Dagskrá Agile Ísland 2012

Tearing Down Walls - Using Kanban to Improve Flow from Marketing to
Production

Mattias Skarin

We have learned how to build small agile teams. But how do you improve if you're an organization with legacy in both systems and processes? Let me share how we linked together four functions using kanban (marketing, development, release management and operations), overcame earlier "die hard" habits and worked to improve flow of value.

I intend to show how kanban helped the functions collaborate and focus even though it sometimes meant sub-optimizing their own work. I also intend to show how we created and delivered good products without product owners or project managers.

Bio

Sun Tzu once said the ultimate responsibility of generalship is to manouver into a position of success. How do we do this in software? This is my quest.

I work as a Lean and Kanban coach building people, systems and interactions for developing great products - and have more fun doing it. 

During my journey I've helped helped several software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams (cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations using Kanban.

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

Culture Hacking

Daði Ingólfsson og Pétur Orri Sæmundsen

Culture hacking is the systematic development of culture in the workplace. In other words, a deliberate, continuous effort to develop a group's set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describe and shape the group. Culture hacking originates with software people and is faithful to the particular ethos of software hackers. It's about modifying culture, instead of software, for personal betterment and the betterment of others. Agile, for example, is one big culture hack because it's a system of values, principles, methods and practices that together greatly influence culture on all levels of the organization.

In this talk we'll start with a short exploration of Culture hacking and why it's important, but the bulk of the talk will be our story of culture hacking over the past five years. We'll go over what all this hacking has taught us about what works and what doesn't at our company, as well as discussing how you can do culture hacking at your own workplace.

Bio

Dadi is a knowledge sponge from Reykjavik, Iceland who's been working as an Agile Coach for the last five years. Before that he was a programmer for seven years where good design, sustainable development and technical excellence were his main obsessions. Today, he is one of the founders and owners of  Sprettur (www.sprettur.is), a pioneering software development and consulting company in Iceland. He's currently most interested in designing great products, coaching, understanding organizations, culture and human beings.

Pétur is the CEO of Sprettur a Lean software house, the only company in Iceland specializing in Lean and Agile software development. He pioneered the use of Agile methods in Iceland and is founder of both the first Icelandic Agile user group and Agile netið (a corporate alliance). Petur has 12 years of experience in the software industry where he as played the role of manager, coach, consultant and developer. 

Coaching is More Than Telling People What to Do

Once upon a time, the idea of a team coach did not really exist. Today, many people are coaching but many are confused. This session will speak to and challenge the most common questions I hear on a daily basis: How is an agile “coach” the same or different than a scrum master or technical lead? What's the role of an agile coach and how is it the same or different than a project manager? Does an agile coach focus only on the dev team or do they get involved with coaching product owners and testers too? What does an agile coach do besides running meetings?

Bio

David leads DevJam, a Minneapolis based company composed of agile collaborators working in the North America, Europe, Africa, and Asia. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on using agile methods to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes to create better and cooler products.

Along with coaching and presenting / leading workshops / tutorials at a variety of conferences, David is the creator of the video series Cutting an Agile Groove release through The Pragmatic Bookshelf.  Here has also contributed to several books “Managing Agile Projects” and “Agile in the Large” as well as creating curriculum for The University of Minnesota and Capella University.

Why High Availability Requires Agile

Udi Dahan

There's always been this tension between the agile and architecture camps. Many agilists focus on delivering business value and iterating quickly. Many architects focus on non-functional requirements - experience has taught them that a system may need to be rewritten otherwise. What both camps don't always realize is that the purpose of their actions is really about managing risk. Join Udi for a irreverent romp through agile principles, architectural “best practices”, and the organizational dysfunction that binds them.

Bio

Udi Dahan is The Software Simplist, an internationally renowned expert on software architecture and design. As one of the world's thought leaders in the areas of Service–Oriented Architecture, Domain–Driven Design, co–creator of the Command ⁄ Query Responsibility Segregation pattern, and founder of NServiceBus (the most popular service bus on the .NET platform), companies from all over the world turn to Udi for help on their mission critical projects. In addition to contributing to 4 books and 7 years of blogging, Udi is one of 44 experts in Europe recognized by the International .NET Association and a top–rated speaker at software development conferences all over the world.

Achieving Agility in an Enterprise Environment

Petar Shomov

Doing Agile software development is hard when you are working with a legacy system. In my team we have to deal with all kinds of technology - from stored procedures and a 15 year old Delphi app to a Windows Mobile app and C# web services. We started from a barely working system that was quite risky to update and now we deploy updates into production a few times a day.

Bio

Petar Shomov has been programming for more then 15 years and still loves doing that. He has developed all kinds of systems among which are a central heating control system back in Bulgaria, an anti-virus products at Friðrik Skúlason, and an IPTV system at Industria. While at Sprettur he has worked on systems for telecoms, transportation and logistics companies.

He is a veteran Agile practitioner and has been enjoying doing Test-Driven Development for quite some time. He is also one of the main drivers at Sprettur behind the Continuous Delivery ideas.

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Refactoring Google Chrome: Refactoring at a massive scale, supported by build and test automation.

Jói Sigurðsson

The talk will describe two very large scale refactoring projects undertaken on the Chromium code base, from which Google Chrome is built.  It will go into details on the tools evaluated and the tools eventually used, difficulties met, and best practices discovered along the way.

Bio

Jói Sigurðsson - Senior Staff Software Engineer, Google Chrome

Jói is an engineer on Google Chrome, currently focusing on architectural improvements. Prior to this role, Jói served as an engineer and tech lead on the Google Desktop and Google Toolbar projects. Jói is the author of GRIT, Google's Resource and Internationalization Tool, that is used by many of our client-side software projects such as Google Chrome.

Prior to joining Google in 2004, Jói held high-level technical roles at several Internet, mobile and security start-ups. One of these, OZ Communications, was acquired by Nokia in 2008.

Jói graduated as valedictorian from the physics department of the Grammar School of Akureyri in Iceland, and studied computer engineering for two years at the University of Iceland. While studying, he represented Iceland in several international mathematics and physics competitions, including the International Physics Olympiad in Sydney in 1995.

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Cynefin for Devs

Elizabeth Keogh

Cynefin is a framework for helping us make sense of our world, the order and chaos within it, and the complications and complexities that result. In this talk we'll look at the difference between complex problems, where cause and effect are only correlated in retrospect and software requirements tend to change as a result of feedback, and complicated ones in which the problem is well understood and merely requires expertise and a decent IDE. With an understanding of the difference, many of our development practices will start to make more sense - and we may even use them more appropriately too!

Bio

Liz Keogh is an independent Lean / Agile coach, trainer and developer based in London. She is a well-known blogger and international speaker, a core member of the BDD community and a contributor to a number of open-source projects including JBehave.

She trains in subjects as diverse as story-writing, haiku poetry, systems thinking, effective personal feedback and OO development, and has a strong technical background with almost 15 years' experience in delivering and coaching others to deliver large-scale enterprise applications, which she now combines with a focus on psychology, NLP and adult learning. She has pioneered the application of learning models in measuring Agile maturity and coaching progress, and is currently interested in modelling risk and change with complexity thinking and the Cynefin framework.

Liz was awarded the Gordon Pask award in 2010 for deepening existing ideas in the Agile space and "coming up with some pretty crazy ones of her own". She is also a science fiction writer and haiku poet.