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Agile 2009 in Chicago this August!
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Conference Details
Location
Hyatt Regency
151 E Wacker Dr
Chicago, IL 60601
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The product division of the global consultancy ThoughtWorks, ThoughtWorks Studios provides innovative solutions that help organizations continually improve and evolve their IT delivery capability. Our products include Mingle (Agile Project Management), Cruise (Release Management) and Twist (Functional Test Automation). More at www.thoughtworks.com/studios.
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| ThoughtWorks Session Calendar |
Monday Aug 24
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| 2:00 pm |
| Paul Hammant: Selenium and JBehave : A Surprisingly Successful Shotgun Wedding |
Tuesday Aug 25
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| 11:00 am |
| Alistair Jones & Patrick Kua: Top Ten Secret Weapons for Performance Testing in an Agile Environment |
| 2:00 pm |
| Steven "Doc" List: Facilitation Patterns & Antipatterns |
| 4:00 pm |
| Mark Rickmeier: Can you hear me now? Good... |
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Danilo Sato & Frank Trindade: The Lean Lego Game
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Wednesday Aug 26
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| 11:00 am |
| Neal Ford: Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture |
| 2:45 pm |
| Sharlene McKinnon: Iterating a Team in Flux |
Thursday Aug 27
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| 11:00 am |
| Andy Slocum: Agile's Too Slow: Developing a Facebook App For the Obama Campaign |
| Patrick Kua: Climbing the Dreyfus Ladder of Agile Practices |
| Ken Kolchier: Exploring Synergistic Impact Through Adventures in Group Pairing |
| Tom Sulston: CI Vendor Cage-fight! |
| 2:00 pm |
| Marina Chiovetti: Build Me the Money, Honey! |
| Sumeet Moghe & Jonathan McCracken: The Distributed Agile Game |
| Tom Sulston: How to be Really Awesome at Continuous Integration |
| 2:45 pm |
| Anda Abramovici: The Ogre and The Wimp: Clever Influencing Tricks - Help the Most Reluctant Teams |
| 4:00 pm |
| Chirag Doshi: A Peek into an Agile Infected Culture |
| Anda Abramovici: A Comical Approach to Project Smells |
| Paulo Caroli & Sudhindra Rao: Mock Objects in Action |
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ThoughtWorks is a proud Platinum Sponsor of the Agile 2009 Conference.
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ThoughtWorkers Present on the Agile Stages:
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| Agile and Organizational Culture |
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Chirag Doshi
India
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A Peek into Agile Infected Culture
Regency D, Thursday 16:00-16:45
What happens when your organization practices Agile software
development for many years? Well, you get pretty good at Agile: you are
able to apply Agile with reducing effort on challenging projects. But
there is another interesting side-effect which is that your people
internalize Agile values, so much so that Agile becomes second-nature
to everyone!
In this photo tour, come see how a culture is infected with Agile
thinking, you will see how we apply Agile to many activities like
training- sessions, recruitment, staffing, office reforms, strategic
decisions and more.
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| Agile Adoption |
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Anda Abramovici
United States
Blog
Twitter
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The Ogre and The Wimp: Clever Influencing Tricks - Help the Most Reluctant Teams
Regency C, Thursday 14:45-15:30
What
happens when the CIO decides the dev team needs to adopt agile
practices and the dev team nods their heads but don't plan on doing
zilch? It is time to leverage those fancy shmancy influencing skills we
agilists are so famous for. We'll cover new fun tactics that have not
yet been explored in some of the prevalent literature. All fresh
information from the field.
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Anda Abramovici
United States
Blog
Twitter
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A Comical Approach to Project Smells
Regency C, Thursday 16:00-16:45
A series of cartoons depicts the terrible things that happen when agile
practices aren't followed. This session is valid for any persona, but
especially for the product owner who will suffer when their product
fails because they follow a process that isn't helping their team deliver!
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| Agile Frontier |
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Andy Slocum
United States
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Agile's Too Slow: Developing a Facebook App For the Obama Campaign
Grand Ballroom A, Thursday 11:00-11:45
Priorities shifted twice a week. My favorite lightweight practices were
all too heavy. Facebook thinks I might be a spammer. On November 5, the
code became totally worthless. It was the best project I've been on!
Come and hear about a project that was too strange for normal,
comfortable agile methods. I hope you can learn from my experience, and
make sure you are bringing the right tools and processes to your next
project. Focus on the principles of agile (communication, simplicity,
feedback, courage) instead of the practices (CI, pairing, iterations,
etc).
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| Agile Product Management |
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Marina Chiovetti
Australia
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Build Me the Money, Honey!
