Writing good user stories and planning effective product releases is difficult. Simple story templates and prioritization heuristics offer short term relief, but teams still struggling under mountains of stories of questionable quality.

In this short workshop you’ll gain a deeper understanding of why the simple idea of stories can be so difficult. Armed with deeper understanding you’ll learn not to write stories, but to discuss your product and plan its release while creating an organized story backlog as a natural outcome of conversation.

David Allen’s GTD, Getting Things Done, is a set of simple things you can implement in your daily life to greatly reduce stress and become more efficient in your personal and work life.
A lot of GTD can easily be mapped to how people behave when Lean and Agile is successful. We explore the basic set of GTD tools and how they can help us to be both Lean and Agile. We will cover: Natural Planning (maps to XP Planning Game), GTD Workflow for transforming wishful (stressful thinking) to actions, Ready For Anything – how to prepare for the unexpected.

This interactive workshop uses role-playing scenarios to inspire the participants with a new way of designing solutions they care about. The workshop uses a simulation game and it’s based on a synergy among solution focused, value-based coaching and theater improvisation techniques to bring the learning to a deeper level.

As an agile coach you’re helping your clients to improve and to establish agile practices, principles and values. But how do you improve and reflect? What are your acceptance tests? How do you measure your personal development? What are indicators for being totally wrong? How do you keep the balance between pragmatism and dogmatism?

If you have similar questions, we will provide a World Café setting for you to exchange experiences, answers and even more questions with other participants. At the end of the workshop you should definitely have new ideas to sharpen your “coaching saw”.

Even though the behaviour of some individuals may seem destructive, most participants in projects are in fact trying to help. Central to realising this—and successfully confront apparently non-contributing co-workers—is understanding their motives.

The key is that changing the personality of others isn’t hard: rather, it’s all but impossible! Therefore, we will propose an alternative approach to this common source of frustration. This workshop introduces a model which can make it easier to see how others and your own behaviour might look from different perspectives.

System Metaphor was and is an elusive practice of the original XP. It has largely been forgotten over time.

Yet in the past few years, my colleagues and I have discovered the stunning power of a genuine System Metaphor on our own shipping product. This makes us wonder why System Metaphor ever went out of vogue.

This session will explore why Metaphor matters. We’ll examine how our own Music Metaphor reshaped our flagship product, even our company, and how the right metaphor can supply the driving beat that can turn your product into a hit.

The introduction of the agile practices is not so easy and immediate and each organization and it’s important to consider which impact agile may have keeping in mind the technology used by the organization that is usually the mirror of the background developers have.This session will drive you in the difficulties (and the solution put in place) experienced during the adoption of agile practices with Flash Platform developers, focusing on this points: -Tasks definition -Conversations’ output recording -Pair programming -Dependencies injection -CRC cards -Sustainable software

You understand “steady state” Agile practices, but how to begin? Embedded systems development holds challenges such as: • Software tightly coupled to inflexible hardware • Team enmeshed with other departments • End customer can’t interact with you

Agile principles need not be watered down when you are faced with the challenges of embedded systems development. On the contrary, they truly shine in complex situations with too much uncertainty for sequential processes to work well. Practical proven techniques for navigating the early “transient state” will be explored.

Agile adoption is all about change. Change is always hard. Agile adoption is a big change which makes it more than hard, it’s painful. However the change can be softened by many means: knowledge, coaching, facilitation, stories, giving options, addressing fears. This workshop is all about treating the agile adoption pain.

For decades functional programming has disappeared from industry mainstream. It’s great that these ideas around modeling applications have reappeared with a huge force, but it can be difficult to see how they fit into our current Agile teams. I’ve spent the last year and a half working to figure out if and how TDD and BDD fit with functional programming. To take it a step further, I’ll break down how agile practices fit in with Lisp vs ML style functional languages.