joining Atlassian, Sherif worked in software development for a Web consultancy firm, and for Optus, the 2nd largest teleco in Australia. Areas of expertise include agile product development. Sherif thinks building simple products is hard and so is writing a simple, short bio.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-47-info

Ever wondered what was the relationship between team size and productivity? Then this session is for you. This talk will explain, how to create effective teams and what are the perspective and different dimensions you should take care of, when you form a team. We'll covers topics such as:

1. How to choose team size?
2. What are the different parameters which can be changed to optimize the productivity of the team?

Also learn some easy tips and tricks to increase the self organization in your team. Different factors which affect the team work and motivation.

Speakers

Ebin John P
Agile Coach, Societe Generale Gobal Solutions

Ebin John Poovathany is a lean/agile coach in Societe Generale Global Solution Center. He is currently strategizing and driving Agile transformation at SG globally.

With his expertise and deep experience with process, people and technology aspects of IT development and maintenance, he has successfully transformed several teams and is in the process of taking the transformation to the Enterprise level.

Previous to Societe Generale, he was working as an Agile Coach in Valtech where he was involved with many IT majors around the world including Alcatel Lucent and General Electric. He was also part of the Agile transformations in Nokia Siemens Networks.

Starting his career as a software programmer, he has worked as Scrum Master, Build Manager, Area Product Owner, Product Owner and Agile Consultant. His forte is a keen understanding of people and their behavior and has had remarkable achievements in creating self organized teams.

Ebin is a dual post graduate in Management (Managing IT Enabled Services from State University of New York, Buffalo and Managing Information System from Amritha Viswavidyapeetham).

He is so convinced about the need to constantly "Inspect and Adapt" that he made "It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change" – a quote from Darwin – his tagline.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-48-info

Managing software development projects are commonly accompanied by continued bouts of nausea brought on by churn in the process and missed expectations. Many organizations feel that they can battle this problem by stiffening their resolve to have stricter and stricter requirements and process guiding development from inception to production. But that formula does not usually work. This session will demonstrate that better results can from some fundamental changes in management approaches to the problem. Drawing on W. Edward Deming's "14 Obligations of Management", we will review the findings from Deming's famous "Red Bead Experiment" on its 31th anniversary, and discuss how this affects our day-to-day work leading and managing software development effort.

Speakers

Howard Deiner
Owner, Deinersoft, Inc.

Howard Deiner is an independent software consultant who specializes in Agile process and practices. He has a varied background spanning 38 years in the industry, with extensive domain knowledge in commercial software, aerospace, and financial services. He has played many of the roles in the development arena, such as developer, analyst, team lead, architect, and project manager. When not mentoring and developing organizations, he has also dabbled in the executive office, and wears the battle scars of the DotCom revolution proudly. He has applied the principles of Agile and XP Development in teams both large and small, for in-house as well as commercial environments, both in an organic setting, as well as the ordained setting. Howard has educated dozens of teams, and made Agile principles come to life in many settings. Howard has degrees in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering from SUNY at Stonybrook, as well as a Juris Doctor from Thomas M Cooley School of Law. Howard is a long standing member of the ACM and IEEE. Recent Speaking Engagements: Better Software Conference East, Orlando FL, USA, AgileDC 2012, Washington DC, USA, Software Architect 2012, London UK, IEEE/ACM Information Technology Professional Conference. Trenton ,NJ, USA Agile India 2012. Bangalore, India Software Architect 2011. London, UK Agile Alliance 2011. Salt Lake City. UT, USA Mile High Agile 2011. Denver, CO, USA.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-49-info

Much has been said about adoption failure and how to avoid it. However, articles and reports on this topic focus on applying the agile methodology improperly or on what is known as smells. This talk goes beyond that and covers other aspects, based on systems and lean thinking, that I consider much more important and have helped me and those I have transmitted this knowledge be more successful.

Speakers

Masa K Maeda (@masakmaeda)
CEO and Principal Consultant, Valueinnova LLC

With 25 years of experience, Masa is the creator of Lean Value Innovation and a known figure in the Lean, Kanban, and Agile communities. He is currently an associate of David J. Anderson and Associates (Seattle); founder and president of Shojiki Solutions (Silicon Valley); co-founder and principal consultant of the Sego Innova enterprise group (Panama); and a senior consultant with the Cutter Consortium (Boston and Mexico). He is the founder of the San Francisco Bay Area Limited WIP Society and the Mexico chapter of the Agile Leadership Network. He is a member of the coordinating committee of the San Francisco Bay Area chapter of the ALN. He is also with UC Berkeley Extension and is an official service provider of the Lean-Kanban University. Masa did RandD at Apple Inc. and was a founding-team member at 4 startups in Silicon Valley that pioneered in the fields of genomics, online entertainment, online soicalization, and virtual worlds with secure online transactions. In Japan he did RandD at Justsystems, the topmost Japanese software company. Masa has a Ph.D. and M.S. from the University of Tokushima in Japan and a B.E. (honors) from the National University of Mexico. Masa is also a Kanban Trainer/coach, CSM and CSPO.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-50-info

Cognitive scientists tell us that we are hardwired for deception - overly optimistic about outcomes. In fact, we surely wouldn't have survived without this trait. With this built-in bias as a starting point, it's no wonder that software managers and teams almost always develop poor estimates. But that doesn't mean all is lost. We must simply accept that our estimates are optimistic guesses and continually re-evaluate as we go. Linda Rising has been part of many development projects where sincere, honest people wanted to make the best estimates possible and used “scientific” approaches to make it happen - and all for naught. In many projects, because re-estimation was regarded as an admission of failure, the team spent too much time and endless meetings trying to "get it right." Offering examples from ordinary life - especially from the way people eat and drink - Linda demonstrates how hard it is for us to see our poor estimating skills and offers practical advice on living and working with the self-deception that is hardwired in all of us.

Speakers

Linda Rising (@RisingLinda)
Independent consultant, Linda Rising LLC

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in a variety of domains. An internationally known presenter on patterns, retrospectives, agile development, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development, Linda has authored numerous articles and four books, the most recent: Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, with Mary Lynn Manns. Find more information about Linda at www.lindarising.org. 

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-52-info

Although it is a simple value, the idea that individuals and interactions are more significant than processes and tools is overlooked perhaps more often than it is valued. Of course, processes and tools make a difference –– sometimes a very big difference –– but what determines whether a process or tool is effective is related to the individuals and interactions. To best achieve agility you need to start with the current context and understand how people actually behave in response to their environment, their beliefs and one another. What actually motivates and demotivates people, developers and other technical roles in particular? What psychology and cognitive biases influence everyday work? What actually makes their work easier or harder? Does making "business value" the centrepiece of what they do actually motivate the people who ultimately produce such business value? Or is it more about the individuals and interactions?

