Imagine you are an agile consultant or coach. You are called by the inhabitants from waterfall island, who haven’t heard about agility before and want to benefit from your advice. Which practices, principles and values would you pack in your agile suitcase for providing them guidance? What would you leave at home? In this Pecha Kucha session experienced agilists will deliver insights in their agile suitcases. Their short, concise and entertaining presentations may give you hints for your own suitcase. So fasten your seatbelts and enjoy your travel with:
• Rachel Davies
• Mary Poppendieck
• Joshua Kerievsky
• Jeff Patton
• Patrick Kua
After listening to your flight attendants you will have the opportunity to work on your own agile suitcases. This may help you to travel lighter next time.

A Journey towards Structured Chaos - Destination: Google. Susan Hunter (Google). (Lightning talk, 10 min) [Link ]
A presentation that compares and contrasts 3 unique experiences across 3 distinct organizations implementing Agile. The presentation will illustrate the constant variables of context, culture and collaboration and how they interrelate when implementing agile. From a large traditional financial company in Dallas: Nurturing a newly formed collaborative team in a competitive environment to a competitive hierarchical advertising company in New York: Navigating land-mines of anti-scrum sentiment; to Google: Giving structure to chaos with the freedom to create options.

Organizational Culture and the Deployment of Agile Methods: The Competing Values Model View. Juhani Iivari and Netta Iivari (University of Oulu). (Invited talk, 30 min) [Link ]
A number of researchers have identified organizational culture as a factor that potentially affects the deployment of agile systems development meth¬ods. Inspired by the study of Iivari and Huisman (2007), which focused on the de¬ployment of traditional systems development methods, the present paper proposes a number of hypotheses about the influence of organizational culture on the de¬ployment of agile methods.

Diagnosing Organizational Culture: Can Agile work in My Company?. Diana Larsen (FutureWorks Consulting). (Invited talk, 45 min) [Link ]
Choosing your approach to a transition to Agile software development hinges more on your organizationís culture than on industry, marketplace, economy, or type of product. But how can you tell whether your culture will support adopting Agile? Will it succeed at your company? Will it provide the results you want? In this talk, Diana Larsen will describe one way to diagnose your organizational culture, determine how youíll measure success, and, working with culture, identify the next steps to getting the results you want.
Bio: Diana Larsen chairs the Agile Alliance board of directors. As a principal consultant at FutureWorks Consulting LLC (http://futureworksconsulting.com), she sparks workplaces where productive, resilient teams focus on frequent delivery of high value software. Diana co-authored Agile Retrospectives: Making Good Teams Great! and co-founded the annual ìAgile Open Northwestî conference.

Collaboration in an Agile World. Panel Impresario: Steven Fraser, Director - Cisco Research Center.
Panelists: Bjørn Alterhaug, Professor, Norwegian University of Science and Technology, David Anderson, President David J. Anderson & Associates Management Consulting for Knowledge Workers, Diana Larsen, Partner FurtureWorks Consulting, Scott Page, Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics, University of Michigan Ann Arbor. (Panel, 90 min) [Link ]
Collaboration, the art of working together on a joint intellectual effort, is an essential part of system and product development. Collaboration is generally learned on the job rather than by academic training. This panel will review challenges, including: organization, geography, culture (norms, beliefs, shared vocabulary), and communication (both verbal and non-verbal) - and the mechanisms now available to ameliorate. This panel will bring together a set of experts to discuss, debate and propose collaboration strategies for the 21st century.

