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Malcolm South

Many teams estimate work to make development safer - to avoid committing to more than they can deliver. But safety features can be dangerous if not used correctly. I'll be looking at some of the ways estimates can be misused and what you can do about it.

Do Estimates Make Us Safer

Kev McCabe

In this talk Kev will cover the journey of Transformation from not only current places of work but also former. Looking at why they fail, and what the common themes are. There will be areas that you will see in your own organisation and this will be a change for people to share their views on the transformations they are on or have been on. 

How many transformations does one company need to become a continuous improvement organisation where the normal is transformation all the time, and not just BIG BANG FLOPs

1, 2, 3 Transformations More

Agile Yorkshire is back. We've had a few months off to recharge the batteries with everything in standby, but the boot loader has been re-invoked and we've spun up with a December event to round off the year. 

There's plenty of work going on behind the scenes to bring a great program of speakers for 2020 and we'll have more announcements to make soon.

We have two great presentations from two great speakers to top off the year and a great new venue in the William Hill offices in the St. John's Centre on Merrion Street in Leeds - register a place now, space is limited.

Transformations and Do Estimates Make us Safer?

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Jutta Eckstei

The Remote Challenge - Agile Software Development

Matthew Skelton

Team Interactions with Team Topologies

The Agile Yorkshire team are pleased to be able to bring you all the insights from our monthly event to the comfort of your home.

We’ve got some incredible speakers confirmed to discuss a topic that’s never been more relevant: keeping your distributed teams agile. 

Not only will attendees get a surprise delivery the week of the event, but we’re also running a short Kwizzbit quiz after the webinar for the chance to win a £25 voucher for a local independent of your choice. 

The quiz will test your knowledge of Agile practises, Yorkshire and some other random knowledge subjects thrown in for good measure.

Agenda
5.30pm - Welcome
5.45pm - First talk
6.05pm - Second talk
6.25pm - Agile Yorkshire Kwizzbit Quiz & Beers
6.45pm - Agile Yorkshire Quiz Winner announced & end

Agile Yorkshire Online - Agile Distributed Teams

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Tom Hoyland 

How would you build a team from scratch? What techniques would you use? What metrics should you respond to? In this talk you’ll see how we assembled a team, embedded agile values, a DevOps mindset and a clear purpose to create a squad with an infectious, high performing culture. 

We’ll demonstrate the coaching and visualisation techniques we used to reduce batch size and improve quality. You’ll see how to reveal ‘hidden’ product backlogs, make the invisible visible, and use domain driven design, theory of constraints and language to optimise team resilience.

Building and Growing an Agile Team

Jon Fulton

We hear much about the state of agile in 2019 - fake agile returns to waterfall and the resurgence of command and control. 

Jon will tell you a story about software delivery. It's a story of success against the odds by a great team. Jon hopes to restore your optimism as he tells you about 'The Art of The Possible'.

The Art of The Possible

How would you build a team from scratch? What techniques would you use? What metrics should you respond to? In this talk you’ll see how we assembled a team, embedded agile values, a DevOps mindset and a clear purpose to create a squad with an infectious, high performing culture. 

We’ll demonstrate the coaching and visualisation techniques we used to reduce batch size and improve quality. You’ll see how to reveal hidden product backlogs, make the invisible visible, and use domain driven design, theory of constraints and language to optimise team resilience.

Building and Growing a Successful Agile Team

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Royd Brayshay

A dive into some product development economics and tactical risk management that delivery teams might employ to improve their commercial effectiveness. Resources are never infinite and any marketplace is continually changing. 

Every delivery team works within a commercial context whether they are aware of it or not and can influence better delivery outcomes by thinking about their skill and experience as an asset and the business context as a design constraint. We'll be talking about real world examples throughout.

Using Technical Experience and Judgement to Commercial Effect

Jason Simpson

Engineering teams are often the furthest removed from the customer, especially as companies grow. Without the customer as the North Star, it is  easy for us to get carried away building over complicated solutions that are challenging to deploy, uses technology we cannot support and when finally delivered, does not have the desired customer impact. These are the fundamental reasons that over 50% of software built is never used. 

