Have you struggled with integrating user experience design practices into an Agile development environment? It’s one thing to say that we welcome changing requirements, and another to be able to quickly visualize the user interface for a product as the requirements change. This workshop is structured to take you through a set of design practices that are highly collaborative, and in low fidelity to enable good user experience within an iterative delivery environment.

A challenging aspect of agile is dealing with software architecture. Architecture should be lightweight and fit-to-purpose, but during projects requirements and technology change, leading to changes in architecture. In this interactive session Sander Hoogendoorn shows techniques, concepts, layers and patterns allowing you to create flexible, scaling architectures that meet with these changes. Think of layers and layer elements, CRC, MVC/MVP/MVVM, OCP and SRP, DDD, dependency injection, workflow, layer supertypes, descriptors, manager-provider, internal state and several other design patterns.

Product Development can be viewed as a Complex Adaptive System. Different people, groups, organizations and systems collaborate in a complex network of relationships and dependencies to produce something of value - generally a product or service. Identifying waste in this value network is a critical step towards creating a truly lean organization. This interactive, hands-on workshop will (1) demonstrate exercises that identify waste, (2) provide a framework for managing waste, and (3) provide concrete strategies and practices for eliminating waste in your organization.

Kanban is a highly versatile and powerful method to manage and accelerate improvement in the team and the organization. Kanban is for those who desire to improve their processes and productivity. Referred to as a 2nd generation agile method or a lean method, it is being adopted in all regions of the world and in organizations of over 100K employees. (See the Process/Mechanics section for details).

Consider two projects: A - Fraught with high technical and contract challenges. The project was delivered with clockwork precision, resulting in tremendous success. B - A regular low-risk project. The project teams failed in delivering a satisfactory solution , until a rescue team was brought in to fix the project.
A was planned as an Agile delivery, while B started as traditional waterfall. What was done right, and what should never be repeated? We discuss a handful of well-known lean/agile practices that were leveraged to run A successfully, and to put B back on track.

Taiichi Ohno defines Lean as “absolute elimination of waste”. This philosophy single handedly transformed Toyota from where they were at the end of world war II to where they are today.
This workshop aims to walk through the theory around waste, the types and anatomy of waste, value and value stream. Also discuss how to develop an aversion towards waste and build an organizational culture to eliminate waste.

The Frog Factory is a fun and fruitful way of learning basic Kanban principles of what to produce, when to produce it, and how much to produce. In a relatively simple game, participants are stimulated to discuss and understand the underpinnings of Kanban, helping them to become more agile and ultimately more successful in their business.

A set of tools and methods that can be employed within the customer development process.

“Systematic innovation” involves multiple steps. - Need identification - Idea generation - Experimentation - Prioritization of ideas Innovathon has not been devised specifically to Lean Startups. What this specific workshop does is, applying this Innovathon model to the customer development phase of Lean Startup. Lean Startup model opens up multiple ways to reach customers and collect needs. However, classifying those needs, ideas needed to address them will require some discipline.

Lean and agile offer good ways to improve organizations but adoption is difficult when the organization is highly dysfunctional and most times adoption is not attempted or fails. Some lean and agile organizations are not as effective as they could be because of issues related to the human factor. I propose Lean Value Innovation (LVU), a framework that brings together innovative thinking, innovation fostering environment, and innovative tools/methods. LVU emphasizes the balance between value to customer and value to enterprise. Result is an acceleration in competitive advantage and maturity.

In this practical and interactive session, you’ll go through a journey of a Sprint in the lifecycle of a product – from Product Backlog creation to the Sprint retro. The difference is you are not going to hear about what is right – you will see it in action. For instance, you will see how a successful Sprint planning meeting works – who are the participants involved and what are the key elements for a Sprint planning meeting. Through the experiences and key learnings from the Visual Studio Test team’s journey with agile, you’ll learn about the common pitfalls and how to overcome them.