Speakers

Kevlin Henney (@KevlinHenney)
Director, Curbralan

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-53-info

Agile methods were initially designed around small, highly interlocked co-located teams. When building such small teams or an organization ground-up, the leadership has enough flexibility to define DNA and org structure of the organization around agile values. However, a different set of process, organizational and cultural issues crop up when you try to transform and scale up agile development paradigm across a fairly large existing organization. There is enough theory and frameworks available to help such change management, but the real-world issues often act as a forcing function, and the leaders and practitioners need to find creative solutions to implement without compromising either the agile value or the organizational ethos. At Yahoo!, we recently decided to move the entire product organizaiton towards agile way. Given the nature of work we do, the cultural values we share, and the rather chequered history of agile we have at Yahoo!, this has been a great learning experience. In this talk, I will talk about how we went about this transformation, what kind of issues we faced, and how we created unique solutions to best address organizational priorities while still maintaining focus on agile values.

Speakers

Tathagat Varma (@tathagatvarma)
Sr. Director, Business Operations, Yahoo! India R&D

Tathagat has been involved with hi-tech software product development over the two decades with Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), and subsequently with Siemens Telecom, Philips Medical Systems and Philips Digital Networks divisions, Huawei Technologies, McAfee and NetScout Systems prior to joining at Yahoo! in significant technical and leadership roles, including starting-up and heading India operations for NetScout Systems between 2004 and 2009. His core expertise is large-scale new product development, project management, strategic program management, software engineering, process improvement, agile software development, general management, leadership development, organizational change management, cultural transformation and outsourced product development. At Yahoo!, he leads strategic programs, including center-wide agile adoption, business operations and outsourced product development.

Tathagat holds an MSc Computer Science from JK Institute of Applied Physics and Technology, Allahabad University, a Post Graduate Certificate in HR Management (PGCHRM) from Xavier Labor Research Institute School of Business and Human Resources (XLRI), Jamshedpur and Certificates in Business Leadership Skills, Executive Leadership and Financial Management from Cornell University, USA. He is also a PMP, PRINCE2, CSM, Sr. Member IEEE.

Tathagat volunteers with PMI (NPDSIG) and IEEE Technology Management Council and has been a visiting faculty on Project Management and Business Ethics courses. He has authored and presented multiple papers and talks at national and international conferences, and is a sought-after speaker in the industry on these topics. He also blogs on his views on strategy, leadership, execution and management of software development at http://www.managewell.net.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-54-info

Startup work is full of really tough constraints - a handful of team members, ultra fast turnaround requirements, rapid deployments, tight feedback cycles, lots of multitasking. Faced with these constraints, many teams turn to ad-hoc development in an attempt to "just get things done". Pretty soon you have tons of technical debt, it takes ages to test, its impossible to get releases out, and the feedback cycle is bust. The good news is that its easy to setup a simple Kanban process that is extremely lightweight and perfect for startups. And, we'll take a look at end-to-end Kanban which goes beyond the development team, and into marketing, sales and customer development.

Speakers

Siddharta G (@toolsforagile)
Director, Silver Stripe Software

My primary interest is in improving the way software is delivered. I take great interest in lean and agile software development methodologies. I am also interested in the social aspects of software development and how it relates to the technical aspects. I started a company, Silver Stripe Software Pvt Ltd, to work further in the area of software process. I help conduct Lean and Agile software development events and seminars in Chennai, India through the Chennai Agile User Group. I am also a part of the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) and help organise ASCI events in Chennai.

I’m also one of the organizers of Proto.in, a bi-annual event that showcases startup companies to an audience of venture capitalists, technologists and media, and the co-organizer of the Chennai OpenCoffee Club, a place where entrepreneurs from Chennai meet once a month.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-55-info

Speakers

Time

03:15 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-56-info

Early-stage startups pivoting to achieve product-market fit is all the rage in Silicon Valley. However, for companies with established products and an existing customer base, pivoting can be a fairly painful and difficult process. This experience report covers my company's experiences, trials and rewards, of pivoting to pursue a new market with a new product without sacrificing our existing revenue stream.

Speakers

Owen Rogers (@exortech)
Product lead, Pulse Energy

Owen Rogers is a Product Lead with Pulse Energy (http://www.pulseenergy.com/), a leading energy analytics software company for commercial buildings. For the past four years, Owen has been applying Lean Startup concepts to deliver software-as-a-service products to a rapidly evolving market. Before Pulse Energy, Owen was a consultant with Thoughtworks, coaching cross-functional teams in Canada, China, India and the UK. Owen worked with Naresh to organize the first Agile India conference, and he has spoken at a number of software conferences around the world.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-57-info

From about 2000 years, in many European languages, a black swan was a metaphor for something that was clearly impossible. And then black swans were found in Australia. So a black swan became a metaphor for a completely unexpected event actually occurs, one we had not imagined was impossible. Black swans appear regularly – Skype, iPhone, the Cloud…. If a black swan landed in your marketplace, would you recognize it? Most companies don't. It's no coincidence that the average age of companies – big companies – is falling fast, at the same time that black swan events are increasing.

You never see black swans coming – you have to be ready to respond when they arrive. This talk is about the kind of thinking and organizational structure that can help you live successfully with the black swans. It is about how to build an innovative, responsive, enduring organization.

Speakers

Mary Poppendieck (@mpoppendieck)
Founder, Poppendieck LLC

Mary Poppendieck started her career as a process control programmer, moved on to manage the IT department of a manufacturing plant, and then ended up in product development, where she was both a product champion and department manager.

Mary considered retirement 1998, but instead found herself managing a government software project where she first encountered the word "waterfall." When Mary compared her experience in successful software and product development to the prevailing opinions about how to manage software projects, she decided the time had come for a new paradigm. She wrote the award-winning book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit in 2003 to explain how the lean principles from manufacturing offer a better approach to software development.

Over the past several years, Mary has found retirement elusive as she lectures and teaches classes with her husband Tom. Based on their on-going learning, they wrote a second book, Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash in 2006, and a third, Leading Lean Software Development: Results are Not the Point in 2009. A popular writer and speaker, Mary continues to bring fresh perspectives to the world of software development.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Expert

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-58-info

The waterfall (mechanical/blueprint) approach to software development allowed us to manage some simple problems (with a couple of variables) such as computerization of credit and debit accounts in banks and some problems with statistics, such as early MIS programs. Far more difficult are problems with a dozen or so variables that interact non-linearly. (For example the life sciences now trying to understanding aging or growth or, for software, trying to develop software that can actually support a changing client culture.)

On Agile projects we try to organically 'grow' software through iterations and develop robust software. However this is not easy on complex problems. We often find ourselves lacking the right kind of thought process and tools to be able to manage such project.

This presentation offers one partial approach to working on such problems. The talk is inspired by two unlikely bedfellows. On one hand are the musings of IDEO's Peter Coughlan on 'design experience.' On the other hand are the methodologies of the English philosopher J.G. Bennett on how to parse and analyze experience. Bennett's approach offers an interesting tool to look at interaction and conditionality among variables. In this presentation we would take Bennett's easiest unit of conditionality, the triad, and show all the (6)modes of permutation and how we find them in typical problems to solve in software.

• Automatic Pilot - routinization of lower level tasks (i.e. travelocity for tickets)
• Creation - novel solutions with a 'lock and key' quality
• Identity Fading into View - a incremental increase in skill (like the constructs in computer games)
• Gravity Applies - handling industries based on regulations
• Intensification - using the computer to reach new levels of understanding as in certain economic modeling
• Release into New Freedoms - how one platform can lead to another ie. how facebook led to new forms of marketing.