We’ve been there, we’ve lived the tale and can tell the story about coming out the other end. This talk intends to do just that.

Agile Puts Customers First, Why Don’t You?

A dive into some product development economics and tactical risk management that delivery teams might employ to improve their commercial effectiveness. Resources are never infinite and any marketplace is continually changing. 

Every delivery team works within a commercial context whether they are aware of it or not and can influence better delivery outcomes by thinking about their skill and 

Using Technical Experience & Judgement to Commercial Effect

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Mark Kirschstein

Far too often team retrospectives suffer from classic anti patterns, including but not limited to:

1. Unproductive/circular debate
2. Following the ideas of persuasive but incorrect team member
3. Implementing solutions that address symptoms not causes

This talk aims to improve your retrospective effectiveness by introducing thinking tools to combat these anti patterns.

Collaborative Logic Based Retrospectives

Steve Trapps

This talk aims to improve your retrospective effectiveness by introducing thinking tools to combat these anti patterns.

Far too often team retrospectives suffer from classic anti patterns, including but not limited to:

1. Unproductive/circular debate
2. Following the ideas of persuasive but incorrect team member
3. Implementing solutions that address symptoms not causes

We will consider:

- Why does this person view the scrum master role as not important?
- What can I do to change their mind?
- Why is it that you can go from one company to another and have different experiences of what a scrum master is responsible for?

I'll look at the different scrum master types I've experienced whilst working in different organisations and then compare the scrum master role to the Scrum Guide and what it says the role should do. 

The session will also cover my personal journey through the process of becoming a professional scrum trainer for scrum.org and how that experience helped me in responding to the email.

Dear Mr Scrum Master

Much of the value of our meetups not to learn about the theory of lean / agile product development but to hear from practitioners talk about their experiences putting theory into practice. Much of the value of experienced agile coaches come from their knowledge of what can work when and help an organisation see when something is likely to fail, saving time, disruption and ultimately money. 

Both our speakers this month fall squarely under the banner of experienced practitioners and both will be passing on their real world experience. As Peter Drucker said - Management is doing things right; leadership is doing the right things.

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Andy Butcher

Small companies can move fast and stay aligned because communication is easy with a small team. But as companies grow, communication becomes exponentially harder. A command and control, top-down hierarchy inevitably emerges. And to protect the culture, companies often adopt an ""internal marketing"" narrative which software teams can find disingenuous.

This talk is based on the challenges we've faced at Sky Betting & Gaming, which has tripled in engineering headcount over the last 3 years as we've become the number one sports betting company in the UK by customer volume. I'll explain why the concepts of choreography and orchestration apply to horizontally scaling an IT driven organisation, and how splitting into autonomous teams (with the right alignment and accountability) can create a workplace where you can get things done, and people feel excited and passionate about what they do.

Using Conway's Law to tackle the company scaling problem

Matt Skelton

For effective, modern, cloud-connected software systems we need to organize our teams in certain ways. Taking account of Conway&#39;s Law, we look to match the team structures to the required software architecture, enabling or restricting communication and collaboration for the best outcomes.

This talk will cover the basics of organization design using Team Topologies, exploring a selection of key team types and how and when to use them in order to make the development and operation of your software systems as effective as possible. 

The talk is based on the forthcoming 2019 book Team Topologies and first-hand experience helping companies around the world with the design of their technology teams.

Key takeaways:
1. Why using the “Spotify Model” of team design is not enough
2. The four fundamental team topologies needed for modern software delivery
3. The three team interaction modes that enable fast flow and rapid learning
4. How to address Conway’s Law, cognitive load, and team evolution with Team Topologies

Using team topologies for fast flow and organisation evolution

Small companies can move fast and stay aligned because communication is easy with a small team. But as companies grow, communication becomes exponentially harder. A command and control, top-down hierarchy inevitably emerges. 

And to protect the culture, companies often adopt an "internal marketing" narrative which software teams can find disingenuous.

Using Conway Law to Tackle Company Scaling Problems

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John Le Drew

Over 3 months John recorded over 60 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”.

