Presentation: TweetAgile

Dispersed Teams - Challenging the Agile Manifesto / 14:30 - 14:45

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced

A small team of young and enthusiastic professionals are starting a large test automation project. They follow agile principles, but they don’t achieve results fast enough. Proposed solution: add team members located in India. Increase the team size while keeping the costs low. The onsite agile test team becomes a dispersed agile test team.
Nienke Alma has faced this situation. As a Scrum Master of the team she was asked to facilitate the growth of the team, support good practices and encourage the dispersed collaboration between the team members. She has experienced how challenging it is to build an effective dispersed team.
How do you for instance deal with Scrum events like standup meetings and retrospectives if you’re thousands of kilometers apart? How do you make sure that all team members contribute to continuous improvement and follow the way of working agreed in the team?
In a challenging journey through cultural differences, miscommunication and continuous learning Nienke has tried to find an answer to these questions. Some of the practices she introduced proved to be successful, while other practices simply failed to deliver results. One thing is clear though: in dispersed teams new dynamics appear.
In this talk Nienke aims to inspire both team members and managers to be creative in their approach towards dispersed teams. And eventually have them think about: are the results proving to be worth the investments?

by Nienke Alma

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Accelerated Learning: How Can Agile Help You? / 14:50 - 15:05

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced

Have you ever thought about applying your Agile knowledge to learn anything you want? Want to learn how to play guitar? Want to learn a new language? Want to learn how to juggle apples?
Believe me: if you know what Agile is about, you know how to accelerate your learning process A LOT.

by Artur Margonari Fausto de Souza

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Something Agile / 15:10 - 15:25

Prerequisite attendee experience level: advanced

You sure want to be agile or become more of it. But… can you agree on what exactly this "Agile"-something should be? As Agile is as much about culture and smart development strategies as it is about backlogs and iterations, how can we say where we stand on our Agile-road? Where should we go next? And how can everyone participate?

One of the agile credos is "Ask the team!", but we wanted to gather insights and observations not just from a single team, but from everyone involved or affected. Thus we developed a tool based upon on the SenseMaker®-Method, which allows us to gather everyone stories, hear their own interpretations and compile a data set which goes far beyond abstract statistics.

We show how to detect your status of "agileness" through the lens of the concrete stories shared and how to derive action rooted in real needs.

by Jan Gentsch