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.

If you’ve never been on a team that’s fully bought into Test Driven Development (TDD) and Pair Programming, then you’re missing out. These teams tend to learn much faster from each other, be more cohesive, write more modular software with fewer defects, refactor with confidence, and are generally more fun to be on.

Come experience what it’s like to work on a team that’s using XP dev practices!

You will need a laptop with wireless connectivity and a web-browser.

Open Innovation is transforming how organizations manage their innovation processes. Open innovation fundamentally challenges how organizations innovate new product development ideas by extending the pool from which ideas are drawn. This model is concerned with combining internal and external ideas, as well as internal and external paths to market, to stimulate and advance the development of new products and technologies. Consequently Open Innovation has implications for how we view ‘the customer’ in agile projects.

Ever tried to study a tune for an acoustic guitars? Or trained for a marathon? Or rehearsed a scene in a stage play? Key to success in all those disciplines is steady practice day after day.

Code Katas (jap. 形, means “form”) are a way to practice programming (BDD/TDD). A coder will solve a coding problem given by a task repeatedly in regular intervals such as every day to achieve better solutions and skills.

In this workshop we’ll do Code Katas (several tasks with several constraints will be provided). And of course we expect lots of fun during this event!

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.

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.

This workshop aims to share experiences on implementing, managing and leveraging agile practices in globally distributed projects. The workshop will set the scene for an edited book on practicing agile distributed software projects published by Springer in 2010 - www.springer.com/computer/swe/book/978-3-642-12441-9. The content will be based on a combination of research and industrial presentations offered by the authors of book. Participants will engage in discussions and develop an understanding of dos and don’ts through a synergy of experiences from industrial companies.

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.