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Speakers


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Attending


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Sponsor


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Diana Larsen – The Team Reflects, then Tunes and Adjusts: Let us count the ways

Agile Roots is honored to announce Diana Larsen will be doing a work shop on Reflection.

This will be a short workshop to unpack and examine the myriad ways team members can reflect, tune & adjust individual and team behavior: e.g., PDCA, retrospectives, Agile Artifact Review, Stand-ups, Pair debriefing, peer feedback, and more.

We will create new activities to help teams look at their behaviors, tune their teamwork, and practice or support their adjustments.

Diana Larsen (@DianaOfPortland) is the author of ‘Agile Retrospectives‘, a senior partner at FutureWorks consulting, and the chair of the Agile Alliance Board of Directors. I’m certain she has done some reflecting on Agile along the way (and was one of the only submitters that listed the principles that applied to each of her submissions without any prompting).

I’ve long held that true reflection is the key to a high functioning Agile team… simple, but not always easy. A practical workshop I’m looking forward to for sure!

Simultaneous Phases: Agile’s Secret Sauce

Agile Roots is excited that we will be joined by James Shore, who will lead us through the ‘Secret Sauce’ of simultaneous phases:

Short iterations (as in Scrum / XP) or even continuous flow (as in Lean / Kanban) are an essential part of Agile planning. And yet there’s rarely much discussion of how these short iterations can actually be accomplished. Teams struggle with finding time to understand requirements, finish testing, and perform adequate design. They often have trouble getting work to “done done” and ready to release as a result.

This session reveals the secret sauce of Agile development: simultaneous phases. These techniques have been part of Agile from the beginning, but few teams are aware of them and even fewer practice them. In this highly interactive session, come experience how simultaneous phases allow you to avoid hacks like “requirements iterations,” “testing iterations,” or “refactoring stories,” and make short iterations and continuous flow possible.

James was an inaugural recipient of the prestigious Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice. He lives and breaths Agile and we are looking forward to learning how to finally avoid ‘Scrummerfall™’.

Announcing Sessions

We’re have begun the process of reviewing submissions and we have some great ones.

As part of the process, once we have selected a proposal and confirmed the speaker will be attending, the session will be announced and described in the blog.

We should do one every couple days until the full schedule is announced mid-May.

Do you speak my language?

I’m looking for people who want to participate on a diverse panel of 6-8 at the Agile Roots conference.

The idea is to have a candid discussion on the approaches and challenges of building communication, collaboration and trust between all the representative roles of an Agile team: Executives, Product Managers, Engineers, Testers.

If you fall into one of those categories and think you can provide interesting perspectives on this topic, please respond to andrew@agileroots.com with ‘There is Only Us’ as the subject.

I’m looking for ways to replace “What are ‘they’ doing down there?” and “What are ‘they’ thinking up there?” to “There is only ‘Us‘.”