Which Presentations I’m Planning on Attending at Agile 2017
Agile2017 is such an awesome conference. With 274 sessions to choose from, I have to focus on what I’m going do and see. This year, I’ll be focusing on Audacious Salons, Product Ownership, Technical Enablers and some wonderful other options!
I attend the annual Agile Alliance conference each year. To prepare, I use my blog to write about the events I’m looking at attending. You can check out what I wrote about last year. I absolutely love this conference, and am looking forward to Agile2017 in August. In addition to presenting on Acceptance Criteria for Data-Focused User Stories, here’s what I’m planning on doing while there. I hope my list gives you some ideas to check out!
Audacious Salons:
The track description has me completely mesmerized! I saw this last year and didn’t venture to explore it, but this year I’m going to summon the courage to dive in. The parts of the abstract that caught my are listed here, with my italics:
- On the track, we reprise this embrace of the unknown and the different. The Audacious Salon is a place where strongly held ideas are discussed in civility, where dialog leads us places we’ve not yet dreamed. It’s a place to compare experiences and expand our own with the richness of others. It’s a place to offer insights and hear how they fit for others. It’s a place to hear others’ insights and test our own beliefs against them.
- Those who attend will put their egos aside and create an environment where all feel safe to participate so that differing ideas can frolic together to produce progeny that delight and surprise.
- Even among the well-experienced, this territory may be risky in its vulnerability. But if you’ve the fortitude, it could be the beginning of new collaborations with peers, perhaps unlikely peers, into a future of exploration in fruitful directions. Prepare to be surprised!
I would love to attend all of them, and I suspect it won’t be possible without giving up some key product ownership sessions as well… so here are a few I’m not going to miss!
To Estimate AND Not To Estimate – Going Beyond #NoEstimates: I’m fascinated by the idea of using the Deep Democracy coaching technique in a sure-to-be-heated discussion on the “no estimates” movement. I’m a proponent of no estimates, and I can’t wait for this experience!
The Silence Experiment: Making Products without Words: As an extreme extrovert who thinks best out loud, I’m sure I will learn a LOT from this session… and hopefully build a new skill in the process.
What Would it Take for Us to Move from ‘Technical Debt’ to ‘Technical Health’? This session will not only challenge me to think about tech debt in a different (more positive) way, but will also give me ideas for helping data-focused teams understand technical debt/health differently. Our industry is relatively new to addressing this concept, so having a new way of looking at it just might help us embrace it more fully!
Imposter Syndrome: Innovation Killer Among Us? Oh! I struggle with this regularly! I recently had someone introduce me to a group of people as “the world’s leading expert on agile for BI teams” and although I was incredibly flattered (and pleased to know he thought that of me), I found it really hard to speak up in the group because I was expected to be an “expert” when I was sure that other people in the group had better ideas than I! I am grateful this track brings focus to this topic.
How Agile Can Data Teams Really Be? Should we just give up? OF COURSE I am going to this one – sounds right up my alley! Hope many of you will join me there!
Product Ownership:
My deepest passion in bringing Agile to data-focused teams is Product Ownership. This year’s conference has some great options for learning more about this important aspect of agility. Though I will have to make some hard decisions and won’t be able to attend them all, here are the sessions I encourage others to attend – and tell me about them afterward if you don’t see me there!
Presentations I’m looking forward to attending:
Agile Product Ownership: DO the Right Things, Not Everything
Why and How We are Moving Beyond the Product Owner Mindset at Riot Games
Product Ownership, Planning & Learning: Growing Product Oriented Teams & Companies
Defining Value: Perspective Is Everything!
Portfolio Visualization and Prioritization for Business Agility
Agile Product Thinking: Stalwarts Talk with Jeff Patton
Continuous Improvement for Product Management
Agile BA Practices using the Guide to Business Analysis
Prioritization – 10 Different Techniques for Optimizing What to Start Next
Technical Enablers:
One of the biggest hurdles for data-focused team when they go Agile is technical enablement – changing the way we do things technically so our teams can be Agile. Our (data warehousing and business intelligence) industry is so full of vendors trying to solve every problem for us that our first reaction can be to wait for a vendor to give us “easy” answers for Agile technical enablement as well. However, a lot of the Agile technical practices are not something a vendor will solve for us, and we need to jump in and start doing them. Others might be more accessible with vendor focus, but we’re a long way from a robust suite of Agile technical tools! So, join me at as many of these as we can get to, to learn and grow our Agile capabilities!
Several presentations that will be important to attend:
How to Fail Your TDD Rollout: A Train Wreck Story
Intentional Architecture: Practices for Sustainable Development and Delivery
Evolving Your Testing Strategy: Mapping Now, Next, and Later
Pairing: The Secret Sauce of Agile Testing
Adapting Information Architecture for Lean and Agile Teams
Not Technical? Not a Problem! Introducing Engineering Practices Without Being Hands-On
Mob Programming: A Live Action Role Playing Game
Scaffolding a legacy app with BSS scenarios using SpecFlow/Cucumber
Other topics that really caught my eye:
Agile2017 offers such a rich program for Agile innovators, thought leaders and practitioners. In addition to growing my skills in product ownership and technical enablers, I’m excited to continue learning about many other areas of agile (there are so many!).
Here are a few other talks I’m hoping to attend:
Beyond the Underpants Gnomes: Why Kanban Stalls and How to Restart It
Why Data Can Be Both Detrimental and Invaluable to Change Initiatives
Surviving Backdraft (or How to Not Die in a Hellish Explosion of Dysfunction)
I love the smell of DATA in the morning (Getting started with Agile Data Science)
One Metric to Rule Them All: Effectively Measure Your Teams Without Subjugating Them
Time Theft – How Hidden & Unplanned Work Commit the Perfect Crime
Value Every 2 Weeks with Improvement Slicing and Incremental Improvement Boards
Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams
Conclusion:
I know that we often wait until the airplane ride to figure out what we’re doing at a conference. As you prepare for the conference, you can create your own schedule, which makes it much easier to plan your time. And I do encourage you to plan ahead – there’s so much to do! Oh, and if you’re attending Agile2017, be sure to let me know you’re there! I’ll be tweeting from my Twitter profile, @AgileLynn.
