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.

Improving the full value chain

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do we involve, intract and improve with the non software parts of the value chain? Let me walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive improvements across organizational borders. I’ll share experiences and examples from real case studies where they have been put to use.

Bio:
Sun Tzu once said the ultimate responsibility of generalship is maneuver into a position of success.
How do we do this in software? This is my quest.
I work as a Lean and Kanban coach, growing people and systems to create great products – while having more fun doing it.
I’m an author of the book ”Kanban and Scrum, making the most of both” and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD.
http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin

Agile adjustments

Examining real world examples of adjusting the agile methodology. Adjusting the overall agile process based on project and client variables

Cross Enterprise Collaboration

Service outsourcing is a business paradigm in which an organization has a part of its business process performed by a service provider. Process views are pivotal to support this way of working. A process view shields secret or irrelevant details from a private business process, thus allowing an organization to reveal only public, relevant parts of its private business process to partner organizations. This presentation introduces a specification framework to support service outsourcing using process views. To enable the construction of process views at various levels of detail, the framework defines several projection relations between process views and the underlying internal processes. To allow consumers and providers of process views to establish an outsourcing relation, the framework defines several matching relations between the respective views that are comprehensive and flexible for service outsourcing

Alex Norta,Tallinn Technology University, Estonia: Alex Norta is currently a research member at the Faculty of Informatics/TTU and was earlier a researcher at the Oulu University Secure-Programming Group (OUSPG ) after having been a post-doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland. He received his MSc degree (2001) from the Johannes Kepler University of Linz, Austria and his PhD degree (2007) from the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His PhD thesis was partly financed by the IST project CrossWork, in which he focused on developing the eSourcing concept for dynamic inter-organizational business process collaboration. His research interests include business-process collaboration, workflow management, e-business transactions, service-oriented computing, software architectures and software engineering, ontologies, mashups, social web. At the IEEE EDOC’12-conference, Alex won the best-paper award for his full research paper with the title “Inter-enterprise business transaction management in open service ecosystems”.

Design up front is back!

Working software is an expensive way of getting user feedback when compared with role-play or design prototypes.

I will present practical examples from the domain of participatory and user-centered design in the context of product and service development. These include various kinds of prototypes, role-play, design games, and simulations.

The advantages of these methods include super-fast iterations, committed stakeholders, and ultimately better systems and cheaper IT acquisitions.

Real Options – Introducing Staff Liquidity

The key to making decisions is not how or what or why. The key to making decisions is WHEN to make them. Chris Matts will introduce Real Options, a decision making process based on financial maths and applied psychology. Now we know how to make decisions, Chris will show you how to make the right decision, especially when people don’t want you to.

We introduce staff liquidity, or how to make the most out of your team. It turns out that real options is something you always do when you manage staff liquidity in the right way. You will never think about management in the same way again.

Stay tuned for our biggest ever – 10th anniversary of Agile Saturday on 15th February!

If you have something interesting to talk about, then please let us know heldin.rikk@agile.ee !

Speakers (preliminary):

• Chris Matts (UK)
• Björn Kimminich (DE)
• Anton Keks (EE)
• Hanno Jarvet (EE)
• Alek Kozlov (EE)
• Marko Alas (EE)
• Marko Taippale (FI)
• Ari Tanninen (FI)
• Jacopo Romei (IT)
• Jaan Pullerits (EE)
• Mitchell Rankin (US)
• Tarkvara Kool (EE)
• Heldin Rikk (EE)

How to use  beta testing to widen DoD

Beta testing has been around for long time, but the world around has changed.
We develop software today very differently that we did 5 or 10 years ago.
On this presentation we look on how and if to have Beta testing on modern product developed using Agile methodologies.
I will provide information what Beta testing is and what are the important bits for running it on products running on fast pace.

20 developers, 3 countries, 1 service – a case study

TransferWise is a global foreign payments company that is moving 1M GBP a day. Our dev team went 3 to 20 in the past year, we span 3 locations, experiment a lot and are anxious to get things done. This puts pressure on efficient communication and strong practices.

This talk is a case study of the problems we have been facing and what have been our learnings. You should come if you’ve struggled with distributed teams, nurturing culture and/or fast-growing teams and have a nice chat with similar minds.

We have decided to become agile. What should we do next?

This is a question I hear quite often but it is impossible to pull out
a ToDo list with descriptions of steps that transforms your team into
an agile one. Instead of answer a number of questions arise – who is
this “we”? why it was decided to become agile? what do you know about
agile or what you think you know about agile? how you define “agile”?
It means that before any possible answer to a question what to do next
or advise how to continue we should have common understanding of what
agile is and means.

This session is targeting beginners. We speak about and discuss the
reasons what drives people and teams toward agile methodologies, what
should you think about before making decision about using (or not
using) agile methodology and what are the prerequisites of success
while adopting agile methodology.

What got you here, won’t get you there. Moving from a technical specialist to a leadership role

The reason for your promotion was your good work as a technical specialist. Having the most seniority makes also total sense why you were promoted to managing people. The new role came without a memo, manual or training.

•  What should you keep in mind while making the most in your new role?
•  What should you do differently?
•  How can you help a colleague in this position?- How to develop the necessary skills and competencies?
•  What are the typical problems of technical specialists in managerial roles and how to overcome them?