The participants will

(a) gain a practical introduction to Bennett,
(b) grasp the specifics of how variables interact, and
(c) see how this offers them a new handle on end user culture and demands.

Speakers

Jenny Quillien
Professor of Management, New Mexico Highlands University

Dr. Jenny Quillien enjoys both French and American citizenship, a long standing academic and consulting career in both of her 'base' countries, and international experience in over 30 nations. She is currently Professor of Management for New Mexico Highlands University (NMHU) and Program Coordinator for their School of Business in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

A personal interest in vernacular architecture led Jenny to the work of Christopher Alexander and a collaboration of six years with him on the manuscript that became The Nature of Order. Jenny was also one of the cofounders of Alexander's first website patternlanguage.com

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-38-info

This talk aims to throw light on how students are prepared to face the Agile world by learning Agile the easy, fun and experiential way at class. The talk will advocate why this elective was designed, the approach behind the running of the class, topics covered and the learning environment provided to learn Agile the agile way. The learner of agile methods and techniques in school (MTech Software Engineering level) should cross the learning bridge and become a "believer" and practitioner of Agile in industry. For this transformation to be successful, an agile learning approach of "do it & learn it" is designed for running the class. This course provides a holistic understanding of Agile Project management by covering topics like Business case & selection of agile projects, Agile Leadership & Governance, Agile Estimation & Planning techniques, Agile Methodologies, Agile Tools, Agile Capability Assessment, and Agile Challenges & Pitfalls etc.

Takeaways for participants attending this session:

• Building Bridges - understand how students are prepared for the Agile world
• Share a framework for conduct of the Agile Project Management Elective in a school environment
• Critique the suitability of the course in preparing students for the Agile world

Speakers

Jagadeesh B
Associate, Software Engineering Programme, National University of Singapore

Jagadeesh is part of National University Singapore, Institute Of Systems Science (NUS-ISS). His academic & professional interests include areas related to Agile Training & Consulting, Agile Project Management, Advanced Software Estimation, Software Process Improvement, IT Audits and Software Engineering Process.

Jagadeesh has over 14 years of experience spread across roles like Agile Consultant, SCRUM Master, Agile Coach, Program Manager, PMO/CMMI Consultant, SEPG Head, Process Auditor, ITIL Consultant, Six Sigma team member etc. Jagadeesh has rich & varied consulting experience in several countries across the globe in areas like Agile Project Management, Program Management, CMMI, Metrics, ISO 9001, ITIL & Six Sigma consulting. As part of his work experience he has mentored & led a large pool of software engineering consultants, has headed the Software Engineering Process Group (SEPG) of a large banking organization, has been a CMMI SCAMPI Class A Assessment Team Member for several appraisals & has handled several Internal & external quality audits.

He has also taught Diploma Level courses for “Advanced Diploma in Quality Management” course students during his tenure at Amity soft. His current Doctoral research is in the field of Management & his topic is related to “Social Networks”. He also has research interest in areas related to Agile Leadership, Agile Motivational theories and Agile Project Management.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Leadership and Org Transformation

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-60-info

Agile practices are sometimes considered an 'overhead' by product teams that are used to a more free-wheeling culture of innovation, and sometimes considered too 'lightweight' for developing large enterprise-class products that require high availability or reliability requirements to be rigorously baked into the product. Similarly, for companies that manage outsourced application development and product maintenance work, the notion of delivery reliability and predictability is paramount from their customer's perspective, and hence leaves little scope for innovating service delivery processes. On the other hand, we do have examples of application of agile, lean and lean startup practices leading to highly successful innovation, especially in web-based startups.

So, is it a right hypothesis that agile kills innovation, or are there critical success factors that we could learn from? Is it possible to tailor agile methods to accelerate innovation in different domains? Can services companies innovate their service offerings using agile practices and create win-win proposition for their customers and themselves?

In this session, we will explore this question with experts, practitioners and business leaders, and try to understand what, why and how it has worked for them?

Moderator: Tathagat Varma

Panelists: Sudipta Lahiri, Sujatha Balakrishnan, Prafull Pillai, Owen Rogers and Henrik Kniberg

Speakers

Tathagat Varma (@tathagatvarma)
Sr. Director, Business Operations, Yahoo! India R&D

Tathagat has been involved with hi-tech software product development over the two decades with Defense Research and Development Organization (DRDO), and subsequently with Siemens Telecom, Philips Medical Systems and Philips Digital Networks divisions, Huawei Technologies, McAfee and NetScout Systems prior to joining at Yahoo! in significant technical and leadership roles, including starting-up and heading India operations for NetScout Systems between 2004 and 2009. His core expertise is large-scale new product development, project management, strategic program management, software engineering, process improvement, agile software development, general management, leadership development, organizational change management, cultural transformation and outsourced product development. At Yahoo!, he leads strategic programs, including center-wide agile adoption, business operations and outsourced product development.

Tathagat holds an MSc Computer Science from JK Institute of Applied Physics and Technology, Allahabad University, a Post Graduate Certificate in HR Management (PGCHRM) from Xavier Labor Research Institute School of Business and Human Resources (XLRI), Jamshedpur and Certificates in Business Leadership Skills, Executive Leadership and Financial Management from Cornell University, USA. He is also a PMP, PRINCE2, CSM, Sr. Member IEEE.

Tathagat volunteers with PMI (NPDSIG) and IEEE Technology Management Council and has been a visiting faculty on Project Management and Business Ethics courses. He has authored and presented multiple papers and talks at national and international conferences, and is a sought-after speaker in the industry on these topics. He also blogs on his views on strategy, leadership, execution and management of software development at http://www.managewell.net.

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Panel

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Panel

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-61-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-62-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-63-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-64-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-65-info

This session describes the current thinking about emergent design, discovering design in code. The hazard of Big Design Up Front in software is that you don’t yet know what you don’t know, and design decisions made too early are just speculations without facts. Emergent design techniques allow you to wait until the last responsible moment to make design decisions. This talk covers four areas: emergent design enablers, battling things that make emergent design hard, finding idiomatic patterns, and how to leverage the patterns you find. It includes both proactive (test-driven development) and reactive (refactoring, metrics, visualizations, tests) approaches to discovering design, and discusses the use of custom attributes, DSLs, and other techniques for utilizing them. The goal of this talk is to provide nomenclature, strategies, and techniques for allowing design to emerge from projects as they proceed, keeping your code in sync with the problem domain.

Speakers

Neal Ford (@neal4d)
Director / Software Architect / Meme Wrangler, ThoughtWorks

Neal Ford is Software Architect and Meme Wrangler at ThoughtWorks, a global IT consultancy with an exclusive focus on end-to-end software development and delivery. He is also the designer and developer of applications, instructional materials, magazine articles, courseware, video/DVD presentations, and author and/or editor of 6 books spanning a variety of technologies, including the most recent The Productive Programmer. He focuses on designing and building of large-scale enterprise applications. He is also an internationally acclaimed speaker, speaking at over 250 developer conferences worldwide, delivering more than 1000 talks. Check out his web site at nealford.com. He welcomes feedback and can be reached at nford@thoughtworks.com.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Tutorial

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-72-info

These days testing is considered an increasingly sexy topic for programmers. Who'd have thought it? What is the motivation for unit testing? And what constitutes a good unit test? There's more to effective unit testing than just knowing the assertion syntax of a framework.

