The session is an experience report that tells the PMI Agile Forum story in chronological order. First, we briefly tell the story about how the PMI Agile Forum got chartered by PMI. Second, we tell the story about how we decomposed the organization’s launch into several phases. Finally, we tell the story of how the organization has decided to manage its operational backlog going forward.
A personal time management approach known as "The Pomodoro Technique" is becoming quite popular with agile practitioners. Pomodoro includes a number of practices similar to those used by an agile team: time-boxing, frequent opportunities to inspect-and-adapt, estimation, a preference for low-tech tools, and an emphasis on maintaining a sustainable pace.
A group of people interested in improving the state of the art in Automated Functional Test Tools gathered for an annual workshop the Sunday before Agile 2009. Among the topics covered: Lightening Talk demos of various tools, Porting Cucumber to .NET, Documenting existing functional test tool capabilities in a spreadsheet and the limits of Capture/Playback tools.
The Project Management Institute (PMI) officially launched their Agile Community of Practice at the Agile2009 conference. The group's stated mission is: "To equip PMI Members with Agile skills and knowledge" Mike Griffiths has been credited with getting things moving when he issued a challenge at Agile 2007 that PMI form an Agile Specific Interest Group.
While some agilists consider only user stories as necessary, Gerard Meszaros believes that we need to find the proper balance between upfront planning and decision deferring. In this presentation, Meszaros explains what should be going on behind the curtains from product conception to the user stories backlog.
Brian Marick talks about several challenges for teams transitioning to Agile and 5 guiding values that successful Agile teams share. The major challenges covered are: courage, working software, naivete, and slicewise design. Successful teams share these guiding values: reactive, ease, solidarity, decency, and joy.
Jeff Patton describes the different ways Agile teams deal with users and then digs in deep into story mapping. Jeff says: "For me, the story mapping thing is going back to using the story as a genuine conversation to actually drive understanding of the system, not as what I've seen it become – molecular conversation about the details of a particular feature and how we're going to test it.
Amr Elssamadisy talks about what makes Agile stick. Before Agile practices, before Lean or Scrum, it is important to have a team of individuals who know how to deal with problems, people who are ready to recognize a problem they have and know how to confront it.
Mary Poppendieck talks about her last book "Leading Lean Software Development", a book for the product, program and all C-level managers, showing them how to apply agile principles and practices starting from the realization that development teams are not successful if they are not in the same boat with their managers.
