As the practice of Agile matures, teams find great value in shortening feedback loops to inspect and adapt more often. However, constraints in the physical seating of teams drive the way in which they interact - team members in the same building communicate via email and meet only for “meetings”. XP advocates Sitting Together, but due to a lot of constraints organizations are unable or unwilling to adopt this. In this presentation we will share what these constraints are and how we were able to overcome them so that our teams could Sit Together!

Imagine that you are brought in as a coach for a customer that wants to start using Agile as their preferred way of doing software development. You have been hired by the management and you have only a short time to transform the team from frozen to agile. In all teams there are resistance to change; in some teams the resistance in a few can lead to resistance of the majority. How do you deal with people that are afraid to change? How do you change external demotivation to internal drive?

Join this session to increase your understanding of how to provide rapid change for any team.

Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP)and hypnosis is widely used in Life coaching and mentoring, but let’s be clear on one thing: You will not be taken serious if you try to hypnotize or bluntly use NLP on your group to be coached in Agile.

However, used in the right context and groups there are some of the basic techniques that have proven to be quite effective.

In this session, you will be introduced to some of these techniques in a no-frills, no-nonsense way and understand how they can be used to make your coaching sessions a success.

We will share our experiences implementing agile in the Rapid Application Development arena. The challenges faced on short duration projects (e.g. between 1 week and 2 months), of different domains (e.g., insurance, human resources, special initiatives) and are global in nature. By following agile practices we promote better communication, a higher collaboration, consistent delivery, smooth transitions and cross sharing. Come and learn the challenges and practices that have helped our short projects: effective and frequent feedback loops, pairing, micro backlogs, unit testing, etc.

How does a geographically-distributed team collaborate across distance, culture, and even language? What can an organization do to encourage successful teamwork? What technologies and practices increase collaboration?

This workshop will explore the patterns that enable companies to successfully deliver software with a distributed team. It will be presented by an Agile coach that assisted with the transition of a company that adopted Agile for teams in three time zones with two languages and cultures, and (travel permitting) the VP Technology of that company.

The purpose of this talk is to propose a logical and pragmatic mechanism to implement Agile practices into medium and large sized organisations. First, we will highlight and categorize the risks associated, such as : organisation, change process, human factor and communication. In a second step, we will propose coherent migration strategies which focus on acceptance, communication and evolutive aspect of change. Finally, we will suggest a list of activities that could help managers to succeed their migration.

Communication is the most challenging aspect of any distributed project. When we throw agile practices into the mix, which rely so much on effective communication we really need to make it work. The organizers will share practices from their experiences with offshore engagements. We found that the most important to accomplish is to really get to know each other and that there are ways to achieve that despite the geographical distance. The tutorial is based on their chapter published in the book: Agility Across Time and Space, published by Springer in 2010 (ISBN 978-3-642-12441-9).

Everybody agrees these days that communication is one of the key success factors in any project, regardless of their size and complexity. During the agile adoption process, many teams and managers are blind to communication issues and believe everything is working just fine. However, experience suggests that communication is failing. The fact is that speaking the same language doesn’t guarantee the understanding of each other’s points. This highly-interactive talk shows typical communication patterns, behaviors and provides eye-opening insights into the ways communication can improved.