Testing represents a form of communication and, as such, it offers multiple levels and forms of feedback, not just basic defect detection. Effective unit testing requires an understanding of what forms of feedback and communication are offered by tests, and what styles encourage or discourage such qualities.

What style of test partitioning is most common, and yet scales poorly and is ineffective at properly expressing the behaviour of a class or component? What styles, tricks and tips can be used to make tests more specification-like and scalable?

Speakers

Kevlin Henney (@KevlinHenney)
Director, Curbralan

Kevlin is an independent consultant and trainer based in the UK. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He has been a columnist for various magazines and web sites, including Better Software, The Register, Application Development Advisor, Java Report and the C/C++ Users Journal. Kevlin is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of the 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know site and book.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-73-info

I was 25 years old when I decided to switch careers from family therapist to software devleoper. A couple years later, I read Pete McBreen's "Software Craftmanship" and was introduced to the concept of apprenticeship. I immediately starting searching for the sort of apprenticeship that Pete had written about. I found it at RoleModel Software, but by the time I had found RoleModel in 2003, they weren't hiring. So I pieced my own apprenticeship together, and eventually was hired by ThoughtWorks in 2004. A year later, I began writing about and researching effective apprenticeships, based on my experiences and those that I was interviewing. The patterns that my co-author and I discovered were recorded in our book, Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman. Come learn some tried-and-true ways to level-up your skills and career.

Speakers

Dave Hoover (@davehoover)
Learning Facilitator, DevBootcamp

Dave Hoover enjoys developing software developers while developing software. One of his life goals is to decentralize education. He writes about technology, learning, and apprenticeship. He helped grow Obtiva, Mad Mimi, Groupon, Code Academy, and Mobile Makers. He advises startups like StyleSeek in Chicago. He competes in endurance sports so that he can keep up with his wife and 3 kids.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-74-info

Creating automated end-to-end functional acceptance tests is hard. Maintaining them over time is harder. Some agilistas even claim that the cost outweighs the benefit. In this tutorial, Jez will explain how to create valuable, maintainable acceptance test suites and keep costs under control. First, he describes how to layer acceptance tests to reduce coupling between the test harness and the system under test. Then he discusses how teams should be organized in order to efficiently manage acceptance test driven development. Next Jez shows how to manage the evolution of acceptance tests by organizing them as scenarios rather than as suites of story tests. Finally he discusses how to manage data for acceptance tests.

Speakers

Jez Humble (@jezhumble)
Principal, ThoughtWorks

Jez Humble is a Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010). He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.

Badrinath J (@badrij)
Tech-lead, ThoughtWorks Studio

Badri is a developer with ThoughtWorks Studios. Well, that is an understatement of sorts. For over 10 years, and counting, he has worked with ThoughtWorks as a consultant/coach with various clients and then as a developer/tech-lead on the Mingle team. Over the past year he has been working on multiple efforts to bring the various Studios products together in a suite.

Apart from being a inveterate geek, Badri is also a big-time foodie and enjoys cooking, hiking and music.

Time

11:00 AM - 12:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Agile Testing and Quality Assurance

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-75-info

Speakers

Time

11:00 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Expert

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-76-info

For years, automobile companies have utilized "Mistake Proofing" as a technique for ensuring high quality, high speed manufacturing - especially in mass scale production. This is also known as Poka-Yoke (in Japanese) and was adopted and formalized as part of the Toyota Production System. In this talk, I intend to build awareness of how Mistake Proofing Poka Yoke techniques can be utilized to design and develop software, especially in Distributed teams, where face-to-face communication and over-the-table shouts aren't possible. Mistake Proofing interlocking techniques will automatically take care of ensuring that people don't make mistakes, don't deviate from standard procedures, don't break localization, and don't introduce bugs inadvertently into the system. You may call this: 'Poka Yoke Aided Software Development.'

Speakers

Gurpreet Luthra (@zenx)
Senior Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Gurpreet Luthra is currently a Senior Consultant at ThoughtWorks and has spent over 10 years in the Software Industry - most of it in Product Development on the Java stack.

Prior to ThoughtWorks, he worked for a start-up called Performix building a next-gen Manufacturing Execution System for Pharma & Chemical Shop Floor operations called xMES.

Gurpreet loves to code and build systems which are elegant, powerful and yet maintainable. He is always on the lookout for building software "smartly". He loves reading non-fiction, and also plays the guitar.

At ThoughtWorks, besides being a techno-geek, his interests lie on working in Social Impact Projects (http://sip.thoughtworks.com): Software that makes a positive impact to society.

Time

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-77-info

Speakers

Time

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Open Space

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-78-info

A major point of contention between IT departments and their business counterparts, be they internal users or product managers, is the lack of responsiveness to change in IT systems. How these systems got to this condition is one question, but this talk addresses the issue of how to change the situation. Making a system maintainable requires new tools and processes. This talk will describe the various techniques that transform a system to one that can be readily enhanced and provide the warning mechanisms that prevent inadvertent drift back into the mud. Both senior technical people and business leaders whose responsibilities include driving business results through IT systems will see how these techniques can make them more effective in growing the organization in the fact of competition and a changing, challenging business climate.

Speakers

Rebecca Parsons (@rebeccaparsons)
CTO, ThoughtWorks

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 20 years' application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. Rebecca has published in both language and artificial intelligence publications, served on numerous program committees, and reviews for several journals. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as Director's Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.

Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-80-info

Commercial software development teams that practice Agile are confronted with daunting challenges in optimizing operations. In particular, the primary challenges faced are in shorter development sprint and bottle neck at QA gates for operations. This session provides an overview of Devops value proposition and business benefits. It also focuses on how CollabNet's engineering and operations team is overcoming these challenges and thus delivering faster and with a much better fit to Devops requirements.

Speakers

Venkat Janardhanam
Director of Engineering, CollabNet

Venkat has experience in mentoring and managing large development project teams throughout the life cycle of the project. Venkat has worked in multiple methodologies from RUP to Agile. Venkat currently works at CollabNet as Director of Engineering responsible for delivery of TeamForge software that is an Application Life Cycle Management (ALM) product. Venkat constantly contributes to the agile transformation for the product development team who are distributed across the globe.

Venkat has progressive experience from developer to architect to project management. Venkat is results-oriented IT strategist with extensive program and project management, coupled with a proven record of developing long-range strategies for business-aligned IT best practices and architectures, as well as building and nurturing customer relationships. Venkat utilizes cradle-to-grave program management techniques and forward-focus to develop standardized business models, substantially reducing business risks. Janardhanam Venkat has 19 years'’' experience in software development industry.

Venkat holds MBA from Penn State in New Ventures and Entrepreneurship. Venkat also holds MS in Computing from University of North London UK and Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from Madras University.

Time

01:30 PM - 02:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

DevOps

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-126-info

Exercise the left and right side of your brain with this enjoyable deep dive with Joe Justice. Together we will design and build a modular car in miniature, similar to the WIKISPEED ultra-efficient road car, using Contract First Engineering, Object Oriented Manufacturing, Continuous Deployment for Flow Based Manufacturing, Test Driven Manufacturing, and more. This session is great for software practitioners, those new to Agile methods who may benefit from a hands-on example, and those looking for concrete practices to apply Agile beyond software delivery teams.