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. 

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 60 hours of audio. 

This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Positions

Chris Cheadle

Towards the end of last year, we decided to remove as many constraints as possible and let our let team at NHS.UK work on what they wanted for 2 weeks. 

We borrowed the idea, and the name, from GOV.UK but of course they weren't the first and won't be the last.

 This is our story. What worked, what didn't, what we will do differently next time and why we think you might want to consider one where you work.

Firebreak Tall Tales - A Break From Routine

This month John Le Drew, host of the Agile Path podcast is previewing his talk about safety - and it looks great. 

Also, Agile Yorkshire regulars Sean Craig and Chris Cheadle will be presenting an experience report on an innovation experiment they ran within the NHS. 

They'll be sharing their insight - warts and all.

Swearing, Nudity and Other Vulnerable Position

David Harper

An engaging, witty and at times irreverent look at why ‘the Grown-Ups’ in Board Meetings and Steering Groups make the decisions they do. And how they all love Agile – until it requires a big decision! By taking us on his own unique journey from IT Coder to CIO, David shares his own techniques on how to survive in the Boardroom as the ‘IT Guy’ representing Agile projects, and how his own adversity has unlocked a fear he has held since childhood.

For anyone frustrated by the apparent lack of understanding of Agile in the Boardroom or mystified by the Waterfall or Fragile decisions that often come back – this is the session for you!

It's Alright for You, You've Had Cancer!

Sharon Dale

A treasure trove of simple, practical methods to stimulate critical conversations and liberate the full potential of any group, from the frontline to the C- suite.""Cheryl M Scott – Global Programs Senior Advisor, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

What would be made possible if you could unleash the intelligence and creativity of everyone? Liberating Structures are a collection of easy-to-learn facilitation patterns that make this possible. They're field tested, rooted in complexity science and freely shared under a creative commons licence.

In this short session, participants will gain practical hands-on experience of at leas one Structure, and an appreciation of some of the possibilities offered.

How might we involve and unleash everyone?

We're back after two months off with two great speakers and two great topics. 

David Harper reflects on his former role as CIO to give a sneak peek into boardroom IT decision making and Sharon Dale will throw some light onto the Liberation Structures body of knowledge. Plus the venue is back at the Platform office above Leeds train station.

It is also that time of year where we start thinking about our annual Lightning Talks Competition that we have held as our December meetup for a good number of years now. We'll be announcing the CALL FOR SPEAKERS in the next few days, so get your thinking caps on!

How Might We Involve & Unleash Everyone?

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Laurence Wood

Customers can distrust people who limit scope in order to achieve early deliverables. Previous disappointments (they never got the functionality they wanted) mean they assume the first release will actually be the only one. So they include everything in a gold plated wish-list due to a lack of trust. 

But in a trusted relationship a team will be able to negotiate on scope finding the contingency they require to meet their commitments despite inevitable curve balls. Every Digital Delivery team needs to show they can be trusted. 

I find it helpful to ask what factors they expect to impact trust in them as a team. This hands-on session shares how IndigoBlue help digital teams to explore reputation and trust.

High Performing Teams Know More About Trust

Why people and organisations are reluctant to abandon a project or an idea, even when it's clearly rational to do so.

The Shit Nightclub Antipattern

One of Agile Yorkshire biggest strengths is hearing real life stories and insights from experienced local practitioners. When these stories are shared they a substantially more valuable because they are told along with the circumstances and context within which they relate. 

Our speakers this month are two excellent example of this. Laurence Wood explores trust between delivery teams and their customers who may often have been used to working with teams delivering in in a traditional project manor with large batches of work and limited or no iteration. 

Believing in iterative product development often needs to be seen before it is believed. Andy Butcher digs into the emotional attachment that can grip teams and trick them into delivering the wrong thing with frustrating outcomes.

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Mike Burrows

Which is better: “top down”, with the challenge of overcoming resistance to change, or “bottom up”, perhaps never gathering momentum? Perhaps this is false choice? Could there be a third way, an approach to organisational transformation that is simultaneously respectful, ambitious, and sustainable?

