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Facilitating the Spread of Knowledge and Innovation in Professional Software Development

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  • Presentation: 10 Ways to Screw Up with Scrum and XP

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Henrik Kniberg talks about 10 possible reasons to fail while doing Scrum and XP. Maybe the team does not have a definition of what Done means to them, or they don't know what their velocity is, or they don't hold retrospectives.

  • Overcoming Resistance to Change

    Any change whether an Agile implementation or re-arranging the office furniture is going to encounter some resistance. The real question is how we react when that happens. Dave Nicolette and Lasse Koskela's workshop - was designed too help us understand where resistance comes from and how to handle it.

  • Craftsmanship - the Fifth Agile Manifesto Value?

    Robert "Uncle Bob" Martin re-invigorated the discussion around "professionalism in programming" by proposing that the Agile Manifesto be updated with a fifth value, "Craftsmanship over Execution".

  • Presentation: Natural Laws of Software Development - Deriving Agile Practices

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, Ron Jeffries and Chet Hendrickson derive Agile practices from the natural laws of software development. They don't just say "Be Agile!", but they explain why Agile practices make perfect sense in the software development world.

  • Presentation: "We Suck Less!" Is Not Enough

    In this presentation filmed during Agile 2008, David Douglas and Robin Dymond discuss about companies which try to adopt Agile, but don't go all the way, resulting in failure and rejection of it, and predictably having a negative impact on Agile's future.

  • Beginner's Mind - An Approach to Listening

    Beginner's Mind is the idea of approaching things without preconceptions, pre-conceived ideas or prior judgements. This approach is useful to agile practitioners and coaches, inviting us to enter situations and observe what is really happening before we act.

  • Presentation: The Development of a New Car at Toyota

    In this presentation made during Agile 2008, Kenji Hiranabe talks about Toyota's development process of a new car. Kenji shares his experience meeting Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer at Toyota, and the lessons he learned from him.

  • Is Estimating A Wasteful Practice?

    The age old problem of software "estimation" has generated some interesting discussion lately in the agile community. J.B. Rainsberger, Arlo Belshee, Josh Kerievsky, David Anderson, and others ask the question "Are estimates really needed at all?"

  • Card Game Teaches Distributed Project Communication Lessons

    Charles Suscheck presented how he uses a variation of the card game Rummy to teach the importance of communication, planning, and collaboration on projects at Agile2008. The game explores the effects of various levels of distribution on a team, as well as the impact of adding or removing experts on the team during a project.

  • Prioritizing (the Backlog) For Profit

    Having difficulty prioritizing the backlog? Luke Hohmann has described a method to make quantitative decisions about which backlog items should be considered first. In addition to the usual attributes such as implementation effort, Luke suggested adding attributes to measure stakeholders needs, strategic alignment and to ask whether the item is driving profit.

  • Touchy Feely Impediments to Agile Adoption

    Struggling with Agile Adoption? Amr Elssamadisy ran a session on what makes adopting Agile processes difficult. He provided the audience with three models for understanding the problems seen during adoption.

  • Coaching Self Organizing Teams

    Joseph Pelrine promised to teach us “how to be a manipulative bastard” with respect to coaching teams. Joseph feels that coaching as a discipline lacks the scientific background and rigor that it needs: "Air guitar and attitude" won't do - Allan Kay. His goal to is to supply that rigor.

  • Agile 2008: The Wisdom of Crowds and Agile Teams

    James Surowiecki, author of the Wisdom of Crowds, gave the keynote speech that opened Agile 2008 on Tuesday, August 5. The thesis behind the wisdom of crowds is simple: given the right circumstances, a group of people can make a decision that is better than the best answer of most (if not all) of the group's members.

  • Second Functional Test Workshop Results

    The second Agile Alliance Functional Test Workshop was held as a pre-conference session before Agile 2008. It was run as a series of open space sessions facilitated by Jeff Paton. The primary purpose of this workshop was to discuss cutting-edge advancements in and envision possibilities for the future of automated functional testing tools.

  • Agile 2008: A Coach's Role is to Reveal the System to Itself

    The term "coach" in the Agile community can mean different things to different people such as mentor/advisor, team lead, project manager, or even consultant. In the broader coaching world, they have a distinction - and that is a coach's job is not to "fix" the system but to reveal the system to itself.

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