Team WIKISPEED entered a $10 Million competition to produce road legal 100+ mpg cars. They built the impossible in three months. Joe Justice will talk about Agile practices applied to enormously speed up physical manufacturing. Joe leads WIKISPEED, a team of 150 volunteers in 15 countries, and walks through how their 100 MPG road car was made possible through modular design, iterative development, and Agile project management. Joe takes a deep dive on exactly how Agile from software projects is applied to physical engineering and manufacture. Joe will use the example and of the design and development of their revolutionary 100 mpg, gasoline powered, four-seat car with a target price of $17,995.

This ground breaking work expands the agile process to design and manufacturing of the car. The talk will provide tools and take-aways for engineers and executives, in manufacturing and software, looking to improve their processes. New professionals and students can see examples of the value found in pairing, prioritized backlog driven development, and extreme programming, as they see the methodology jump from software teams to research, manufacturing, and product engineering.

Speakers

Joe Justice (@WIKISPEED)
Founder, CEO, WikiSpeed

Joe's team tied for 10th place in the mainstream class of the 2010 Progressive Insurance Automotive X Prize, a $10 million challenge for 100+ MPG automobiles. WIKISPEED now uses agile processes to solve problems for social good. Joe has spoken to audiences at TEDx, Denver University, University of California Berkley, Google, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Rotary International, and others about social web application development, project methodology, and agile best practices. He is CEO of WIKISPEED and works at SolutionsIQ, a leading provider of Agile consulting, certified training, coaching, development, and Agile talent services, where he helps clients leverage Agile project management and team development methods to deliver solutions more reliably.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-82-info

Speakers

Time

01:30 PM - 02:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-83-info

Speakers

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-84-info

Craftsmanship advocates talk about apprentices, journeymen, and masters and have a clear understanding of what it means to be an apprentice or a journeyman, but mastery remains ill defined and ambiguous. This session will present a clear and assessable model of mastery and provide a path for individuals to achieve mastery.

Speakers

David West
Consultant, Systems Design Studios, Ltd

Dave West has been a software professional for forty years, most recently as a consultant/coach in Agile, Design, and Enterprise-IT Integration. He has also been a professor for twenty years. He is the author of Object Thinking (Microsoft Press Professional) and has been a speaker at numerous conferences including SPLASH (nee OOPSLA), Onward!, Agile, and various PLoPs. He has graduate degrees in Computer Science, Cultural Anthropology, and Cognitive Science along with an undergraduate education in Asian Philosophy.

Time

02:00 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-85-info

How do we try to break down the wall between an operations team and development teams? I will talk about what we have done at Atlassian when we started our first Hosted Operations team - what worked, and more importantly what didn't work. How did we change our process and how did we try to maximise the feedback we could give back to product teams - closing the loop.

By the end of this talk, you will understand the issues Atlassian faced with DevOps and how they went about solving them. Hopefully this will prevent your teams from making the same mistakes in the future.

Speakers

Ryan Thomas (@hobos_delight)
Development Team Lead, Atlassian

Ryan is a software engineer and now team lead at Atlassian with 8 years of industry experience. He currently leads a group of engineers at Atlassian working on scalable deployment tooling for Atlassian OnDemand and works closely with the operations and infrastructure teams. Ryan has been with Atlassian for three years, and previously held positions at Oracle, Hyperion, Objective and a small Australian startup.

Time

02:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

DevOps

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-87-info

SOA, service-oriented architectures, burst on the scene in the new millennium as the latest technology to support application growth. In concert with the Web, SOA ushered in new paradigms for structuring enterprise applications. At the Forward Internet Group in London, we are implementing SOA in unusual ways. Rather than a few, business-related services being implemented per the original vision, we have developed systems made of myriads of very small, usually short-lived services. In this workshop, we will start by exploring the evolution of SOA implementations by the speaker. In particular, lessons learned from each implementation will be discussed, and reapplication of these lessons on the next implementation. Challenges (and even failures) will be explicitly identified.

Speakers

Fred George (@fgeorge52)
Consultant, Fred George Consulting

Fred George is a consultant with over 44 years experience in the industry including over twenty years doing object programming and over a dozen years doing Agile/XP. He counts at least 70 languages with which he has written code. A veteran of the IBM-Microsoft wars, Fred did early work in computer networking, LAN's, GUI's and objects for IBM. As an independent consultant from 1991-2003, he counted HP, Morgan-Stanley, American Express, IBM, and USAA among his clients. He gave the first Agile/XP experience report at OOPSLA in 1999 about an embedded system done in Java, and has mentored many clients in use of objects in Java under an XP process. He has shared the stage at JavaOne with Martin Fowler, acting as his foil, and assisted in XP Immersion sessions with Kent Beck, Ron Jeffries, and Robert Martin. Fred spent a year as a visiting lecturer at N.C. State University teaching Java programming to over 800 undergraduates, with a generous dose of object design, patterns, and XP practices thrown in. Fred joined ThoughtWorks in 2003, delivering yet more projects using agile processes. He has worked with clients in four countries since then, including a ten-month assignment in India (where he founded ThoughtWorks University), four months of projects in China, and a post in the London office. In 2007, he joined the London Internet advertising firm, Forward, bringing Agile practices to all aspects of the business, leaving to pursue industry change at the end of 2011. He has been writing about the post-agile work at Forward under the moniker of Programmer Anarchy. He believes in objects, Lean processes, fun in programming, and the client's successes. He holds a bachelors degree from N. C. State University in Computer Science, and a masters degree from MIT in the Management of Technology. Oh, and he still writes code!

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Expert

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-89-info

It is the syntax that most of us observe when introduced to a language. However, we ought to move quickly beyond that to leverage its powers. The real strength comes from its styles and idioms. Learning a different style does not simply change how we write code, it fundamentally changes how we think and how we solve problems. In this session, award winning author and mentor, Dr. Venkat Subramaniam will explore the idioms and style of prominent JVM languages, and help refactor your language portfolio.

Speakers

Venkat S (@venkat_s)
President, Agile Developer, Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., and an adjunct faculty at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is the author of .NET Gotchas, the coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning Practices of an Agile Developer, the author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine (Pragmatic Bookshelf). His latest book is Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering synchronization, STM, and Actors.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Expert

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-90-info

Project Retrospectives are an important part of any software development process. The Principles Behind the Agile Manifesto state that, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." How can this be done? By taking the time to reflect and learn and proactively determine what should be done differently in the next iteration, release, or project. Linda’s presentation will introduce techniques for project retrospectives, whether they are agile or not. The techniques help teams discover what they’re doing well so that successful practices can continue and identify what should be done differently to improve performance. Retrospectives are not finger pointing or blaming sessions, but rather a highly effective process in which teams reflect on the past to become more productive in the future. Linda will share her experiences with leading retrospectives of several kinds for dozens of projects - successful and unsuccessful, small and large, in academia and industry. Her lessons learned can be applied to any project to enable teams and organizations to become learning organizations.

