December 7, 2020 1:00 PM - 5:00 PM EST

12:30 to 5:30 PM EST

• Hangout Room

1:00 PM EST

• Become a Modern Manager and Create a Culture of Business Agility
  • Johanna Rothman   Link to Session Link to Video Tags: #mgmt

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    Agile approaches promise more innovation and easier leadership. However, most agile approaches don't discuss the role of managers at all. Do we even need managers when we use an agile approach? Yes, we do. Managers offer two valuable services to the organization. First, managers can support everyone as each person learns to lead-regardless of their role or title. Second, managers create and refine the agile (or not) culture. Learn to invite managers to change their behaviors. Create your agile culture and enable business agility.

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    Bio: Johanna Rothman, known as the 'Pragmatic Manager,' offers frank advice for your tough problems. She helps leaders and teams do reasonable things that work. Equipped with that knowledge, they can then decide how to adapt their product development. Johanna is the author of eighteen books and hundreds of articles. Find the Pragmatic Manager, a monthly email newsletter, and her blogs at jrothman.com and createadaptablelife.com.

    
    

1:50 PM EST

• Mastering distributed communication: theory, tips and tricks to make you more effective
  • James Stanier   Link to Session Link to Video Tags: NA

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    Many of us unintentionally became distributed workers during 2020 and soon found that our usual ways of communication were less effective - or not even possible - whilst at home. In this talk we'll walk the synchronous to asynchronous spectrum of communication, visiting each method and noting the best and worst ways of using them in your job. Along the way we'll suggest all manner of practical examples in which you can harness each form to improve the way you work with your team, your manager, your peers and your wider network.

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    Bio: James Stanier is SVP Engineering at Brandwatch. He has built web scale real time data processing pipelines and teams of people: both are equally challenging. He has written about his experiences on his blog The Engineering Manager, and has turned it into a book called "Become An Effective Software Engineering Manager".

    
    

2:40 PM EST

• O' Mice An' Men: Rescuing a Project Gang Agley
  • George Dinwiddie   Link to Session Link to Video Tags: #Estimation #AgilePlanning #RecoveryFromDisruption

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    You might have noticed that the world is suffering a pandemic at the moment, and it might have disrupted your software development plans. At least you've got a good excuse, though I've heard rumors of managers being sacked for not foreseeing the pandemic and including it in their schedules. I've not heard that sacking the managers has either made the pandemic go away, or rescued a software development schedule. I'll leave that first problem to the epidemiologists and virologists, but when circumstances make a laughingstock of your schedule, what can you do? I can't tell you how to do the impossible, but I can help you make the best of the situation. To do that, we'll use that much maligned and oft misused tool, estimation. Come with me and we'll explore ways to use your estimates to guide your response to unforeseen disruptions-meeting near term needs to the extent possible, and future proofing your longer term plans.

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    Bio: George Dinwiddie helps organizations develop software more effectively. He brings decades of development experience from electronic hardware and embedded firmware to business information technology. He helps organizations, managers, and teams solve the problems they face by providing consulting, coaching, mentoring and training at the organizational, process, team, interpersonal, and technical levels. Involved in the Agile community since 2000, he has helped organizations ranging from a 6-person startup to a Fortune 100 company and a billion-plus dollar federal program, either directly or in partnership with other companies. He is the author of Software Estimation without Guessing: Effective Planning in an Imperfect World (Pragmatic Bookshelf), Evolutionary Anatomy of Test Automation Code (LeanPub) and co-author of Patterns of Agile Journeys (LeanPub).

    
    

3:30 PM EST

• Your Boss Is Not Your Friend, and Other Keys To a Successful Manager Relationship
  • Ken Kousen   Link to Session Link to Video Tags: #management #prisonersdilemma

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    It's tempting to think of your manager as more than just your boss, especially during a crisis. That's a trap, however, that can cause you difficulties in the long run. Building a successful relationship with your manager is a long-term process, where you balance the demands of your boss against your own needs and desires. Lessons from the classic Prisoner's Dilemma problem in game theory can make that task easier. This talk discusses ways to build a professional relationship with your boss that you can rely on in the best of times as well as the worst.

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    Bio: Ken Kousen is a Java Champion, Oracle Groundbreaker Ambassador, and a Grails Rock Star. He is the author of the upcoming book "Managing Your Manager" from Pragmatic Programmers, as well as the O'Reilly books "Kotlin Cookbook", "Modern Java Recipes", and "Gradle Recipes for Android", and the Manning book "Making Java Groovy". He also has recorded over a dozen video courses for the O'Reilly Learning Platform, covering topics related to Android, Spring, Java, Groovy, Grails, and Gradle. In 2013, 2016, and 2017 he won a JavaOne Rockstar award. His academic background include BS degrees in Mechanical Engineering and Mathematics from M.I.T., an MA and Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Princeton, and an MS in Computer Science from R.P.I. He is currently President of Kousen IT, Inc., based in Connecticut.

    
    

4:20 PM EST

• Five Development Practices Essential for Agile Teams
  • David Bernstein   Link to Session Link to Video Tags: #Agile #ExtremeProgramming #TDD #CI #refactoring

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    This session focuses on the five development practices that are often overlooked but are essential to iterative software development. These five practices include automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test-first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical areas are proving to be essential for sustained success with Scrum development. But many teams have not been exposed to the benefits of these practices or how to use them effectively. In this session, we explore why these engineering practices are essential for Scrum software development and how to use them to reduce risk and build quality in at every level of the development process. We make the business case for these technical practices by showing how they address the inherent risks and challenges in building software. We then look at how these practices help mitigate the core issues of software development and help us drop the cost of maintaining and extending software in the future.

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    Bio: David Bernstein is the author of Beyond Legacy Code: Nine Practices to Extend the Life (and Value) of Your Software. It's an insider's view of the software industry drawn from his decades of hands-on experience as a software developer, trainer, and consultant to some of the biggest players in the business. David's continuing passion for software design and construction has led him to train more than 10,000 developers since 1990 at hundreds of companies worldwide including Amazon, Yahoo, and Microsoft. His consulting firm, To Be Agile (http://ToBeAgile.com), helps developers adopt Extreme Programming practices such as test-driven development, continuous integration, and refactoring.