What we know and where we must do better

Ivor Tymchak

Often, data is found that is so significant that the discoverers forget in their excitement to add a simple story to it before they try to explain it to the world. How the data is received by the public depends upon the story accompanying it.

In this talk, I'll tell you a story about a hugely important discovery, how data confirmed its efficacy but because it was lacking a good story it wasn't taken seriously for years resulting in the loss of countless lives. I'll also explain how I applied this story principle to the Tech-Off contest and came out the champion.

Tell stories, not data

Author, regular conference speaker and founder of the Agendashift network Mike Burrows is back this month to talk about the perennial topic of managing change. As many of us know through experience, any kind of change is a hard won victory. 

This is especially so in larger organisations with numerous conflicting agendas. Mike insight is always fresh and  worth listening to. This months support slot is filled by Ivor Tymchak fresh from his TechOff victory at the Leeds International Festival. 

Ivor has been running speaker workshops with Agile Yorkshire for a couple of years now and is back to tell us how he won, pass on some tips and explain the new round of workshops we're organising to help budding presenters take their stories to the next level at conferences and beyond.

What We Know & Where We Must Do Better

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Dennis Vergne

We had a theory that Agile is just as well suited to Public Service organisations as it is to Private, software development industries. We proved that theory right. Through 'whole system prototyping' we incorporated Agile, Design and Adaptive Leadership to bring about positive, sustainable change in to UK Public Services. 

We used these approaches to not only enable better services and achieve savings but also brought about a true sustainable adaptive culture, able to face the future with confidence. I'm looking forward to sharing the what, why and how with you... Maybe even throw in an activity to help explain.

Prototyping Public Services

Glenn Crossley

An introduction to a blended approach to Agile delivery. There are many tools, techniques and frameworks available, one rarely solves all your challenges. 

BAD is an open source knowledge base that attempts to share experiences of blending multiple approaches together to experiment, learn and adapt.

Blending Agile Delivery

The variety and depth of topics covered by speakers is ever expanding. 

We all know the value and savings made though gaining feedback from users of a system early and often and this month Dennis Vergne shares an approach to system building in the public sector that he's dubbed "whole system prototyping" as a model for doing just that. Plus Austen Bell and Glen Crossley are here to talk about the open source Blended Agile Delivery (BAD) toolkit that has recently emerged from work right here in Leeds.


Prototyping Public Services & Blending Agile Delivery

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Matt Barnaby

Times are hard in public services. An increasing demand for providing services to the most vulnerable members of society is being undermined by crippling bureaucracy, continuous budget cuts, increased stress and 'more for less' as a mantra. In fact, times are really hard! How on earth do services cope with change? For years Basis (a RedQuadrant Company) has been helping public services to 'change the change', to do 'it' differently. You guessed - we use agile to do it differently. How do we do it? Come and find out. Our session is going to walk through a number of cases where we have 'changed the change'. We have delivered savings of millions, dramatically improved social care practice whilst making savings, and engaged staff in re-developing their own mental health services to halve the customer journey time whilst boosting quality.

We intend to demonstrate how progressive prototypes are so much more beneficial to delivering the right thing sooner (which might not have been what they thought they wanted, right?) and how self-organising cultures maximise the use of agile.
We also like to play games so come prepared, you might need to get creative (or lose some clothing!)


Changing the Change: Agile in Public Services

Joe Stead

I've spent a large chunk of my career working on greenfield projects, the promised land. All of the projects faced different issues, and we worked towards coming up with different solutions. 

The promised land wasn't all it's cracked up to be. Recently, I've spent a lot of time working on legacy projects, bringing them into the modern world. Again, these projects aren't perfect and presented a whole variety of different issues. Let's explore the types of projects, and decide which is better: Greenfield, or Legacy.

The Trials and Tribulations of Greenfield vs Legacy Projects

The cost of public services are in constant scrutiny and anyone who's worked on a public sector software project knows there is plenty of room for doing things differently if there is a motivation to do so, saving enormous amounts of money in the process. 