Speakers

Linda Rising (@RisingLinda)
Independent consultant, Linda Rising LLC

Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in a variety of domains. An internationally known presenter on patterns, retrospectives, agile development, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development, Linda has authored numerous articles and four books, the most recent: Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas, with Mary Lynn Manns. Find more information about Linda at www.lindarising.org. 

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Culture, People and Teams

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Experience Report

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-91-info

Is Design still alive on Agile projects? If yes, then what does a team effectively applying agile design practices supposed to look like? Formulating an answer requires addressing two common misconceptions about design:

(1) it must always precede development; and (2) it is the work of one person.

In this talk, we will examine agile design as an ongoing activity carried out by teams, and this will give us valuable hints as to where to look to catch design happening "in the wild."

Speakers

Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil)
Director, Institut Agile

Laurent Bossavit still likes to code though no longer doing so full-time. He was a recipient of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for contributions to Agile practice. He now heads Institut Agile, a privately funded, independent entity whose missions include growing the Agile business ecosystem, creating stronger links between the business and research communities interested in Agile approaches, and providing stronger empirical evidence on the benefits and limitations of Agile practices.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-92-info

Speakers

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-93-info

Service-oriented architecture (SOA) provides a scalable architectural model for building complex systems. One of the principle challenges with SOA is determining appropriate service boundaries. Imposing SOA boundaries up-front tends to produce overly complex and wasteful designs with impedance between services. Extracting services out of a well factored domain model is ideal, but can be quite tricky work. It is easy to accidentally introduce unintended coupling between packages or modules over time. Using tests to support decoupling work and to enforce boundaries and directional dependencies can be a lifesaver.

Speakers

Owen Rogers (@exortech)
Product lead, Pulse Energy

Owen Rogers is a Product Lead with Pulse Energy (http://www.pulseenergy.com/), a leading energy analytics software company for commercial buildings. For the past four years, Owen has been applying Lean Startup concepts to deliver software-as-a-service products to a rapidly evolving market. Before Pulse Energy, Owen was a consultant with Thoughtworks, coaching cross-functional teams in Canada, China, India and the UK. Owen worked with Naresh to organize the first Agile India conference, and he has spoken at a number of software conferences around the world.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Expert

Session Type

Tutorial

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-94-info

The BDD Workshop offers a comprehensive, hands-on introduction to behavior driven development via an interactive-demo.

Over the past decade, eXtreme Programming practices like Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Behaviour Driven Development (BDD) have fundamentally changed software development processes and inherently how engineers work. Practitioners claim that it has helped them significantly improve their collaboration with business, development speed, design & code quality and responsiveness to changing requirements. Software professionals across the board, from Internet startups to medical device companies to space research organizations, today have embraced these practices.

This workshop explores the foundations of TDD & BDD with the help of various patterns, strategies, tools and techniques.

Speakers

Naresh Jain (@nashjain)
Tech-Startup Founder and Agile/Lean Evangelist, AgileFAQs

Geek at heart, Naresh is a tech-startup founder, building two lean-startups in India. Part of his time is also dedicated to help Software companies as an Agile/Lean Coach/Consultant. From Organizational Transformation to enhanced Developer productivity, Naresh helps organizations embrace, scale and sustain essential Agile and Lean thinking.

Over the last decade, as an independent consultant, Naresh has helped many fortune 500 software organizations and many startups deliver mission critical software solutions. Having played various roles of Founder, Agile Coach, Quality Evangelist, Technical Lead, Product Owner, Iteration Manager, Scrum Master, Developer, QA, Recruiter, Build Master, Mentor & Trainer, he is well equipped to help the entire organization rapidly adapt Agile and Lean methods.

Naresh was the Chair for the Agile India 2012 Conference, largest conference on Agile and Lean in Asia. He founded the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) in 2004. He is responsible for creating and organizing various international conferences including the Simple Design And Testing Conference (SDTConf) and Agile Coach Camp. He started many Agile User Groups including the Agile Philly User Group and groups in India.

Naresh is also the author and contributor to various open source tools like FitNesse, Panopticode, ProTest, DBFit, Qwick, to name a few.

In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community. At the moment, this is the most prestigious award in the Agile Community.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Demonstration

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-95-info

The hard thing with Agile is that it is all about change, and people are naturally wired to resist change. This workshop provides a model for approaching the change process, and plenty of practical real-life examples of how to overcome resistance to change and help organizations become agile.

Speakers

Henrik Kniberg (@henrikkniberg)
Agile/Lean coach, Crisp

Henrik Kniberg is an Agile/Lean coach at Crisp in Stockholm. He enjoys helping companies succeed with both the technical and human sides of software development. During the past 15 years he has been CTO of 3 Swedish IT companies and helped many more get started with Agile and Lean software development. Henrik is the author of “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” and “­Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and “Lean from the Trenches“. These books are available in over 12 languages, have over 500,000 readers, and are used as primary guide to Agile and Lean software development by hundreds of companies worldwide.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-81-info

One of the pillars for an agile process is the ability to inspect and adapt - see where you are and steer accordingly. As our products and projects - and their code base - grow bigger we face an increasing challenge to our ability as developers to see where we are. In particular, our suite of automated tests grows bigger and bigger and soon we are running thousands of tests. That's where the challenge lies: a slow build. Join this session to discuss ways of keeping those tests fast and see live demonstrations of techniques that help you keep your Ant or Maven build running quickly!

Speakers

Lasse Koskela (@lassekoskela)
Principal, Reaktor 

Lasse Koskela is a technologist, consultant, and software development coach specializing in agile and lean methods. Lasse spends his days helping clients and colleagues at Reaktor create successful software products and has trenched in a variety of software projects ranging from enterprise applications to middleware products developed for an equally wide range of domains. He's a Certified Scrum Trainer and the author of Test Driven and Unit Testing in Java.

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-97-info

Speakers

Time

04:30 PM - 05:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-98-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-99-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-100-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Mobile Development

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-101-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Lean Startup

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-102-info

Speakers

Time

05:30 PM - 06:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-103-info

Over the past decade, we've seen a major adoption of agile development. But, are these projects and companies really agile or are they simply experiencing fragility, and either simply don't know it or are in denial? Let's see, what our expert panel has to say.

Moderator: Venkat Subramaniam

Panelists: Laurent Bossavit, Fred George, Kevlin Henney, Jez Humble and Dave Hoover

Speakers

Venkat S (@venkat_s)
President, Agile Developer, Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., and an adjunct faculty at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is the author of .NET Gotchas, the coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning Practices of an Agile Developer, the author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine (Pragmatic Bookshelf). His latest book is Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering synchronization, STM, and Actors.

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Grand Ball Room

Stage

Panel

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Panel

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-107-info

Every year, we seem to get more adventurous with our architectures for our crazy changing world. Our adventures have lead us through client-server, n-tier, SOA, Big Data, REST and lots more. While each expedition is filled with the thrill of discovery, I still see teams creating old messes in new territory with cool new toys. In this talk I will highlight some fail points and revert to old school ideas to use them in these new adventures. Hopefully, we will become more aware of the messes we are making, and take cognisance of some characteristics of design architecture that defy time and technology.

