Companies have success with agile development because of their culture. Consciously (or unconsciously), senior developers build culture continuously when teaching their co-workers about technology, process and business goals.

What are they like, the senior developers that manage to guide their co-workers in the every day routine towards agility?

Even though many projects are doing what the call agile; standups, backlogs and some automated testing, they are not reaping the full benefits. Proving you can adapt to circumstances by shipping new versions rapidly will be the true test. And it doesn’t matter if you’re doing agile or not: Getting to that point will expose problems in your process andhelp you achieve your goal of delivering quality software that solves real problems for real customers.

Prove that you’re doing it right and ship it!

We have seen agile work best when a project team has a collaborative culture. This session aims to help you discuss with your team the culture in which they would like to work. It draws on some basic questions regarding trust and trust-worthy behaviour. We will begin by presenting some basic models of trust (including David Maister’s Trust Equation). Then brainstorm factors that can help and hinder trust. We will also explore tools and techniques that can be used to create or improve trust. Run at XPDay09 (see http://agilecoach.typepad.com/photos/xpdaylondon2009/index.html for outputs).