Some of you will remember Martin Sumner speaking at Agile Yorkshire back in January 2015 comparing the NHS Spine 1 project with the Spine 2 project. The former a traditionally procured and run waterfall affair requiring hundreds of outsourced consultants and lots of expensive proprietary hardware and the second a pilot for an agile approach employing a tenth of the resources and taking significant advantage of low cost, open source infrastructure. 

In a non IT context Malcolm Gladwell's much discussed 2006 article in the New Yorker Million-Dollar Murray challenges the accepted approach to dealing with the homeless with a system thinking eye that should be familiar to us in the agile community. 

This month Matt Barnaby will share his thoughts on doing this differently in the public sector in our main speaking slot followed by Agile Yorkshire regular Joe Stead's reflections on working with new and existing product code bases. 

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Ian Franklin

Too often the big blue sky horizon of Agile falls short of its promise when technical delivery takes over and UX design and user needs start to look like a bolt on, a nice to have, and “it's a lovely idea. It's even worse when those above lose sight of the user and start suggesting or imposing user stories and use needs that seem to come from the whims of a stakeholder or outer space.

In the talk Ashley and Ian will cover how to keep UX, user centred design design and user needs alive and kicking throughout Agile process. 

This will include tricks to keep stakeholders onboard,  how to package UX and user centred design so that it maintains importance, and how to manage upwards when the senior project team are new to Agile roles. 

Making UX work within Agile

Joe Williams

When pressed with hard deadlines like the start of the Premier League season and a rapidly changing market, we really had to think about the way we would deliver software. Our product owner wanted frills and bows, but we didn't really have the time to give him either. Instead, we taught him to stop worrying, and love the minimal viable product.

In this talk I'll go over how we optimised our process, learnt to be strict with our product owner, and ultimately delivered the new Sky Sports iOS Enhanced Live player for Premier League fixtures. 

I'll also talk about the impact of this going forward, and how we extended the player to include EFL fixtures in just 3 points. I'll also talk about how, in my own independent development, I faced the same issues my product owner did, and the issues that arose from that. Hopefully at the end, there'll be something you can take away, whether it be about embracing MVP, or learning that MVP isn't what you think.


How Our PO Learned to Stop Worrying and Love MVP

Software technology keeps marching forward with new ideas and fascinating engineering innovations that can, if allowed to, distract from the job at hand - to provide value through software features that normal humans can actually use. 

That means delivering value as soon as possible and regularly checking that people can reliably accomplish what they need to quickly and without fuss or lots of training. This month we focus on just this with insight into agile testing of the UX kind with Ian Franklin and Ashley Wheat plus a dip into the world of MVPs and what they can bring to any delivery team with Joe Williams.

Making UX Agile & How Our PO Learned to Stop Worrying

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Simon Cookson

Simon will explore what agile teams could learn from sales thinking and practice about engaging stakeholders. Talk about how stakeholder engagement can build team resilience and explore whether we should all become mini-product owners.

Stakeholder Engagement, Sales Thinking and  Should We All Be Product Owners?

Simeon Smith

Having been through a few job titles over the past few years (Business Analyst, Product Manager, Product Owner), I’ll be talking through what I think the similarities and differences between the roles are. 

I’ll also explain one approach to setting-up teams including these roles which avoids people stepping on each other’s toes. 

Business Analyst, Product Owner or Product Manager?

Building the right thing and having a good outcome from a software project requires all sides to be wilfully collaborating in a creative and enthusiastic fashion. That may seem obvious and easy but the IT industry has a legacy culture to deal with. It's not uncommon for both sides to be evaluated on meeting deadlines and budget constraints but not always on costs saved or revenue generated by the outcome of a software project. 

Of course measuring outcomes isn't always easy and bringing people together to collaborate meaningfully when they may also have other day to day tasks to get done is a similar challenge. However in the world of software product development it's people working together that often transforms the outcome and this month our two speakers Simon Cookson and Simeon Smith are both drilling into upstream end of the product development pipeline.