Speakers

Aslam Khan (@aslamkhn)
Software Developer, factor10

After more than 20 years of developing software, I find that each time I learn something, it reveals is another mountain of things that I still don't know. More importantly, I have learnt that we can use software development to break down stereotypical social barriers, carve out new social contracts, and to restore dignity to individuals. I still spend my time trying to be a better developer, crawling with people that are trying to run, and sharing my lessons from software development and life equally. I currently head the South African operations for factor10, a leading software development consultancy founded in Sweden. I blog reasonably (in?)frequently at http://aslamkhan.net.

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-114-info

Scrum is great! Except when it isn't. What do you do when Scrum doesn't appear to work?

In this talk we'll go through a handful of concrete steps for diagnosing and debugging Scrum problems. We'll talk about using the process wrong, blaming the messenger, being impatient, not adapting the process, and using the wrong process. We'll also introduce some new Scrum terminology such as Scrumdamentalism, Sadoscrumism, and Scrumbutophobia.

Speakers

Henrik Kniberg (@henrikkniberg)
Agile/Lean coach, Crisp

Henrik Kniberg is an Agile/Lean coach at Crisp in Stockholm. He enjoys helping companies succeed with both the technical and human sides of software development. During the past 15 years he has been CTO of 3 Swedish IT companies and helped many more get started with Agile and Lean software development. Henrik is the author of “Scrum and XP from the Trenches” and “­Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and “Lean from the Trenches“. These books are available in over 12 languages, have over 500,000 readers, and are used as primary guide to Agile and Lean software development by hundreds of companies worldwide.

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Neptune

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-110-info

Speakers

Time

10:15 AM - 11:15 AM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-111-info

Through my experience as a family therapist, cultivating Obtiva, helping apprentices, and mentoring developers around Chicago, I've developed a knack for pointing people at productive possibilities. I'd like to spend some time speaking with you in Bangalore. I hope I can share my insights with you, and also learn more about the different challenges and advantages that exist in Bangalore vs. Chicago.

Speakers

Dave Hoover (@davehoover)
Learning Facilitator, DevBootcamp

Dave Hoover enjoys developing software developers while developing software. One of his life goals is to decentralize education. He writes about technology, learning, and apprenticeship. He helped grow Obtiva, Mad Mimi, Groupon, Code Academy, and Mobile Makers. He advises startups like StyleSeek in Chicago. He competes in endurance sports so that he can keep up with his wife and 3 kids.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-116-info

Functional programming has been around for a while, however, they have sharply raised to prominence on the JVM with the emergence of languages like Scala, Clojure, Groovy, and JRuby. Programming in functional style is not about picking a set of syntax, it is thinking in a particular idiomatic style and programming using a set of constructs. One of the better way to learn this is by doing it. In this workshop, we will take ten different tasks, discuss how to do them with the all-too-familiar imperative style and then how to program it using functional style. We will then implement our design for each task using a language that provides functional style of programming on the JVM.

Speakers

Venkat S (@venkat_s)
President, Agile Developer, Inc.

Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., and an adjunct faculty at the University of Houston. He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with agile practices on their software projects. Venkat is the author of .NET Gotchas, the coauthor of 2007 Jolt Productivity Award winning Practices of an Agile Developer, the author of Programming Groovy: Dynamic Productivity for the Java Developer and Programming Scala: Tackle Multi-Core Complexity on the Java Virtual Machine (Pragmatic Bookshelf). His latest book is Programming Concurrency on the JVM: Mastering synchronization, STM, and Actors.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Introductory

Session Type

Demonstration

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-108-info

The software profession has a problem, widely recognized but which nobody seems willing to do anything about. You can think of this problem as a variant of the well known "telephone game", where some trivial rumor is repeated from one person to the next until it has become distorted beyond recognition and blown up out of all proportion.

Unfortunately, the objects of this telephone game are generally considered cornerstone truths of the discipline, to the point that their acceptance now seems to hinder further progress.

In this talk, we will take a look at some of those "ground truths": the claimed 10x variation in productivity between developers; the "software crisis"; the cost-of-change curve; the "cone of uncertainty"; and more. We'll hone our scholarship skills by looking up the original source for these ideas and taking a deep dive in the history of their development. We'll assess the real weight of the evidence behind these ideas.

And we'll confront the scary prospect of moving the state of the art forward in a discipline that has had the ground kicked from under it.

Speakers

Laurent Bossavit (@Morendil)
Director, Institut Agile

Laurent Bossavit still likes to code though no longer doing so full-time. He was a recipient of the 2006 Gordon Pask award for contributions to Agile practice. He now heads Institut Agile, a privately funded, independent entity whose missions include growing the Agile business ecosystem, creating stronger links between the business and research communities interested in Agile approaches, and providing stronger empirical evidence on the benefits and limitations of Agile practices.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Craftsmanship

Level

Expert

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-115-info

Agile processes were originally designed to break down the barriers among users, programmers, and testers. Now, DevOps - an emerging set of principles and practices for communication, collaboration, and integration between development and IT operations—seeks to break down the development/operations barriers. By applying agile principles to operations and re-architecting the interfaces between these groups, DevOps empowers organizations to deliver high-value software faster and with fewer errors. In this presentation I will describe how to implement DevOps practices in large enterprises—and small organizations. Starting with an investigation of the crisis facing large IT departments, I’ll discuss the root causes of operations challenges and how DevOps addresses them. I’ll explore how the guiding principles of DevOps—collaboration, automation, measurement, and information sharing—enable continuous delivery through rapid software releases of high quality software. Using examples from real companies, including amazon.com, I illustrate how to accelerate innovation within your company with DevOps techniques and share the architecture and organizational structures necessary for success.

Speakers

Jez Humble (@jezhumble)
Principal, ThoughtWorks

Jez Humble is a Principal at ThoughtWorks Studios, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010). He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services, and online retail companies. His focus is on helping organisations deliver valuable, high-quality software frequently and reliably through implementing effective engineering practices.

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

DevOps

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-113-info

Speakers

Time

11:30 AM - 12:30 PM

Room

Stage

Open Space

Level

Expert

Session Type

Open Space

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-117-info

What can we learn about collaboration from games like World of Warcraft and Rock Band? How do games (like cruel 2 B kind) increase social positivity? What are the principles behind game design which encourage specific behaviors and self-correct negative behavior? How can we translate this type of collaboration, engagement and fun to our everyday work?

Gamification is an emerging field based on psychology, design, strategy and technology. Gamification frameworks help create better team member engagement through collaboration, social engagement and self-motivation. Interestingly, Agile Manifesto and game design principles share a few fundamental psychology concepts. Not surprisingly, these principles can be combined with agile practices to maximize value delivery, increase team collaboration and to make work more fun by bring positive behavioral and cultural changes in organization.

Speakers

Ram Srinivasan (@ramvasan)
Lean and Agile Coach, InRhythm

Ram Srinivasan is a transformation catalyst and works as an Agilecoach and trainer. He partners with his clients and uses his expertisein strategy, product management, Innovation Games®, and humanpsychology to create pragmatic solutions. He regularly conducts publicand private training sessions on Agile methodologies, Lean-Kanbansystems, coaching, facilitation, and Innovation Games®.

