Presenters: Clark Ching

Great for people new to Agile Software development and for those who want to communicate the benefits of using Agile Software development with managers and clients. This session is an introduction to Agile, with an emphasis on the business benefits of doing projects in an agile way - in particular, making more money from software projects.

Presenters: Duncan Pierce, Jason Gorman

In this fun and interactive workshop, the audience explores the use of metrics to influence the evolution of development teams in a genuinely agile approach to Software Process Improvement. The workshop is inspired by recent experiences at a leading health insurance provider. A selection of established performance and quality metrics will be experimented with and their design tested to see what kind of behaviours they might encourage when they’re applied. Also explored will be “gaming” of metrics by development teams to hit performance targets without achieving the desired effects, and proposing changes to the design of each metric to make it more robust.

Presenters: Lindsay McEwan, Gavin Hope

Our company Nonlinear Dynamics, like many others, is on the road to becoming agile. We have experienced mixed results, one which ended with "cargo-culting", and was not particularly successful. Since then we have improved several areas, leading us to real, tangible successes. During this interactive presentation we discuss some of our agile experience, good and bad and encourage the audience to share some of their experience, perhaps in contrast to our own.

Presenters: Romilly Cocking, Rachel Davies

This tutorial with interactive exercises introduces thinking tools, such as mind mapping, that can be applied in an agile software development environment. The session looks at several ways in which these techniques can be combined, and discusses how they could be used in retrospectives.

Presenters: Karl Scotland

There are many different agile software development methodologies. This can be confusing for people who are new to Agile who do not know where to start. However, all the methodologies are based on the same values and principles, and many share the same practices. This session is an introduction to the commonalities of Agile methodologies, with pointers to how they are applied in specific examples.

Presenters: Daniel Poon

How can developer or a development team bring about change within their team and influence the processes outside their direct control? A consultant will tell you to hire a consultant and go on an immersion course. However Big-Up-Front-Training doesn't seem to be in the spirit of agile. What is more, having to get authorisaztion and capital investement up front in order to act is counter to Kaizen principles. Romax Technology has bootstraped agile pratices using its own people. We have payed for further improvement by using the funds freed from effciency savings geneated by agile. From our experiences, we will describe the benefits and drawbacks of a DIY agile implementation, and what kind of timeline you can expect. We will also explain how the developers managed to sell agile to the managers and the rest of the company. It is hoped that this will motivate other individuals and teams to act independently and find ways of moving forward in their organisations, with or without the help of external consultants.

Presenters: Sam Newman, Manish Shah

This fun and interactive session is a variation on the traditional XP Game. The Lego XP game is designed to introduced the concepts of XP development by involving the participants in the development of a lego model. The session includes planning games, iterations, estimation and velocity tracking - core planning tools of an extreme programming team.

Presenters: Pascal Van Cauwenberge, Rob Westgeest

In this simulation/workshop participants are introduced to the Theory of Constraints whose basic premise is that "The throughput of any system is determined by one constraint ('or bottleneck')". Based on this idea, the theory provides a 5 step process to optimize the system's throughput. After this session, participants will be equipped with a number of new problem solving tools and new ways to look at (IT) projects and are able to apply the Theory of Constraints to improve their own process.

Presenters: Andy Pols, Steve Freeman

A software group is best measured by its customers' success. Understanding what they really need is critical, but customers are human too which means that they're fallible. Customers can't always tell you what they want because sometimes they don't know themselves, so asking them to rank requirements or write stories might not be the best place to start. This workshop presents techniques for working with customers and other stakeholders to help them understand the context and goals of a project or product. It describes a range of techniques such as "Speedboat", "Product Box", "Butterfly Stamping", and "Give 'em a jacuzzi" and runs two of them as exercises.

Presenters: Rachel Davies, Giovanni Asproni

During this interactive simulation suitable for all interested in Scrum and/or agile planning, the audience, working as teams following an introduction to scrum practices and roles, experience a Sprint Planning Meeting, a Sprint, and a Sprint Review and Demo, all in 1 hour.

Presenters: Tom Gilb

In Tom Gilb’s XPDay4 Keynote he pointed out that one major missing practice in most agile methods is quantification of the key qualitative improvements that our stakeholders want. This session will both give detail on the method for doing it and illustrate, using audience input, exactly how it works in practice.

Presenters: Dafydd Rees, Tim Forsyth

In January 2005, our agile team encountered business requirements that we believed couldn't be met using our normal Java-based approach. We experimented with a number of different approaches to deliver the application. Despite strict time limitations and the need to deploy a new staging and live platforms, we delivered our new rails-based application three days early. Using a mixture of demos, discussion, and presentation this case study tells the story of our work to date using ruby on rails to build tools for our customers.

