Lynn Winterboer

Always learning; always growing

Picks for Global SCRUM GATHERING®

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Part 1

I’m getting excited for next week’s Global Scrum Gathering® San Diego 2017, and thought I’d share some thoughts on the MANY wonderful sessions attendees can choose! If you are as excited for these as I am, but haven’t yet registered reserve your spot today.

Here are my suggestions for what to see on Day 1 at #SGCAL!

Monday, April 10, 2017

11:00 – 11:45 45-Minute Sessions

5 Easy Ways to Get Started with Scrum at Home (Stacey Ackerman and Evan Ackerman)

I personally apply Agile principles and practices in my home, and with my aging parents. I strongly support anyone new to Agile to give it a try in your own life so you can really FEEL the benefits of these approaches!

Dynamic Reteaming: The Art and Wisdom of Changing Teams (Heidi Helfand)

I am very much looking forward to this session. I caution attendees thinking they are going to come away with an excuse to never keep teams stable (i.e. maintain their current “resource utilization” approach to staffing people on projects) – as that is still a terrible practice that will never lead you to the benefits of an agile approach! However, when re-teaming really DOES need to happen for a healthy reason, it will be good to have some guidance from these case studies.

How to Reboot Your Agile Team! (Maurizio Mancini and Martin Lapointe)

When teams “go Agile” too quickly and follow the practices (or just some of the practices) and don’t invest in the mindset changes, they usually need a re-boot to even begin to be successful.

Unit Testing Makes Me Faster: Convincing Your Boss, Your Co-Workers, and Yourself (Jeremy Clark)

Awesome topic!  I encourage all developers (and managers of developers) to check this out!

Use the Force! Why Your Scrum Adoption Will Fail Without It (Michelle Sliger)

I ALWAYS want to hear what Michelle Sliger has to say. She’s got a ton of experience under her belt, and the courage to share it!

13:00 – 14:15 75-Minute Workshops

Agile Team Chartering: Give Your Scrum Teams a Great Start (Diana Larsen and Steve Holyer)

Team chartering is so important, and often poorly executed. If you are starting your Agile journey, this session will be invaluable.

How to have REAL “Agile” Conversations with Managers and Executives (Bob Hartman)

Bob is so good at these conversations, and I’m glad he’s sharing his expertise with the Scrum Gathering!

Virtuous Metrics – Most metrics are the devil. Be an angel instead. (Adam Weisbart)

Healthy Metrics! + Adam Weisbart! = Yay! Adam is clever, intelligent, and experienced. Go see this session to stop inflicting metrics on your team that drive the WRONG behavior and mindsets.

Where do you want to get to? A Goal-Based Approach to Succeeding with Scrum (Jim York)

I like this approach to starting with the end in mind, and adding practices to Scrum where appropriate to reach that end.

14:30 – 15:45 75-Minute Workshop

Build a Car with Hubert! (Hubert Smits)

I really enjoy every session I’m in with Hubert, and learning about Scrum via building a car is so good for the brain. In this session he focuses on the Definition of Done, a key element of any Agile practice!

How to Conduct Enterprise Retrospectives (Luke Hohmann)

Luke brings such interesting and effective ideas for important activities!

The Holy Grail: How to Define Business Value (Roger Brown)

This is a hard topic and I’m confident Roger will cover it well.

Turn Your Leaders into Servants! (Gez Smith)

Agile without servant leadership is, well, not Agile. Learn how to create and support servant leaders from a practitioner at one of the world’s largest financial services organizations.

16:15 – 17:00 45-Minute Sessions

An Introduction to Mob Programming (Woody Zuill)

I am a huge fan of mob programming and believe every team should try it!  Many of the teams I lead through this experience decide to continue with it in some form – embrace it full time, mob program once a week to get started, or reserve it for gnarly problems. I look forward to asking Woody his thoughts on the later two options.