Ram has a project management background (PMP, CSP, PMI-ACP) and hasmore than 10 years experience working with start-ups, mid-size andlarge organizations (e-commerce, media, telecom, finance, andinsurance). He is an Innovation Games® Qualified Instructor, and isalso trained as an Organizational Coach (ORSC). His other interestsinclude lean start-ups, complex adaptive systems, change management,gamification, and conflict management.

Ram frequently speaks at local meet-ups as well as internationalconferences. He believes in contributing to the community and co-leadsthe webinar team for PMI Agile Community of Practice. He holds aMasters degree in Engineering from The University of Arizona and iscurrently based out of New Jersey. You can reach him atemail[at]ramvasan.com

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Coaching and Mentoring

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-122-info

It's easy to speak of test-driven development as if it were a single method, but there are several ways to approach it. In my experience, different approaches lead to quite different solutions.

In this hands-on workshop, with the help of some concrete examples, I'll demonstrate the different styles and more importantly what goes into the moment of decision when a test is written? And why TDDers make certain choices. The objective of the session is not to decide which approach is best, rather to highlight various different approaches/styles of practicing test-driven development.

By the end of this session, you will understand how TTDers break down a problem before trying to solve it. Also you'll be exposed to various strategies or techniques used by TDDers to help them write the first few tests.

Speakers

Naresh Jain (@nashjain)
Tech-Startup Founder and Agile/Lean Evangelist, AgileFAQs

Geek at heart, Naresh is a tech-startup founder, building two lean-startups in India. Part of his time is also dedicated to help Software companies as an Agile/Lean Coach/Consultant. From Organizational Transformation to enhanced Developer productivity, Naresh helps organizations embrace, scale and sustain essential Agile and Lean thinking.

Over the last decade, as an independent consultant, Naresh has helped many fortune 500 software organizations and many startups deliver mission critical software solutions. Having played various roles of Founder, Agile Coach, Quality Evangelist, Technical Lead, Product Owner, Iteration Manager, Scrum Master, Developer, QA, Recruiter, Build Master, Mentor & Trainer, he is well equipped to help the entire organization rapidly adapt Agile and Lean methods.

Naresh was the Chair for the Agile India 2012 Conference, largest conference on Agile and Lean in Asia. He founded the Agile Software Community of India (ASCI) in 2004. He is responsible for creating and organizing various international conferences including the Simple Design And Testing Conference (SDTConf) and Agile Coach Camp. He started many Agile User Groups including the Agile Philly User Group and groups in India.

Naresh is also the author and contributor to various open source tools like FitNesse, Panopticode, ProTest, DBFit, Qwick, to name a few.

In recognition of his accomplishments, in 2007 the Agile Alliance awarded Naresh with the Gordon Pask Award for contributions to the Agile Community. At the moment, this is the most prestigious award in the Agile Community.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-120-info

Gathering requirements or "User Stories" is always a challenging activity in Agile or in any other approaches.In this session, I propose using mind mapping that focuses to explore "User Wish" - a vague shape of user requirements before it is written into a form of User Stories.

Speakers

Kenji Hiranabe (@hiranabe)
CEO, Astah.net

An Agile software development practitioner and consultant in Japan. I think of software development as a form of communication game, and am always searching for better ways to make it more productive, collaborative, and fun. 2008 Gordon Pask Award Recipient for contributions to Agile practice.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Jupiter

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Workshop

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-121-info

Devops represents a different approach to IT operations -- an approach based on the principles of collaboration, visibility and automation. For developers it means a better understanding and greater visibility into the environment that the production system is running; for operations it means closer collaboration with development and a greater focus on frequent deployment, monitoring tools and automated system provisioning. The result is more supportable, scalable systems with a streamlined deployment process and a lower cost to operate. This presentation covers the principles, practices and tools that we have found help nurture and sustain a devops culture.

Speakers

Owen Rogers (@exortech)
Product lead, Pulse Energy

Owen Rogers is a Product Lead with Pulse Energy (http://www.pulseenergy.com/), a leading energy analytics software company for commercial buildings. For the past four years, Owen has been applying Lean Startup concepts to deliver software-as-a-service products to a rapidly evolving market. Before Pulse Energy, Owen was a consultant with Thoughtworks, coaching cross-functional teams in Canada, China, India and the UK. Owen worked with Naresh to organize the first Agile India conference, and he has spoken at a number of software conferences around the world.

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Neptune

Stage

DevOps

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-119-info

Speakers

Time

01:30 PM - 03:00 PM

Room

Stage

Lightning Talk

Level

Expert

Session Type

Lightning Talk

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-123-info

Have you ever been in a prioritization discussion where the only priorities are High, Higher, and Highest? Or tried using MoSCoW to prioritize user stories only to find that 80% of the cards are 'Must Have'? In this tutorial, we show you how you can effectively use a gamut of different prioritization methods, ranging from simple techniques like stacked ranking or MoSCoW that classify items along a single dimension to multi-dimensional techniques like priority quadrants, Story Maps, and Innovation Games™. We'll be pruning feature trees, spending fake currency, using visual metaphors and having fun, while truly identifying what the most important stuff really is. We also show you how you can choose which prioritization techniques may work best for different settings, group sizes, and personality mixes.

Speakers

Tarang Baxi (@gnarat)
Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Tarang works with ThoughtWorks as a Project Manager and Business Analyst. He has over 11 years of experience in a variety of roles spanning analysis, project management, IT strategy consulting, business process consulting, and methodology coaching. Tarang has extensive experience working with distributed software delivery teams. Tarang has presented and run workshops at a number of agile conferences including Agile India 2010, Agile India 2012, XP 2012 and Agile 2012.

Chirag Doshi (@chiragsdoshi)
Principal Consultant, ThoughtWorks

Chirag has around 10 years of experience in software development in various roles developer, analyst and tester. In the last 6 years of work with ThoughtWorks he has been part of development teams of different sizes ranging from 2 to almost 200.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 1

Stage

Agile Product Management

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Tutorial

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-129-info

This talk examines how to evolve the database representation on an Agile project when using two different classes of NoSQL databases. We use MongoDB to represent document data bases and Neo4J to represent graph data bases. Based on the approach described by Sadalage and Ambler for relational data bases, we show how to address the special issues that arise when evolving NoSQL data bases.

Speakers

Rebecca Parsons (@rebeccaparsons)
CTO, ThoughtWorks

Dr. Rebecca Parsons is ThoughtWorks' Chief Technology Officer. She has more than 20 years' application development experience, in industries ranging from telecommunications to emergent internet services. Rebecca has published in both language and artificial intelligence publications, served on numerous program committees, and reviews for several journals. She has extensive experience leading in the creation of large-scale distributed object applications and the integration of disparate systems.

Before coming to ThoughtWorks she worked as an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Central Florida where she taught courses in compilers, program optimization, distributed computation, programming languages, theory of computation, machine learning and computational biology. She also worked as Director's Post Doctoral Fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory researching issues in parallel and distributed computation, genetic algorithms, computational biology and non-linear dynamical systems.

Rebecca received a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science and Economics from Bradley University, a Masters of Science in Computer Science from Rice University and her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Rice University.

Time

03:15 PM - 04:15 PM

Room

Grand Ball Room 2

Stage

Agile Development Practices

Level

Practicing

Session Type

Tutorial

Direct Link

https://betterconf.confengine.com/agileindia2013/index.html#session-127-info