Stakeholder Engagement, Sales Thinking & Should We Be Product Owners

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Ian Carroll

The two questions that have haunted development teams since the beginning of 01/01/1970. In this session we explore the fear associated with deadlines, milestones, and commitments and how to turn this fear into positive focus to embrace the constraint.  We introduce a new estimation technique to help you to manage expectations more effectively.

How long will it take? How much will it cost?

While business knowledge and domain expertise is useful and essential, is this only achievable with a 'single wringable neck'? What would happen if the whole team could be encouraged to take ownership of product direction?

This session looks at how we have often created dysfunctional relationships with our product owners through both the way we collaborate (or don't) with them and the language we use to talk about the role itself.

We will discuss questions like:
 - What is actually the role of the product owner?
 - Why do we discourage 'hero' developers but encourage 'hero' product owners?
 - How do we know what the right thing to do is?
 - Can the whole team engage in product ownership?

The product owner is an agile anti-pattern

One of the nice things to have witnessed over the last few years is the growing number of people regularly speaking on lean / agile topics across and based in the north of England. With a slight change to our normal format this months gathering is a showcase of talent with three speakers all from our region. 

Ian Carroll runs Lean Agile Manchester and we've been trying to coax him along for some time, John Le Drew ran an excellent session at Agile Yorkshire on safety a few months and hosts the Agile Path podcast and Ian Lister is making his debut appearance. Hope everyone is having a great summer and see you in a couple of weeks.


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Karl Scotland

Learning is a key part of both Lean and Agile. Learning about customer needs and how to most effectively meet those needs. But as well as learning how to solve today's problems, we need to be able to solve tomorrow's problems, and next weeks, and next years. We need to learn how to learn. And we want all that learning to be aligned towards the addressing the same critical challenges or opportunities. That requires leadership to create an environment where experimentation is encouraged.

This talk will explore how Strategy Deployment can be used lead lasting learning and introduce some tools and techniques which can help achieve that goal.

Leading Lasting Learning: Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

Ian Thomas

Extreme programming kickstarted a lot of what we consider the modern agile movement, but many of its practices often fall by the wayside due to the high discipline required to implement them. 

This talk looks at the "you aren't gonna need it" principle and how engineering teams often find themselves walking the fine line between gold plating and unstructured bloat in their delivery of software. Using real-world examples from recent work, we will look at how YAGNI can help (and hinder) our efforts to deliver the best software for our customers.

Does anyone remember YAGNI?

Over the years Agile Yorkshire has been for fortunate in hosting some of the industries most experienced practitioners and this month is a prime example. Karl Scotland has been sharing his insights and experience through his blog and speaking at conferences for many years. 

He played a fundamental role in contributing and popularising the Kanban body of knowledge in it's early days and continues to do so. Ian Thomas brings his experience as an architect at one of our regions largest technology businesses to reflect on some of Extreme Programming's fundamental principles through real world examples.

Becoming a Lean Enterprise with Strategy Deployment

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Adam Mitchell

Cost of delay should be the biggest factor when deciding what order to queue work - yet it is very rarely used and not properly understood by most business's. This interactive session will go through what we mean by value, how we perceive it and how to best use it in prioritising work. 

I was lucky enough to spend a couple of days with Don Reinertsen, probably the leading authority on product flow alive today. This session talks through some of his learnings and puts them into a practical context that you can use tomorrow with your teams.


We Lost How Much Money?

Software product design and engineering is an area rich in opinions and historic working practice. Also the modern agile methods prescribe many practices which may work for you if followed carefully but can just as easily lead to "cargo cult" activities that deliver no real business benefit. 

Going back to first principles and understanding some of the economics of software product development and understanding HOW Scrum, Kanban or <insert favourite method here> can deliver more value for the same cost is liberating. 

It unlocks a new ability to adapt popular practices to any circumstance and ensure the business benefits in the way expected. Adam Mitchell brings his knowledge and experience to this months meetup to explain some of the mysteries of product development economics. Chris Warren will also share his experience of shifting focus to the "left of the board" when building a top performing test strategy.

Agile

Yorkshire

About the Agile Yorkshire Community

The Organisers

Royd Brayshay

Past Speakers