Ensure Sprint Success with Stories that are Ready (Steven Granese)

While I don’t believe there is only one definition of “ready” for user stories, I strongly believe each team/PO needs to have an intentional “Definition of Ready” and retrospect on it regularly to ensure the right balance between doing enough up front and doing too much.

The Super Agile Satchel (Andy Bacon)

I have to admit, I’m a supply junkie and having someone early on help me know what supplies are most useful would have saved me hundreds of dollars (and a lot of storage room!).

18:00 – 21:00 Monday Mingle

Monday Mingle

Let me know if you’re going to be there and we can plan to meet up! Tweet @agilelynn to connect!

Didn’t I say there are a lot of amazing sessions this year at the Scrum Gathering? I’ve only covered Monday’s sessions! My next post will cover the Scrum Gathering events scheduled for Tuesday, April 11.

Q: Which events are you attending? Do you want to connect? Tweet me @agilelynn and let’s connect.
Q: Which events do you recommend and why?

UPDATE:

Done! Check out the lineup for Tuesday, April 11 at #SGCAL.

Book Review: Tribal Unity

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Em Campbell-Pretty’s Book is Packed with Ways to Help Transform Your Teams

Tribal Unity: Getting from TEAMS to TRIBES by Creating a One Team Culture by Em Campbell-Pretty, 2016

The following is a review I wrote to post on Amazon, which I hope is useful to readers of this blog as well. This photo is one of me and Em at her book launch – I requested that she wear a big wig now that she’s a BIG WIG author!

I am an educator and coach who focuses on bringing Agile principles and practices to data warehousing and business intelligence teams. I first met Em years ago when she was walking ahead of me down a street in Boulder, Colorado one sunny day wearing a T-shirt with “World Leaders in Agile Data Warehousing” on the back. I couldn’t help but run up and ask her about her shirt! Although rather startled at being approached by a stranger in a foreign land, (Em is from Australia) she kindly gave me the short version of her story and suggested I come see her speak at a local Agile conference later that week. I did. She had wonderful things to say about changing team cultures, and I have followed her work ever since.

Em Campbell-Pretty is a business-leader-turned-technology-leader from Melbourne, Australia. She became interested in the Agile world when her company handed her the reins for a large under-performing data warehouse team that was considered “toxic” by both those on the team and those who regularly interacted with it. As she searched for ways to make the team a better place to work and more effective at meeting the organization’s needs, she decided to look into the “Agile” thing so many were talking about in business circles. Over the next two years, and in several years of consulting with other teams since then, Em has learned some important lessons in transforming the culture of a large team. She shares her journey and her learning with us in Tribal Unity.

The book provides a refreshing balance of motivation and practical reality, along with an amazing bibliography of recommended reading and solid tips and tricks for leaders to try with their own teams. At US $8.99 for paperback and US$ 7.99 for Kindle, the book is an easy investment for anyone wanting to learn how to tackle the very difficult challenge of changing team culture.

The author tells her story of how a corporation’s cultural transformation took place as she helped them launch the first SAFe Agile Release Train in Australia.

Besides the fact that the team she was working with was an Enterprise Data Warehouse Team (which obviously lights my fire!), the book first really caught my attention when Em told the story of Jean Tabaka visiting Em’s team in Australia. Jean was the author of Collaboration Explained, and an international Agile thought leader for many fruitful and glorious years (she passed away unexpectedly in 2016). Jean asked Em how she had created “an environment where traditionally introverted software engineers from a diverse range of cultures and backgrounds were so willing to participate in team activities” (p. xxix). I have worshipped the ground Jean walks on ever since I first heard her speak in 2003, and her interest in this team’s behavior really piqued MY interest in Em’s story!

