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Agile pitfalls in large organizations, how to not fail the programs

You will gain insight into more common pitfalls and learnings from running large architectural programs in agile environment and how to make them successful from company perspective.

Session will give an insight to the practical side of running a large programs in agile environments.

– How to manage the expectations of stakeholders, set achievable goals and deliver real products in predictable time-frame.
– Difficulties in defining the business value, making it clear and understandable for everyone.
– Role of a product owner in this environment and requirements for other roles.
– Avoiding duplication of work and making sure that the time is spent in the right place.

The talk is based on the real life experience in running the programs that have involved around 100 developers and multiple scrum teams.

BIO: Currently on a VP of Engineering position in Fortumo, one of Estonian companies offering mobile and micro-payments in the world around 80 countries.

Previously have been working as a project manager in EMT working on the data services and actively involved in introduction of early mobile portals, MMS and some other services to Estonian market.

After that have been working for 8.5 years in Skype, actively been involved in project and program management, also participating heavily in introduction of agile methods to Skype and running very large programs in Agile environment.

The Soul of a Developer

List of subjects discussed in no particular order:

– The soul of a developer – what sort of people common developers are.
– Way of thinking – binary logic.
– Introversion
– Attention disorders
– Laziness
– Teamwork
– Rivalry
– Trust
– Management communication barrier
– Motivation
– Developer burnout

BIO: Software developer in various companies for over 10 years. Worked in both agile and waterfall companies. Doing hobby projects in various areas of programming and computer arts.

I stumbled upon a blog of Dave Thomas, a signer of the Agile Manifestor, where he very reasonably complains about the misuse of the word “agile” and misuse of the whole concept.

According to him, here is what it is all about:

What to do:

Find out where you are
Take a small step towards your goal
Adjust your understanding based on what you learned
Repeat

How to do it:

When faced with two of more alternatives that deliver roughly the same value, take the path that makes future change easier.

A good read:
http://pragdave.me/blog/2014/03/04/time-to-kill-agile/

Introduction to 3D Graphics in your web browser with three.js

Browser technology has made a huge leap in past few years. It wasn’t long ago when web was mostly text with some pictures and hyperlinks, but now most internet sites we visit are built as massive client side applications with the browser doing as much work as the server.

Only recently it also became possible to do actual full blown, GPU accelerated 3D graphics using merely the browser. The new technology, called WebGL, makes it possible to create stunning games, business graphics or real estate presentations among other things, which work on many operating systems, devices and browsers without the need to install any extra plugins or extensions.

Only problem with WebGL is the fact it is a low level API and although extremely flexible, it requires quite a commitment to get started with. Fortunately, it didn’t take long for high level APIs to pop up, one of which, Three.js, we are investigating. One thing is for sure: it has never been quite that easy to get into the world of interactive 3D.

What exactly is GPU accelerated 3D? How it works? How to get started with it? How to use agile methods for developing your next sparkling 3D project? These and hopefully many other questions will be answered during the presentation.

Test Driven Development: An Essential Practice To Go Fast

Test Driven Development is a software development process that relies on short cycles of writing test code and making the tests pass by writing production code. I will give an overview of TDD and talk about my own experience using TDD.

We will talk about the reasons why development teams slow down over time, and how that process can be prevented by a comprehensive suite of tests. We will discuss the three laws of Test Driven Development – the central discipline of TDD, and the benefits of following these rules: increased quality, reliable low level documentation, decoupled design, and no fear of change.

Using and abusing metrics for improvement on personal, team and company level

Understanding how to use and abuse metrics, charts, KPIs and indicators for personal, team and organisational improvement. Why would I want to have measures or metrics for anything in the first place and how do they work in an organisational context? How can a metric be more than just a tool for a command and control styled management and help us in improvement?

Mashing up customers, users, product and business

Finding a product that people want to buy and use is common problem in software product development.

I will present a “how-to” for achieving viable software product business by combining Customer Development, Lean Startup, Business Model Generation, User-Centered Design and Agile software development.

Bio:
Marko has co-founded two companies, built concepts from idea to product, sold IPRs, coached AaltoES startups and been executive advisor for Finnish Deloitte TOP10 growth companies. He has applied Lean Startup in both product and service innovation context and has done several public speaking appearances regarding lean, agile and product development. Currently Marko is a partner at Gosei and helps companies to become better

Continuous Deployment – Fact or Fiction?

