Agile practitioners 2015

I’ve just came back from the Agile practitioners conference. I enjoyed being part of the organizing team – it was fun giving a hand and helping to make this conference happen.
After attending an excellent “Lean problem solving” workshop by Claudio Perrone yesterday I was ready for a day of breakout sessions.

We've kick started the day with Angel Medinilla’s  “unicorns, krakens, self organizing teams and other mythological beasts” – it was about why self organizing teams do not happen automatically but can be built.

Also: Unicorns

Being the “Beginner” track lead I got to hear all of the lectures in that track – they were interesting and were not strictly beginner material.
We’ve started with “The missing lecture” by Uri Nativ (@unativ). It was an excellent talk about the things no one tells you when you start doing agile. Uri has explained how to successfully adopt agile by understanding how the development team perceive the change. He had excellent “do”" and don’t” and used examples from his own experience – good and bad.
Next was Oren Ellenbogen (@orenellenbogen) – “engineering your culture: how to keep your engineers happy” -  a talk on what great companies do in order to attract and retain great developers.
After lunch we had three “lightning talks” (15 min):

• Gull Ben-Davind - “Why are QA members good scrum masters”, it was refreshing to see a presentation without any slides where Gull walked us through the way MyHeritage used QA/Testers as SCRUM masters.
• Ran Deri & Noam Zweig – Managing technical debt in Cyberark. They explained how they managed to measure technical debt and then decide on what debt to pay on each team – while improvement as well. It was amazing seeing how an abstract idea (Technical debt) was measured using metrics and questioners and how they keep track of their debt on a daily basis.
• The last lightning talk was by Barak Benjo who talked about “The 10 commandments of an agile tester in a legacy world”. Barak explained about how testers can be agile even when testing Legacy code and the kinds of tests that are available and how to choose what to do.

After the lightning talks we had an “Lean Lens” exercise/game with Andrea Darabos.
By using a fictional story we got to find all sort of “waste” in common scenarios during the software development process. You can read more about Lean Lens here – and download it and use it (creative commons) in your company.
Afterwards I got to give my talk on TDD – I hope that the code I showed (https://github.com/dhelper/DesignWIthTests) was not too much for the late afternoon hour.

Designing with tests from Dror Helper

And finally we got an excellent closing keynote by Claudio – where he briefly explained A3 method for problem solving and his brand new “popcorn board”.

It was a great conference and I got to talk to some interesting people and hear excellent talks – all in all a very good day.



Happy Coding…