Tribal Unity is a collection of “repeatable patterns and practices that have been used both within and outside IT to transform the culture of organizations” (p. xxx). The book covers not only creating and nurturing great teams, but also making critical connections between teams, with leaders and managers, and with ideas. An interested reader flipping through a copy of the book might think such meaty topics can’t possibly be sufficiently covered in a book of just over 100 pages, and yet the reader will be surprised at Em’s efficient words, giving great ideas with real-life examples and in-depth suggestions for further study on each topic along the way.

As a reader, I underline things that catch my attention. Then I star or jot a quick note on things I really want to remember for future benefit. The most difficult part of reviewing this book is identifying only an appropriate few great moments rather than quoting the 46 (!) items I starred as I read.

Em is a wonderful presenter, partly because she is so funny. As I would expect, she’s equally humorous in her writing style. Here are a few gems:

“Inflicting daily standups” on her team (xxvi)
Within six months she had created six agile teams across four projects doing “the worst Agile known to man.” (xxvii)
“It was all just a little bit too hippie for me” (p. 10)

Another aspect of the book I deeply appreciate is the wealth of references she draws upon and shares with her readers. She includes insightful summaries of work created by excellent business leaders, like W. Edwards Demming, and agile mentors, like Kent Beck. She further punctuates her writing with thoughtful quotes by Olympic winners, like Taiichi Ohno and writers like Brene Brown. As I read the book, and since putting it down, I want to lead a book club that reads this together, then dives into each of the recommended texts put forth by Em! (If you’d like to join me in a Skype-led book club, please email me: lynn@winterboerAgileAnalytics.com).
In summary:
I finished the book feeling inspired to embrace the belief that leaders CAN change culture. I am motivated to take tangible action this very afternoon! This book is a key reference guide for me now and going forward – I even bought the Kindle version so I have easy access to Em’s guidance on my mobile phone. I have already sent gifts of this book to several good friends and key clients – those who are leaders seeking to make their organization a great place to work. I also think it’s a valuable book for any leader who wants to be truly inspiring to everyone he or she meets.
Buy it today: www.amazon.com – Tribal Unity

On Becoming An Agile BI Team

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A Coach’s Tale

Please welcome our guest blogger, Geoff Hunt. Geoff joins us from OptimalBI in Wellington, New Zealand. OptimalBI is a Business Intelligence services company with an impressive staff and quality skills in AgileBI.  We asked him to share some of the reasons he’s successful as a BI coach and how he helps agile teams become real teams. – Lynn Winterboer

I’m Geoff, a consulting and capability coach recently given the opportunity to coach a new agile team. This blog will pass on some wisdom I have learned in my numerous years as a coach while focusing on the coaching experience I had with my most recent new agile team.

First, I brought the new team together for a half-day, end-to-end agile [education] session. Everyone was brought up to speed, and we dove right into their very own customized learning experience. I have a standard approach to teaching agile, but each customer gets a few adaptations to ensure the program seamlessly matches up with their needs.

Next, we needed to set a baseline for what needed to be accomplished. We got started with some simple questions such as: What is the vision for the project? The stakeholders? Assumptions? Risks? We created a quick context diagram and jumped right in to writing user stories.

Typically, the first few stories are slow and come out choppy. But it didn’t take long for the team to come together and start creating stories that really flow. I can really see the team begin to form when everyone stays engaged, contributes to the words, and has a turn holding the pen. This new team was no exception. Once they got the hang of it, the stories started flying.

I find that writing a lot of stories up front hasn’t helped as much as I thought it would the first time I did it. For one, the team is unable to write detailed stories too far ahead as it’s hard to guess the future. They also leave gaps, which only appear with hindsight. This is particularly unhelpful as your typical nervous Product Owner starts to calculate the number of sprints to complete the project from an unrealistically low number of stories (not very agile, but old habits die hard.) So, I try and cap the story writing at a few sprints’ worth, with epics to capture the next few sprints.

Over the first two sprints, the team rapidly realized that the stories that they’d written weren’t as great as they thought they were; typically, the acceptance criteria are a bit too loose and they start to learn to write better criteria.
The first two sprints can be really successful as long as the team keeps the number of stories very small, and picks the easier ones to start with.