Crystal C, Thursday 14:45-17:30
Agile is taking off in the marketplace, and agile processes are the
norm for helping IT departments deliver great software... but what
about the business? What about the product manager? What about the
software itself? What processes are there to ensure that we build the
RIGHT software with the RIGHT features... the features that will make
us the MONEY!
This session will introduce the concepts of Business Value Metrics
and Customer-Based Design a simple formula to help Business
Stakeholders evaluate their application feature by feature to ensure
they are building the MONEY (honey.)
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| Coaching |
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Climbing the Dreyfus Ladder of Agile Practices
Crystal A, Thursday 11:00-12:30
Agile coaches often need to distinguish when people "do" an agile
practice versus "really understand" that practice. This workshop will
help coaches develop a tool, mapping agile practices, or more
specifically, behaviours people exhibit when using an agile practice,
to a learning model. The learning model of choice for this workshop is
the Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition. We will also discuss how to
apply this tool to better communicate and set goals with teams "going agile".
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| Developer Jam |
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Ken Kolchier
United States
Twitter
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Exploring Synergistic Impact Through Adventures In Group Pairing
New Orleans, Thursday 11:00-11:45
As
Agile practitioners, a great deal of our time is focused on having
targeted, directed impact. But sometimes we miss opportunities to
repurpose our efforts into syngergistic, many-pronged effects. Not
multi-tasking -- multi-EFFECTing, from one piece of effort. This talk
will explore this topic, both in theory and in practice. We will
examine a particular client case-study, where two disparate 6-person
developer teams, with minimal pairing and TDD experience, were
developed into highly-productive "gelled" teams, through "Group Pair
Programming" -- 6 individuals, 1 workstation.
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Neal Ford
United States
Website
Blog
Twitter
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Emergent Design & Evolutionary Architecture
Grand Ballroom F, Wednesday 11:00-12:30
Most
of the software world has realized that BDUF (Big Design Up Front)
doesn't work well in software. But lots of developers struggle with
this notion when it applies to architecture and design. Surely you
can't just start coding, right? You need some level of understanding
before you can start work. This session describes the current thinking
about emergent architecture & design. This philosophy allows you to
specify only the critical items up front and allow the important
architecture and design criteria emerge once you understand the problem
better.
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Paulo Caroli
India
Website
Co-presenting with
Sudhindra Rao
India
Blog
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Mock Objects in Action
Grand Ballroom F, Thursday 16:00-17:30
How
can mock objects help you design your system better? Want to know how
mocking saved hours of work? We focus on establishing best practices
based on examples with mock objects. We cover design of classes, using
mock objects to understand and test interaction between objects of the
system. By the end of the session it should become clear how mocking,
when applied correctly helps with system design, improves testability
by reducing cost of change. An explicit part of this session is
dedicated to the Mocking top offenders. We talk with examples about bad
usage of Mocks, and its consequences.
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| Distributed Agile |
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Mark Rickmeier
United States
Alpha IT Journal
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Can you hear me now? Good...
Crystal A, Tuesday 16:00-17:30
This tutorial focuses on the detailed specifics that will make
distributed agile meetings effective. We will demonstrate several key
agile meetings, run in a distributed fashion, so teams can immediately
improve their projects. To do so, I will highlight specific tools
available in the market place to facilitate each of these different
kinds of discussions (retrospectives, planning meetings, stand ups).
I'll demonstrate the processes to enable more effective communication
between remote locations and describe the key roles required on a
project to encourage the best exchange of information.
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Sumeet Moghe
India
Blog
Co-presenting with
Jonathan McCracken
United States
Blog
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The Distributed Agile Game
Plaza Ballroom A, Thursday 14:45-17:30
When
it is achieved together, the combined benefits of both Agile and
Offshore software development, can be multiples greater than either
approach alone. During this interactive session, we will simulate a
distributed project with some participants being onsite and the others
offshore. With 4 teams of up to 8 people each, this game will draw out
learning around the challenges of Distributed Agile and different
methods to communicate successfully on such projects. The rules of the
game help illustrate how to deal with travel, different timezones,
delayed communication and other such hurdles.
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| Leadership and Teams |
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Sharlene McKinnon
Canada
Blog
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Iterating a Team in Flux
San Francisco, Wednesday 14:45-15:30
Imagine
yourself with a team that flies in from AU, the UK, and US in bi-weekly
shifts to work with a telecommunications giant. Mix in inexperience, a
shared resource model, bad behaviours, and a mandated intro to Agile in
a silo-ed non-agile environment. Couple this with a capability driven /
satellite team whose focus is to assist other teams to drive out SOA:
and you have a recipe for a Team in Flux. Working to find a system that
worked for this team was a long and arduous journey full of
misdirection, poor choices, and learning around structure, Agile
methodologies, and people in general.