In this session I’ll describe my experience with making the biggest Agile “leap” in a consumer facing web application: From releasing a product version once every 2 months to releasing a version every other day – what does it take to make the release cycle totally Agile?
Agenda

• Why Continuous Deployment
• Setting the goals
• Development using Kanban workflows
• Some critical development technics
• Making the leap
• Some unexpected results that came out of the change
• Q&A

Challenges of implementing SCRUM in a large scale public sector project

Estonian Employment Information System (EMPIS) is one of Nortals largest development projects and the biggest in Public Sector Business Unit. Alar Huul will talk about the mistakes they made and challenges they faced in turning the development team of 20 specialist and the Product Owner agile.

Practicing Advanced Unit Testing with the TCG Kata

Doing Code Katas alone or in a Dojo can help sharpen our elementary skills as software developers. Practicing IDE shortcuts and TDD mini-step cycles is very useful for the daily business, yet I find some existing Code Katas too far away from real-life programming situations. That’s why I came up with the Trading Card Game Kata – which is (very loosely) based on Blizzard Entertainment’s free-to-play online-game “Hearthstone – Heroes of Warcraft”. This Kata is focused on practicing TDD in a slightly more complex (but not complicated) situation where you might have to think about rules like Single Responsibility Principle or Command Query Separation and might even feel the urge to use a Mocking framework at some point.

First I will introduce the ideas of Katas and Dojos in general and explain the TCG Kata rules to you. Then I will demo some real-life best-practices for writing good developer tests, using my TCG Kata sample solution as a showcase. This will include:

• Picking the right Test Double
• Test Data Builders
• Behavior Tests with BDDMockito
• Prose-like Assertions with Hamcrest
• Readability Sugar

PS: In the meanwhile, if anybody’s up for a little duel in the original Hearthstone, here’s my Battle.net tag on the EU server: koshiii#2720! 🙂

Toyota Kata – habits for continuous learning and improvements

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” – Aristotle

What are the habits, routines, behavior patterns, needed to strive for excellence every day? How do we create a culture of continuous learning and improvement?

Building on the power of habits, Toyota Kata will help you build a culture of continuous learning and improvement, a kaizen culture.

In this session, you will be introduced to the two main Kata* of the Toyota Kata, the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata. You will learn how the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata can become your “muscle memory” for continuous learning and improvements in your organization. These daily habits or routines will help you to strive towards your vision, your state of awesomeness, in small experiments focused on learning. The Improvement Kata will form the habits of doing small daily experiments focused on learning and improving. The Coaching Kata will form the habits of the leaders of the organization to help the learners learn and improve.

In this session, we will take Toyota Kata out of the manufacturing context and put it into the knowledge work context. You will learn how you can start applying the Improvement Kata and Coaching Kata in a software development context tomorrow.

Time to stop collecting problems and start forming new habits of learning and improving!

(*) Kata means pattern, routine, habits or way of doing things. Kata is about creating a fast “muscle memory” of how to take action instantaneously in a situation without having to go through a slower logical procedure. A Kata is something that you practice over and over striving for perfection. If the Kata itself is relative static, the content of the Kata, as we execute it is modified based on the situation and context in real-time as it happens. A Kata as different from a routine in that it contains a continuous self-renewal process.

Bio:
Håkan Forss is a Lean/Agile Coach, public speaker and author. He coaches, mentors and teaches Lean/Agile thinking, methods and tools to organizations, teams and individuals. He develops people’s ability to continuous learn and improve how work is done.

Håkan is an active member of the Kanban, Lean and Agile communities. He is an Accredited Kanban Trainer (AKT), a Kanban Coaching Professional (KCP) and he serves in the Kanban Coaching Professional Advisory board. He was also nominated for the Brickell Key Award 2013.

You can find Håkans random thoughts and thinking at http://twitter.com/hakanforss  and http://hakanforss.wordpress.com

Cocoon Projects – Liquid Organizations: anti-fragility beyond design.

During more than 100 years of classic management, hierarchy oriented organizations have shown their limits.

A new generation of enterprises is now moving its first steps towards a brand new way to organize and prosper.
Liquid, collaborative, flat, responsive, adaptive and anti-fragile: these are just buzzwords as long as alibis keep hanging around.

Based on our real experience, we present a workshop to involve audience while experimenting with new ways to set an organization up.