Then we get to sprint three. Everyone is happy and velocity is still on the up. Time to push the team a bit harder. Time to teach the team about failure. Sprint three is normally when I let the team bite off too many stories, or over commit in one skill area without looking at the dependencies with the other stories. Halfway through the sprint, there are usually more stories to the left than to the right of the sprint board, or worse, a whole mess of stories stalled ‘in-progress’!

The team can obviously rescue themselves from failure. For example, they can renegotiate with the Product Owner. But there’s a lot to be learnt from failure. Most important is that they continue to behave as a team, not play the blame game or bury themselves in their own work to the detriment of others. After all, Agile is a team sport!

By sprints four and five, the team was getting through the work. They had managed some failure, they were learning the process. At this stage, they should be getting through the work but this is generally when they become ‘aware,’ a bit like Skynet. ‘Oh! We’re a team! I have to keep working with these people.’ It’s at this point when a bit of team friction arises. It’s normal and it’s when I step in as a coach and begin that transformational process of working as a team and being a team. More fun!

This new agile team is now working together as a team and functioning as a team. It’s a process. We move forward, we move backward. Eventually, we move forward and keep moving forward. We’re now an agile team!

Geoff Hunt is a consulting and capability coach at OptimalBI in Wellington, New Zealand. Read more of Geoff’s blogs and reach out to him on LinkedIn.

Three Trademarks of a Good Agile Business Intelligence Coach

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What BI Teams Need in an Agile Coach

by Lynn Winterboer Agile Analytics Educator & Coach

Reprinted with permission from Media 1105, Inc. Originally published April 7, 2016 – TDWI Flashpoint Article

Working in Agile Data Warehousing (DW) and Business Intelligence (BI) over many years, I’ve worked with a lot of teams and coaches.  There are three hallmarks of a good Agile BI coach that teams should consider when looking for a coach.

1. A good Agile BI coach understands the unique challenges faced by BI teams.

Agile coaches accustomed to working with software development teams (e.g., Web or mobile) often struggle to get their points across when coaching BI teams. The biggest hurdle is the difference in semantics. Although a Web team, for example, might refer to the regular movement of data from one place to another as an API (application programming interface), the BI industry refers to this function as ETL (extract, transform, and load). Coaches who have a deep repertoire of software examples to illustrate Agile concepts to their teams will find that many of their examples will frustrate the BI teams because of the disconnect between the Web/mobile examples and the daily data-focused work of the BI team. What’s more, without understanding the various aspects of BI work, it’s difficult for a coach to understand and answer questions.

2. A good Agile coach prevents BI teams from making exceptions.

The strongest coaches I’ve seen excel at helping teams “hold the Agile process.” They help their teams resist the temptation to make exceptions. A BI team with multiple stakeholders, specialized tools and related skill sets, and large volumes of data certainly faces more challenges than other IT teams. I can understand why it’s tempting to say, “We’re different, and therefore we can’t adhere to [Agile value here].” A good coach, however, will help the team think this through and find ways to adhere to the core values and principles of an Agile approach.

For instance, many BI teams don’t think it’s possible to frequently deliver working BI results for business review and feedback. Yet, a coach who understands the BI value chain—from source system all the way through to reports and dashboards—can help the team break the work effort into smaller, testable pieces of functionality that the business can review every few weeks.

3. A good Agile coach will ensure testing at the beginning of the project.

I’ve seen data teams try to develop a “mini waterfall” within each iteration, leaving all testing of functionality to the end. This practice shortchanges the testing activities (just as it does in a traditional waterfall process), and it goes against the grain of the Agile principle of continuous attention to technical excellence. It’s very difficult to deliver technically excellent code when it hasn’t been well tested. A good Agile coach will help the team understand how to start thinking about testing from the very start, as well as how to finish the higher-priority functionality, including testing, before starting work on the next-in-line priority.

