Agility Instructor/Mentor
David has been creating software for more than 15 years in a variety of domains: digital audio, digital biometrics, medical, financial, retail, legal, and education to name a few. For the past 8 years, David has mentored and coached agile teams in the U.S., Canada, Europe, India, Egypt, Russia, and Ukraine. Along with presenting and leading workshops / tutorials at conferences in the U.S. and Europe, David has contributed to several books (Managing Agile Projects and Agile in the Large), and worked on agile curriculum for The University of Minnesota and Capella University. David is currently writing a book for the Pragmatic Programmer series.David leads DevJam, a Minneapolis based company composed of agile collaborators. As mentors and practitioners, DevJam focuses on using agile to help people and companies improve their software production skills. DevJam provides seasoned leaders that strive to pragmatically match technology, people, and processes in a way which produces software that makes people happier and more productive.
For more information, check out the DevJam website www.devjam.com
Presentations by David Hussman
Coaching and Leading Agile Projects
Successfully coaching agile communities involves using a wide variety of skills. Coaches help guide coding and design, collaboration and communication, the writing and telling of user stories and much more. The coach needs to continuously show and teach the varied interactions that connect and support the entire project community.This session will explore and teach coaching skills. The session will reference a wide variety of agile coaching as well as drawing from cross disciplinary techniques like those used by music producers to help foster creativity while helping to ensure products are delivered and challenges confronted.
Test Driven Everything!
Why do we wait to test? Of course when you read this your thoughts went to testing code. While we still wait to test code and products early, we also wait to test ideas, projects, product direction, meeting and more. This session will show you (or challenge you) to think about test driven beyond the coding realm. You will be doing some thinking and talking and other things that involve more than just listening to someone talk with slides for 90 minutes.Agile Management & Managing Agility
Management and agility are not mutually exclusive. Many managers are already working in an agile manner as a means to improve, produce, or simply survive. Other managers hear about projects using agile methods and struggle to find a place in the project community.This session provides a new way to think about managing projects. Some managers will find that their existing practices and skills are supported and enhanced by the forums and metrics provided within an agile project while others will be challenged by some of the principles and practices.
Agile Product Planning: Building Strong Backlogs
Agile methods have cut through the noise and lighten the burden of crafting requirements documents. While this is good, it also shows clearly see that defining and guiding the creation of software products is challenging work. Most agile projects use a product backlog as a place to hold anything that will improve the product.Creating strong product backlogs is less defined than many of the other agile practices. Backlogs contain many items: user stories, architectural spikes, investments in updating and maintaining development and other environments, and more. While it is clear that developers primarily code, it is often less clear who adds to and grooms the backlog.
Automating Customer Acceptance
Why should the value of test driven development (TDD) stay stuck in the realm of coding? The ideas behind TDD are now being successfully applied to the automation of business value. While this has been going on for some time within the agile community, it is not starting to spread to main stream development.There are more tools are coming available everyday which allow developers, testers, and customers (or product owners) to work together to automate acceptance tests. This process helps clarify the needs of the end user before development begins and removes more of the wasteful work based on incorrect assumptions from vague requirements.