For at least a decade the agile community has understood that there was value in Lean Thinking and that methods such as Extreme Programming could be interpreted and explained using Lean concepts. However, institutionalized adoption of Lean, with its culture of continuous improvement ("kaizen"), has been slow. There is no recognized Lean software development lifecycle or project management methodology in common use today. The Lean idea of flow is widely accepted but the tools and techniques required to manage and optimize it have gained little traction, until recently. The introduction of kanban systems that visualize work and specifically limit the quantity of work-in-progress (WIP) have generated a significant improvement in the adoption of Lean concepts, techniques and tools. This growth is rapid and global and echoes the growth rate of XP almost a decade earlier. Unlike XP adoption is happening in a wide range of businesses from conservative Northern European insurance firms that failed to embrace agile methods, to startups in emerging markets such as Cambodia. This talk, citing real examples from around the World, will look at why and how choosing to limit WIP can create a cultural evolution within your organization that will lead to a leaner future.
David J. Anderson, leads a management consulting firm focused on improving performance of technology companies. He has been in software development for 26 years and has managed teams on agile software development projects at Sprint, Motorola, Microsoft and Corbis. David is credited with the first implementation of a kanban process for software development in 2005. David was a founder of the agile movement through his involvement in the creation of Feature Driven Development. He was also a founder of the APLN, a founding signatory of the Declaration of Interdependence, and a founding member of the Lean Software and Systems Consortium. He moderates several online communities for lean/agile development. He is the author of the book "Agile Management for Software Engineering - Applying the Theory of Constraints for Business Results". Most recently, David has been focused on creating a synergy of the CMMI model for organizational maturity with Agile and Lean methods through projects with Microsoft and the SEI. He is based in Seattle, Washington

Kanban at an Insurance Company (Are You Sure?). Olav Maassen (QNH AD&S) and Jasper Sonnevelt (ASR Insurance). (Experience report, 30 min) [Link ]
ASR Insurance, one of the top 3 insurance companies in the Netherlands is transitioning their IT maintenance and operations from a more traditional approach to Kanban. They started small with 1 team and slowly increased to 7 teams to gain experience. Due to the positive results they are now in the middle of transitioning 200 people to their new environment. This experience report highlights the experiences gained by the first implementing during the initial phase of the Kanban implementation. This report reflects both the practicing perspective and the coaching perspective.

Since late 2007 the software development teams at Codeweavers UK have been incrementally improving their ability to deliver motor finance and insurance web services. This two-year journey has taken the company from chaos to kanban-style single-piece flow, including Scrum briefly along the way. This paper charts that journey, showing the benefits gained from a simple "inspect and adapt" cycle in which the teams tackled their biggest problem at each stage.

From a timebox tangle to a more flexible flow. Jørn Ola Birkeland (Bekk). (Experience report, 30 min) [Link ]
Flow-based software development (FSD, a.k.a. lean, pull- based, or kanban) is attractive in certain types of software development projects, e.g. maintenance projects. This experience report shows one project team’s attempt at moving from a timebox-based development process (scrum) to a flow-based process

Bugs is the number one waste in software development. In fact, it has been so since the early days of software development. Finding and fixing bugs late in the software development process is hard, time consuming and expensive. Developer focus is moved away from building features and testers get fed up by having to report errors that should have been detected earlier in the process. In this talk, I will focus on how we can use Kanban in combination with solid engineering principles like ATDD and TDD can help improve the quality of the software delivered.

I'd like to share some key aspects of Google culture that make it very receptive and an ideal fit for lean and agile practices. Also some aspects that initially seem a barrier. Focus will be on principles such as: transparency; collaboration; agility; openness to embracing change; innovation; ambition; questioning of the status quo. We are about to introduce kanban and mix it up with agile, scrum & lean practices. By March 2010 I will have much to share on how we have soared and how we have crashed.

For many projects it is difficult to make the Scrum process fit. For example, it may be impossible to focus on a month’s worth of pre-planned work without substantial interruptions. Kanban takes a different approach, and Scrumban has been proposed as a way to combine Scrum with Kanban. We will talk about how Kanban can be better for your team, and how to go from Scrum to Kanban in 10 easy steps!

We are terribly concerned about being done with things. But are we really ever done with things? Done is an ambiguous term. Why else would we need a Definition of done? Definitions of done normally includes quite a few activities, but why are they concealed in a definition? Sometimes "Done" is at the same time so desirable and ambiguous that teams have two or even three versions of it - "Done Done" and "Done Done Done". Teams should discard the notion and need of being "done" and instead find the real states that their tasks have and make them visible.