Conclusion

Many BI teams recognize the value their software development colleagues are getting from using Agile approaches to their work. They want that experience for themselves, but they need the right coaching to help them on their journey. Among other talents, a good Agile coach will understand BI challenges and semantics; keep the team from making exceptions to any of the core principles of Agile; and ensure the team focuses on testing from the beginning of each development effort.

The Data Warehouse Institute, www.tdwi.org TDWI Is Your Source for In-Depth Education and Research on All Things Data. For 20 years, TDWI has been helping data professionals get smarter so the companies they work for can innovate and grow faster. TDWI Flashpoint is a regular publication for TDWI members that provides tips, techniques and critical research in BI and DW.

What’s Hot: My Recommendations for Agile 2016 – Part 4

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Agile 2016 | July 25 – 29 Atlanta, GA

The Agile 2016 Conference in Atlanta is right around the corner! The forecast for July 25 is … 95 degrees with high humidity and maybe some rain. It’s a good thing I’ll be inside, where it’s air conditioned, and enjoying the amazing lineup at this year’s conference. I’ve been using my blog to post my recommendations. I’ve shared my stories and thoughts on each day, if you missed them check out: Monday, July 25 ; Tuesday, July 26 and Wednesday, July 29.

Now, on to Thursday, July 28:

Agile Clinical Decision Support Development (Vaishnavi Kannan, DuWayne Willett)

Looks like a deep-dive on a complex data-focused topic!

Agile Economics: Budgets, Contracts, Capitalization (Pavel Dabrytski)

Changing the way we handle funds is a common challenge to Agile transformations – and I’m glad it’s getting some attention at this conference.

Ghostbusting User Stories – Uncovering hidden users (Alan Parkinson)

I heard good things about this session from my friend, Lisa Crispin – so I intend to check it out at this conference!

Avoiding Test-Driven Damage (David Bernstein)

I’ve had great conversations with David over several years and can highly recommend this session. His new book, Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software, is also really good!

Technical Debt: OK, It’s Bad. Now What Do We Do About It? (Tom Grant, Declan Whelan)

Paying down technical debt is a very important aspect of improving agility, and doesn’t get enough attention, IMHO.

Hacking getKanban v2.0: Advanced Game Mechanics to Illuminate Lean & Create Real Change (Cheryl Hammond)

I’ve had a great time playing the getKanban board game and would like to start using the online version in my client work. I like this session’s focus on how to make it really useful for team learning.

Domino Game: Pair-Coaching to increase Self-Efficacy (Victor Bonacci, Brett Palmer)

I caught the tail-end of this session at the Scrum Gathering earlier this year and it looked really interesting. The whole room seemed very engaged in the exercise.

Moose on the table: Enabling you to use LEGO techniques to improve your retrospectives (Mike Bowler, Ellen Grove)

Ellen Grove was a wonderful host for the 2016 Scrum Gathering Open Space. Lego Serious Play is a hot topic these days!

A Complete Acceptance & Test-Driven Development Example (Don McGreal)

Very cool!

Architects in an Agile World (Thomas Nedwek)

“Agile development practices require innovative ways of looking at the contributions architects make, as well as the ways in which they make them.”

Coaching the Agile Enterprise: The Integral Agile Transformation Framework ™ Comes Alive (Michael Spayd, Michael Hamman)

I have taken several courses from Michael Spayd and I have participated in early roundtables based on his developing book. I respect his deep knowledge in this area as well as his ability to communicate with a variety of audiences. Besides, he’s one of the most serene people I’ve ever met – it’s quite an experience to learn from Michael.

Emergent Architecture – Just Enough Just in Time (Michael Vincent)

I’m so glad to see several sessions on emergent/agile architecture at this conference!

Agile at the Intersect of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things (Don MacIntyre)

Don is a colleague of mine at The Cutter Consortium and we meet bi-weekly to discuss Agile topics.

