Agile Tour Riga 2012

Speaker: Andrea Provaglio
Keynote

What is it that makes an Agile team or an Agile organization run like a clockwork, deliver and succeed? Is Agile just a set of useful practices and tools, or is there more to it than meets the eye? Yes, we also have values and principles, but are those what really makes the difference between a team that delivers and one that doesn’t? More than anything else: could it be that effective teamwork and social/relational proficiency, custom-fit for an Agile cultural environment, are the ultimate – and largely untapped – source of real competitive advantage? In this session, based on the speaker’s experience, we’ll explore topics such as:

• self-regulating social systems
• collective intelligence
• organizational learning
• self-organization

Speaker: Bob Marshall
Keynote

Rightshifting explains how most knowledge-work organisations fall far short of their potential. The Marshall Model explains the causes of organisational effectiveness - or lack of it. This session will explain the basics of Rightshifting and the Marshall Model, giving the necessary context for the rest of the morning's sessions, and explaining how all this affects your job satisfaction, career prospects and life at work.

Speaker: Mattias Skarin
Keynote

Continuous improvement in a manufactoring environment is far simpler than a product development scenario. Set a standard, improve from it. In product development we make a living by dealing with uncertainty, making cause and effect much more dim. But don't give up! Let me give examples how visualisation, reflection, close management interaction and challenge can tie together improvement initiatives and how we used these to improve cycle time and market share on an a legacy product.

Speaker: André Heie Vik
Presentation

Embracing change is a core agile value. That does not mean that we should always say "yes". As developers, we acquire detailed knowledge of the domain and the system. With this knowledge comes the responsiblity to say "no" when we see a real problem. By saying "no", we make room for discussions about the issue at hand, and make it possible do make informed decisions. If we don't say "no", we make promises we can't keep. That means more risk, more stress, lower quality.

Speaker: Vaidas Adomauskas
Presentation

Agile maturity is quite new and disputable subject. The reason can be that we saw good and bad things with Capability Maturity Model (CMM). Can we do differently in Agile? Can (do we need to) create Agile maturity model that helps our companies to pick best Agile methods and practices depending on their context? Can it bring value to people doing the work rather than just be one more “marketing tool” for managers and sales?

I will base my presentation on my personal experience with Agile projects and companies I have been working with. I will show how “knowing where you are” helped us to set “where we want to go” – choose right Agile improvements and practices. Last but not least, I will use basketball league metaphor to make sure it is fun and you are not bored! So if you want to hear real life examples and tips how to go from kids basketball league (follow the book) to NBA (optimize whole organization), join the presentation.

Speaker: Piotr Burdyło
Presentation

Running a software development company is sometimes simple and sometimes complicated. Most often it is really complex and from time to time - very chaotic. Basing on the Cynefin framework (deriving from Complex Adaptive Systems Theory) one can get some guidelines on how to aid decision making and not get lost in the process.

Cynefin is a sense-making framework that describes complex systems (like projects or companies), situations in these systems and aids decision making. It was presented in ‘99 by Dave Snowden and has recently started to get recognition in agile community as it can be used to explain concepts of agility in a broader context. To make it worse (and more geeky) - Cynefin is pronounced in a very unintuitive way.

During the talk I’ll present a few ideas that are rooted in agile concepts (inspection & adaption, collaboration, empowered team, etc.), that have been playtested in a real company and can be reused on any level of an organization (from a project team level up to the whole company as we did).

Speaker: Aleksi Rossi
Presentation

What's Lean startup from a techie perspective and how does Agile software development fit in that picture? Let's go through perspectives how to get best value out of them. If you are in a start-up or consider founding one, or if you need to develop new business in existing company, you should definitely check out how to find common ground.

Speaker: Ola Sundell
Presentation

Keypoints:

• why customer development matters?
• how to use feedback loops to build better products?
• understanding product-market-fit
• the importance of early vangelists
• crossing the chasm
• metrics matter, but not just any metrics
• pivot or persevere, but don’t touch the vision

Speaker: Raimonds Simanovskis
Presentation

Agile methodologies are mostly focused on software development but software starts to live only when it is finally after development in production. As there are unexpected changes during development there are also unexpected changes in production as well and we need to be agile to respond to these changes.

This presentation will cover the following Agile production or DevOps practices with real life stories as examples:

• Infrastructure as code
• Continuous deployment
• Monitoring and self-healing

Speaker: Igor Afonov
Presentation

In this session Igor is going to make a short introduction to configuration management with Opscode Chef. He will share his practical experience using Chef in day to day operations and building infrastructure for various web applications ranging from small projects to high-load applications. He will make a focus on mistakes he made and ways to avoid them. Specific topics he is going to cover include handling application deployment with chef and testing your infrastructure code at different levels.

Speaker: Martins Kemme
Presentation

This presentation will touch different technical aspects of product development as well as do's and don'ts during production/maintenance. Topics of the presentation will include old terms like continuous integration and build process as well as more recent topics like continuous delivery, deployment and devops. During presentation we will also talk about monitoring of the live application. Topics will be illustrated with examples.

Facilitator: Martin von Weissenberg
Workshop

Find out how powerful Scrum can be, learning by doing and failing. Do not underestimate any Story... it may cost you a lot! The Scrum Lego City brings you right to the point: You will experience what it means to be agile.

The goal of the Game is to simulate every aspect of the Scrum process learned in theory the day before. The Team and the Scrum Master will have to put in practice everything learned during the theoretical part.

You can find more about this workshop here, but you should experience it yourself!

Number of participants is limited to 17 of 24. Please, let us know about attending the workshop vie e-mail.

Facilitator: Armands Baranovskis
Workshop

Kanban is a tool that allows optimization of a process by visualizing it. There are three main prescriptions:

1. Visualize the workflow
2. Limit WIP
3. Measure and optimize the average lead time