Lean principles have been around for quite a while now, long enough for companies to try them out and see how well they work. So what does success look like? It turns out that in successful lean development organizations, people routinely dedicate their intelligence and creativity to helping the company become and remain successful. Because of this, the companies themselves are adaptive - they respond to changing market conditions and opportunities faster than their competitors. This talk will be about what these successful lean companies do to energize their workplace.
Bio: Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for thirty years. She has managed solutions in software development, supply chain management, manufacturing operations, and new product development. She spearheaded the implementation of a Just-in-Time system in a video tape manufacturing plant, resulting in dramatic improvements in the plant's performance. Maryís team leadership skills were honed in 3M, where new product development is a core competency. Her teams commercialized products with embedded software three times faster than normal, partnering with small suppliers in the process. A popular writer and speaker, Maryís classes apply lean principles to Software Development problems and offer a fresh perspective on software development processes. Her book Lean Software Development: An Agile Toolkit was awarded the Software Development Productivity Award in 2004. Implementing Lean Software Development: From Concept to Cash, was published in 2006, and Leading Lean Software Development was published in November, 2009.

Some years ago I met Christopher Avery (PhD, http://christopheravery.com/) on Agile conference and listened to one of his talks about the Responsibility Process. Through thousands of years human brain have been trained to avoid responsibility, we have build an subconscious and automatic process to guard us against it. It´s always somebody else´s fault, right? It´s the circumstances :), not us, right? In this talk, I´ll try to present The Responsibility Process (TM) itself as well as my personal experiences about its practical usage. Ill show you a way to become more responsible!

Beauty is in simplicity. Jørn Ølmheim (Statoil). (Lightning talk, 10 min) [Link ]
Will expand on the topic of my article from 97things every programmer should know: http://programmer.97things.oreilly.com/wiki/index.php/Beauty_Is_in_Simplicity. The talk will be a short discussion of what I think is beautiful code, and include some examples.

With the craftsmanship movement, focus has shifted from viewing the developer as a production unit in software engineering to viewing the developer as a craftsman with responsibility and individual skills. Agile with its lightweight methodologies can't afford heavy processes to control production unit developers. In order to be lightweight an agile process needs a structure of responsible craftsmen that takes responsibility for the quality by itself.

Software Craftsmanship is sometimes dismissed as being only for individual developers and/or boutique software shops. However, the practices and principles of craftsmanship are just as vital and valid to large organizations as individuals. In this talk, Cory will cover practices and approaches for adopting craftsmanship in your organization. We'll cover specific exercises, organizational challenges, and how to influence both organizational and team-level acceptance.
Bio:Cory Foy is an agile developer, consultant and coach with a passion for looking at the entire system within an organization. His background consists of highly technical positions in Java, Ruby, .NET and C#, including working for Microsoft as a Premier Field Engineer debugging critical enterprise applications in .NET and C#, developing mobile applications using J2ME and Objective-C and building client-side applications for financial transfer using C#. Cory has also been a coach leading agile transitions with large distributed teams and a frequent speaker at conferences including the SQE Agile Development Practices conference and the Software Craftsmanship North America conference. He’s also very passionate about the development community, helping start or run user groups in Florida, North Carolina and Missouri, and serving as the Global Community Liaison for the Scrum Alliance.
Cory Foy http://www.coryfoy.com http://twitter.com/cory_foy

Leveraging Diversity in Parallel: Perspective, Heuristics, and Oracles. Scott Page (University of Michigan Ann Arbor). (Keynote, 60 min) [Link ]
Scott Page is the Leonid Hurwicz Collegiate Professor of Complex Systems, Political Science, and Economics at the University of Michigan Ann Arbor and a member of the external faculty at the famous think thank Sante Fe Institute. He is an acclaimed speaker, researcher, educator, consultant, and author. Both of his excellent books "The Difference: How the Power of Diversity Creates Better Groups, Firms, Schools, and Societies" and "Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Model of Social Life" (co-authored by John H. Miller) have important implications for collaborative software development. We asked Scott to illuminate us about the role of diversity in activities that we frequently perform in software development: problem solving, decision making, and prediction. For a discussion of the relationship between Scott's theories and software development, see the editorial in IEEESW on Diversity and Software Development (http://www.computer.org/portal/web/csdl/doi/10.1109/MS.2009.62).