How an Expedite Request Sunk the Titanic (Daniel Vacanti)

“Chances are you have always intuitively known that interrupts are what makes your process unpredictable. This talk will give you to tools you need to quantify that impact and give you strategies on how minimize their negative effects.”

Now It’s Your Turn:

Help Agile Analytics readers know which sessions you’re attending and why! Leave your recommendations in the comments section. Thanks for helping our community!

What’s Hot at Agile 2016

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Agile 2016 | July 25 – 29 Atlanta, GA

What’s hot besides the weather? The Agile 2016 program!

Wow – The Agile 2016 program has been announced and there are SO MANY good sessions it will be hard to choose what to attend! Four of us from Winterboer Agile Analytics are attending, and will be splitting up to participate in as many sessions as we can. Since I was going through the full program to decide where to spend my time, I decided to capture some notes and share them with you, in case it helps you decide how to spend your time at Agile 2016! Sessions we are looking to attend or can recommend to others:

Starting with Monday, July 25:

Learning from Bad Examples – Readability and Python (Bryan Beecham, Tim Ottinger)
Bryan and Tim are always entertaining and very smart – and I learn a lot from every interaction with them. When I first met Bryan at a shared client last year and learned he was really into XP technical practices, I told him all about a great session on pair programming I’d seen at RallyON 2013 – and it turns out it was HIM AND TIM who led that session!!! He’d worn a hat at RallyON and wasn’t wearing a hat when I met him – that’s my excuse for not recognizing him 😉

Building the Business Case for DevOps (Kathryn Kuhn, Christine Hudson)
DevOps practices and technologies are incredibly important for agile enablement, and all require a business case for funding and support.

Agile in name only: It’s not a problem, it’s a solution (Matthew Carlson)
Decoupling is “where the vocabularies of agile were used but inspection and adaptation were hollow” and how “…decoupling is actually a solution to underlying conflicts which need to be identified and managed before agile will be accepted.”

Modernizing Government: How Agencies Became Awesome Places to Work using Holacracy & Scrum (Paul Takken, Joe Justice)
Joe Justice is a dynamic speaker who grabbed my attention at Mile High Agile 2013 where he presented on WikiSpeed (if you don’t know what this is you MUST check it out!)

Servant *Learner*ship: Exploring Teacher, Student & Community to grow better Agile Coaches (Lyssa Adkins, Timothy Meyers)
Lyssa’s instruction and mentorship has had a profound impact on my career. This session provides a real-life example of someone growing from ScrumMaster to highly effective agile coach.

Being Agile to become Customer centric (Angel Diaz-Maroto Alvarez)
Anything with “customer centric” in the title will always grab my attention.

Scrabbling To Find A Good Agile Game? Which Should Be Uno On Your List? (Tom Grant)
Tom is my go-to guy for anything related to serious games. He’s a strong presenter with really valuable ideas, and I learn from him every chance I get.

A Millennial’s Perspective on Software Craftsmanship (Ajay Fewell, Jesse Fewell)
Brilliant idea for a session! Jesse is a smart dude, and I’m sure this will be a strong presentation.

Strong-Style Pairing (Llewellyn Falco, Maaret Pyhäjärvi)
I know Llewellyn as a champion of pair-programming and look forward to seeing how he and Maaret guide team members in this important practice.

Deploying a Data-Centric Approach to Enterprise Agility (Jorgen Hesselberg, Rajan Seriampalayam)
Okay, so it has the word “data” in the title – of course that got my attention. Beyond that, I’ve seen some strong agility in my work with Intel and I want to know more about how they measure their agile journey. I am also curious to ask them about avoiding undesired behavior based on what they measure – I’ve seen lots of teams do unproductive backflips to make their measurements look good, all the while countering the intention of an agile practice.