Presenters: Keith Braithwaite, Tim Joyce

How can a Lego model of a steam locomotive provide deeper insights into architectural choice in an agile environment? Join this interactive presentation/workshop to experiment, challenge and debate ideas about "architecture" and "merciless refactoring".

Presenters: Steve Freeman, Nat Pryce

What must we consider before the first development iteration? What place does analysis have in an agile process? How much design do we need to do up front? How do we set up the tools and working environment to support the project? What should we expect to happen at the start of the project? How do we ensure that lines power and responsibility are aligned for success? How do we build a cooperative relationship with the users based upon continual learning on both sides? This workshop suitable for any project stakeholder explores what we must do before we do agile development.

Presenters: Fred Tingey, Pradip Mistry, Mark Kennedy

Do not underestimate the impact on the business of adopting Agile methods - in particular Extreme Programming. Fred's department adopted XP as a 'bottom up' initiative driven from our in-house IT development teams with full support from IT Management and a 'wait and see' attitude from the business. We were suprised to find that reliably develivering software of high quality within budget to agreed deadlines is only a part of the story. Perhaps this was naive but we had never really managed it before Agile methods were introduced and hence had the false assumption that if we did achieve it then every IT project would be a success. The fact is there is no such thing as an IT project; There are only business projects which involve IT to a greater or lesser extent. And the success of your IT development is crucially dependent on the ability of the business to take advantage of it. This case study and self help clinic attempts to determine what should be in a "Business Readiness Assessment" in order to know if a business is ready to go Agile.

Presenters: Dave Leigh-Fellows, Matt Bonetti

Anyone who has been involved in IT development and found themselves in conflict with business users, testers, managers, developers, and occasionally, themselves (and as for the rest of you who haven't - we don't believe you!). This roleplay workshop helps attendees learn through sharing others experience what the common pain points between individuals in agile software development are, and ways you could mitigate them by falling back on your interpersonal skills.

Presenters: Mike Storey, Robert Chatley

The agile processes described in the literature tend to be focussed on teams that have one project to work on. Typically in practice, teams have a number of projects that they need to work on concurrently to satisfy different customers. This may be seen as a reason not to adopt agile techiniques in a particular team or organisation. This simulation session will examine the issues relating to coordinating multiple concurrent projects in an agile team, aiming to introduce useful techniques, and give participants experience in planning projects in such an environment. Also to uncover new techiques that may help as a result of group discussions.

Presenters: Steve Freeman, Mike Hill

On an Agile project, the acceptance test suite is the medium that bridges between the technical and business members of the team to ensure that the right functionality is delivered. The tests must be clear and understandable by both sides, which implies building a common language within the team. This workshop is about how to write acceptance tests that are meaningful, focussed, and understandable.

Presenters: Marko van der Puil, Jan Bakker, Willem van den Ende

Have you ever undone some team members work? Have you ever had a team where people worked at cross-purposes? Have you had team members "sending signals" and then quitting in disgust because nobody picked them up? Have you ever wondered who or what you were building this system for? Have you ever wondered about the amount of rumors in your company? We have, and that is why we have embraced Temperature Reading as an effective team communication technique. Temperature Readings can improve these issues, and most importanty address respect - the newest and latest XP value, as seen in the second edition of EXtreme Programming Explained. This tutorial will help attendees learn about a tool that can help create a more communicative and secure environment for their team.

Presenters: Kevin Rutherford

Lean manufacturing is based on two pillars: Pull and Jidoka. Agile methods focus most of their attention only on Pull: customers pull features or user stories from the development team, and the development team carries out every task just in time and without building up inventory. Jidoka – the policy of stopping the production line whenever a fault occurs, and then fixing both the fault and the cause of the fault – has been largely forgotten.Jidoka is what keeps value flowing fast through the process, iteration after iteration. And yet there are no published studies or collections of Jidoka practices as applied to software development. This game/workshop helps attendees learn about Jidoka on a production line, and to discuss its application to adapting a software development process in a learning organization.

XP and other methodologies are frequently treated as a process - a series of steps leading from the beginning to the end of a cycle. Such treatment makes it difficult to adapt when the process is disrupted due to unforseen events. A more agile approach is to treat XP as a toolbox; to appreciate the relationships between the people involved in a project and the environment in which they work - the codebase, hardware platform, office, etc. - and let the brain's natural desire to solve problems and make connections tell the project participant which of XP's many tools to use. This workshop explores the art form of haiku as an allegory to software development, and aims to break the habit of procedural thought through techniques which capture the changing relationships between the poet and his environment.