Open Agile Romania – May 22-23, 2009

In addition to the bellow abstracts, we will soon announce the topics for the panel sessions inside the first Romanian Agile conference. In the next few days the presentations’ list will be completed.

Keynote speaker:  Ken Schwaber - ScrumButs: The Dangers of Customizing Scrum

Many organizations use Scrum. To do so, they have had to make adjustments to Scrum. These are called ScrumButs, and are said as follows: “We use Scrum, BUT it is impossible for us all to get together for the Daily Scrum SO we only have the Daily Scrum when we need to.” In this presentation, Ken will lightly describe the Scrum framework and the impact these variations have on the ability to build complex products when Scrum is used. Ken will also ask the audience to describe and figure out some ScrumButs with his help, so bring you Scrum but’s to the meeting.

AND

Jurgen Appelo - Checklist for the Agile Manager
http://www.noop.nl/
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jurgenappelo

Agile teams know that agile software development is all about empowerment and self-organization. But that doesn’t mean that managers have nothing to do. On the contrary. A patch of soil and seeds is also a self-organizing emergent system. But it doesn’t become a beautiful Japanese garden all by itself.

In this talk Jurgen Appelo explains why agile management is the essential counterpart of agile software development. He lists a number of topics that managers in an agile organization should concern themselves with. These topics include: motivation, diversity, alignment, organizational structure, risk management, discipline, optimization, knowledge management, and process improvement.

Many software project teams are not able to change their own environment. The central message of Jurgen’s talk is that, in those cases, agile managers have the responsibility to create the best environment for the teams, so that they can grow and deliver value.

Razvan Gliga - Survive in Agility Islands
IT Architect at IBM Romania
Adoption of agile development in large organizations is always a difficult process. Agile development starts in islands. Agile practices sometimes collide with different legacy procedures or organization’s standard software development processes.

In this presentation we will share experiences from the real world in order to avoid the war between agility and organizational politics.

Corey Haines - The Craftsman Developer in an ‘Agile’ world
http://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyhaines
http://www.coreyhaines.com

In this talk, I will cover the basic history of and reasons behind the Software Craftsmanship movement, leading to the Software Craftsmanship Manifesto. While discussing the manifesto, we will talk about the dangers of implementing ‘Agile’ project management methodologies without altering the technical practices of the developer to support the increased pressure of focusing on the near term. We will end by giving concrete examples of methods of practice to help developers more quickly learn new practices, allowing them to build software that they can be proud of over the long-term.

Corey Haines - The Life of a Tester in an Agile Team
http://www.linkedin.com/in/coreyhaines
http://www.coreyhaines.com

One common mistake when implementing ‘Agile’ project management processes is falling into a so-called ‘ScrumerFall’ process: taking the standard waterfall phases (development -> QA) and shortening them dramatically. This process puts undue pressure on the testing team, as they are expected to test more in less time. The Agile whole-team philosophy counters this by providing a testing presence throughout the iteration/sprint, ensuring that testers are not ‘up against the wall’ at the end of the cycle. In this talk, we will cover the phases a story goes through from planning to release, focusing on the role of the tester throughout.

Ovidiu Negrean - Agile Startup
http://www.linkedin.com/in/ovidiunegrean
http://www.negrean.ro/

The main advantages and strength of a startup come from it’s agility, agility that can be the secret of success in the dynamic world of IT. Being at the beginning gives you the power to guide your startup on the track you want with great ease. Even big companies like Google structure their new projects as startups to take advantage of these benefits.

I had such an experience launching Lucrez in IT, first Romanian business social network for IT professionals and IT companies. We’ll cover the stages of an agile startup, see tips & tricks about launching your IT company, getting users and visibility and the DO’s and DONT’s of a startup.

Let’s see how to work in short iterations and having clear goals, let’s see how to get from an idea to a functional and successful project. And all these with minimum costs and with maximum effects. We are agile!

A fun and useful presentation for all those who are planning to start an IT company or want to manage a successful IT project using Agile.

Mircea Pasoi & Mihnea Giurgea - Scrum for startups and successful software companies
Software Engineers at uberVU – http://www.ubervu.com/

&  How agile development can help a software company overcome the dreaded 90% fail rate and stay on top while maximizing their results.

Lucian Parvu - Executive Dashboard Report for Agile Projects
Project Manager at Luxoft Romania (former ITC Networks)
Moving teams from a classical Waterfall based project to a completely Agile based project is difficult. There are major cultural changes involved in the transition. The visibility and the increased dynamics of the projects are the main drivers that recommended Agile Methodologies – in our case Scrum.

Some are thinking that in Agile we have no Plans and that we should take care only about iterations – this is one of the major mistakes we faced in the beginning. Full Release View is often lost and projects don’t have the big picture. We had a such an experience when projects failed, one of the big issues being the miss-understanding of Agile. We wanted to keep in touch with the Release View after each iteration. We created an Executive Dashboard Report for our Scrum based projects.

In this Presentation we’ll cover the challenges we faced in the transition to Scrum and the basic components of the Executive Report that helped us to have an instant view of the Release Status.

AND:

Maria Diaconu & Alexandru Bolboaca

& Agile thinking – a simplified workshop for those who want to experience the Agile way, with Scrum flavors

If you want to know more, please contact us.