How to be Agile in Non-IT Organizations – Breaking the Software Constraint (Jake Calabrese)
I’ve known Jake for a long time. He’s dynamic, intelligent, and highly entertaining. I love that “Agile” is moving beyond IT and into the broader world.

My Own Personal Leanness (Catherine Swetel)
Personal Kanban literally changed my life, helping me become happier, calmer, and more productive.

Everything is important RIGHT NOW! How do I determine a Minimum Viable Product? (Jenny Swan, Amanda Tygart)
“This workshop will give the tools for any team, using any methodology, and at any maturity level, to discuss Minimum Viable Product.”

Critically Thinking Your Design DNA (Kupe Kupersmith)
Kupe Kupersmith gave a wonderful presentation on product ownership some years ago, and I have kept my eyes peeled for more of his work since then.

Introduction to Agile Testing: Everyone Owns Quality (Matthew Heusser)
Such an important topic.

Insights and Connections: Using Sense Making to Think & Decide in Uncertainty (Lynne Cazaly)
Lynne led a great session years ago on visual note-taking and I’ve been a subscriber to her newsletter ever since. I really enjoy the way she thinks and expresses ideas.

The Agile Database Techniques Stack: Bridging the Agile/Data Cultural Divide (Scott Ambler)
It’s SCOTT AMBLER! I always make a point of going to his sessions, and this one will be particularly interesting: “Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision making. It is crucial to the success of software development, and to our organization as a whole, that we apply agile and lean strategies to data-oriented activities.”

#StopTheMimimi: from victim to protagonist (Erica Briones Graciano)
We often run into teams, and leaders especially, who want the benefits of Agile without really changing anything. This session speaks to that issue: “The reality is, if you need ideal conditions to apply your principles, they aren’t principles, they are conveniences. Change happens from inside out, examples speak louder than words, the agile culture fosters protagonists, not victims. If you believe that the agile way is the path to follow, then the question you should ask yourself is: how can I make it happen?”

Leadership is an Extreme Sport (Em Campbell-Pretty)
If you are, or want to be, an Agile leader, then you NEED to follow Em Campbell-Pretty. The ideas she shares are based on her own deep experience, as well as an amazing amount of personal research. I first met Em in Boulder, CO in 2013 – I was walking down the street and saw a woman half a block ahead of me wearing a shirt with “World’s Best Agile Data Warehousing Team” on the back! I ran to catch up to her, and insisted that we should know each other. After she got over the shock of practically being tackled on a street in a foreign country (Em is from Australia), she graciously agreed to have lunch the next day. Her RallyON presentation was fantastic and set the standard for agile data warehousing team transformations going forward.

Agile Testing Maturity – What does “Good” Look Like? (Bob Galen)
Bob’s sessions tend to be full of good examples and concrete ideas for taking the next step in your agile journey.

You Can’t Fix What You Can’t See: Visualizations that Spark Conversation and Change (David Hussman)
Ever since I first met David at the Intel Agile Lean Conference in 2013 I have enjoyed his sessions and find I come away with a completely new way of looking at things. He’s very entertaining, too!

Scaling Without Frameworks – Ultimate Software Experience Report (Prateek Singh, Daniel Vacanti)
I’m not only a huge fan of Daniel Vacanti’s work, but also of Kanban as both an agile practice and a way to run a successful company. This case study of how this company has leveraged Kanban will be fascinating. “Ultimate has been on “Fortune’s 25 Best Companies to Work For” list for the past 5 years and was named “#1 Best Company to Work For in Tech” this year.”

Didn’t I say there are a lot of amazing sessions this year at Agile 2016? I’ve only covered Monday’s sessions! My next post will cover all of the Agile 2016 events scheduled for Tuesday, July 26.

Q: Which events are you attending? Do you want to connect? Tweet me @agilelynn and let’s connect.
Q: Which events do you recommend and why?

UPDATE:

Done! Check out the lineup for Tuesday, July 26 @ Agile 2016.