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Steven "Doc" List
United States
Blog
Twitter
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Facilitation Patterns and Antipatterns
Regency A, Tuesday 14:00-15:30
Facilitation skills are essential for anyone. In fact, everyone
facilitates whether they know it or not! Do you work on a team, manage
an organization, or otherwise work with others? The opportunity to
facilitate will come up.
Steven "Doc" List will lead
you to explore the common patterns & antipatterns that come up in
facilitation, for the facilitator and the participants. We'll have some
fun by taking on roles, and exploring the behaviors that work and that
don't work. The session will include some time on specific activities
and techniques that can be used for effective facilitation.
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| New to Agile |
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Danilo Sato
United Kingdom
Website
Co-presenting with
Francisco Trindade
United Kingdom
Blog
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The Lean Lego Game
Grand Ballroom B, Tuesday 16:00-17:30
After revolutionizing the automobile industry, Lean principles have
been applied to different knowledge areas, such as software
development. However, many people haven't been introduced to the
concepts that made Lean successful. In this interactive session, the
participants will work in a small Lego production line, experiencing
the problems and applying Lean practices to overcome them. Eight to 20
participants, divided in 4 teams, will learn about: systems thinking,
push vs. pull systems, waste, etc. We will also compare the production
line scenario with the software development industry.
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Tom Sulston
United States
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How to Be Really Awesome at Continuous Integration
Grand Ballroom B, Thursday 14:00-15:35
Continuous Integration is a key practice in the agile toolkit. The
practice is pretty simple - when checkins occur, some process is run
against the codebase. This usually includes compilation and unit tests,
but could include all sorts of things.
The panel of CI
experts host discussion of the audience's problems, questions, concerns
and ideas about how to make best use of CI.
We aim to draw together the experience of the panel with the enthusiasm
and fresh eyes of the participants to share our collective CI knowledge
with those having issues with their CI implementations.
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| Testing |
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Alistair Jones
United Kingdom
Blog
Co-presenting with
Patrick Kua
United Kingdom
Website
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Top Ten Secret Weapons for Performance Testing in an Agile Environment
Grand Ballroom D North, Tuesday 11:00-11:45
In the battle of YAGNI and the performance testers, who
wins out on
an agile project? Join us as we walk through a historical account of
what happens when you need to meet heavy performance targets on an
agile project. Find out what was at stake, and the dire consequences if
either side annihilated the other. We'll focus on technical detail,
planning and management techniques that led to the only outcome,
collaborative success! Finally, discover the impact this battle had in
the war agile wages to align the needs of end customers, the business,
and IT, to see how it all worked out.
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| Tools for Agility |
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Paul Hammant
United States
Website
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Selenium and JBehave: A Surprisingly Successful Shotgun Wedding
Grand Ballroom E, Monday 14:00-15:30
Selenium is the 800lb gorilla of open source web application testing.
For four years it has been steadily gaining a following and making a
difference for corporations large and small. Such tools have always
been a trap for adept Agile teams though. Too often teams rely on
functional testing and skimp on the much more effective "small" unit
tests. Now with JBehave steering Selenium, we're seeing test scripts
emerge that engage formerly perplexed management and business folks.
The time has come for this type of tool pairing to be valued for its
role in validating Agile in the enterprise.
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Tom Sulston
United States
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CI Vendor Cage-Fight!
Grand Ballroom E, Thursday 11:00-12:30
In this session, we invite CI tool vendors to give a short
demonstration of the best features of their tool. Each vendor will be
given 10min to show off the best features of their software, with a
further 5min of questions.
This will allow CI users to quickly get a good grasp on the plethora of
CI tools on the market, to help them find out about useful features of
various tools that may help their CI implementation, and to learn about
the practices that each tool encourages.
It also helps CI tool vendors gauge the market, and improve the standards and features of all CI products.
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| User Experience |
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Luke Barrett
United Kingdom
Linked In
Co-presenting with
Marc McNeill
United Kingdom
Website
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Hands-on Guerilla User Testing
Columbus KL, Wednesday 14:00-15:30
Anyone who's seen a user trying to get to grips with their application
knows what a humbling experience it can be. No matter your design
experience there's no substitute for testing with actual users. But the
whole user testing process can seem daunting & costly in terms of
time, effort & materials. Seeing this Jakob Nielsen proposed a
lightweight approach, 'Guerilla User Testing', in the mid-nineties. It
emphasized what could be done on limited resources by a team committed
to providing a decent user experience. Marc & Luke share over 20
years of experience applying this type of technique.
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