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The Round Foundry

Mark Stringer

In this talk I examine the powerful reasons why most projects are perceived to be late and over-budget and suggest, possibly controversially, that this is probably going to be the default state for most software projects for a long time to come. 

I then go on to suggest some strategies for continuing to deliver value to customers on late and over-budget projects whilst at the same time easing the stresses and pressures on developers and project managers and allowing them to feel they are doing a good job.

Overtime and Overbudget

Agile project management methodologies and agile project management books give the impression that if you follow their recommendations and implement their practices your projects will be on-time and to budget. However, my own experience is that most projects, even if they are good examples of Agile project management practice, are still perceived by most of the people involved, and especially by customers and stakeholders, to be late and over budget.

Why should this be? Why does being late and over-budget feel so bad? What can we as developers, project managers and even customers do to make the situation better? 

When a Project is Overtime and Overbudget

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Ethar Alali

Agile development has been around a long time now. One of the key concepts in reliably and consistently delivering software and crucially, realising it's value, has been the flow of stories through the delivery chain, however big the organisation. 

In this talk, Ethar presents his view on why it works, how Kanban works at scale, what always worked before agility, how to spot value delivery and crucially, the limits to employing particular practises. All Illustrated with Lego and Monopoly money.

What’s Wrong With Estimates?

Martin Woodford

This will explore who the product manager is, who the product manager isn't, what a good product manager should be, from the type of character to the output.

The Product Manager

Welcome back. The summer is passing, the kids are back to school and our traditional December lightening talks competition is only three months away. We have two great speakers this month covering predictable delivery and the roll of the Product Manager. 

With both speakers plucked from within our northern agile community. Read on for details and see you all next week.

What’s Wrong With Estimates & The Product Manager

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Futurelabs

Dr Oliver Shaw

In this talk Oliver describes what "Doing TDD" is and, importantly, what it isn't. He will make the ethos of TDD very clear and show you how to do TDD via a live coding demo. He touches on mocking, the testing pyramid and finishes by doing a fanaticism check with the audience.

Test Driven Development, the most misused term in software development?

Keith Williams

What is abstraction, and when should you use it? How much is too little, and how much is too much? Why are we even bothering anyway? If you get it right, you might just make your life much easier; get it wrong and you might end up wishing that you never bothered.

In this talk, we’ll examine what abstraction (and, more specifically, dependency injection) is, what it does, and how it can make your code more testable and reliable, as well as being a key factor in enabling continuous delivery.


Dependencies, Injection and Abstraction for Fun and Profit

It's a while since Agile Yorkshire had an entire evening of content that was firmly planted in agile engineering but for February we're back to our roots. 

We're still building our calendar for 2017 so watch out for new announcements and get in touch if you know someone with a story to tell.

Test Driven Development - The Most Misused Term in Software Development?

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Amy Thompson

No-one seems to talk about velocity anymore. I want to talk about velocity. And Harry Potter a bit. I mean I like Harry Potter, but I like stable velocity a fair bit more. I'm going to talk about why velocity is so important to me, why it should be so important to you, and how its possible achieve predictable delivery when you catch the Golden Snitch of Scrum. 

The Golden Snitch of Scrum

Jon Fulton

Formula 1 teams use data to fuel continuous improvement. Can agile teams do the same with Metrics? If they can, what effect can this have on people? Jon will share thoughts and experiences from using Metrics with agile teams.

Using Data Like a Formula 1 Team

Last month's two engineering based presentations received great feedback but we like to mix things up and this month it's all metrics, data and quantitative decision making. This should be the foundation and focus of any lean / agile leadership team, however this is sometimes not the case. When an organisation uses data well it knows what it's capable of and can match resources to demand, deliver predictably and react in real time to production problems before they escalate. 

Unfortunately the lagging indicator reports of old are still alive and in common use, accompanied by the familiar lurching from one crisis to the next. 
Come along this month, learn from others and don't let that happen.

The Golden Snitch of Scrum & Using Data Like a Formula 1 Team

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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

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Tony Heap

User story splitting is an established practice on agile delivery teams. But in my experience, it’s really difficult to do well.

In this presentation I’ve pulled together everything I’ve learned about story splitting. I'll talk about why, when and how to split stories. I'll present different story splitting techniques and, most importantly, I'll show you what order to use them in. I'll also explain why I think it's dangerous to play with spikes!

If you're new to story splitting, this presentation is for you. If you think you already know how to split user stories, think again!

Story Splitting for Beginners and Experts Alike

Stew Abel

Need to start a new project? Do you need to keep your hosting costs low and development time short? Does throwing everything at AWS PaaS products help? Stewart decided to try just this to find out . Here he discusses his experience, and lessons learned.

Using AWS PaaS for an MVP

Fresh from the hugely successful one day Crazy Agile Thing conference over Leeds Digital festival week we've two excellent speakers pluck from our own community this month. Tony Heap has always been very popular with his past session being amongst our most watch videos and Stew Able, long time supporter of AY is debuting as a speaker.


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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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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?

Chris Warren

I would like to tell my story about how I started focusing my attention on the right side of the board but slowly started to shift to the left. The journey starts with me picking up work in the ‘Test’ column without much involvement earlier in the process and continues today with me spending most of my time testing the requirements in an Analysis stage and working with the team to ensure testing is baked in throughout the process.

To the Left to the Left, Everything I Test in a Box to the Left

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.

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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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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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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

Platform

Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle. What's the goal? 

Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? 

Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition? This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it.

Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking

These days social media is awash with stories of ‘fake agile’ and ‘dark scrum’. Has Agile failed? What if it was us, as Agile practitioners, who failed our organisations? What is required of us now, as agents of change?


Agents of Change

A new year is upon us with new challenges plus hopefully new goals and new target conditions. We've got some fantastic speakers lined up for the coming months but we're kicking the year off with a couple of people many of you will know. 

Diversity is regularly in the news these days and John Le Drew is here to prompt us in to thinking why and how this matters to product developments teams. Jon Fulton is back to challenge our own assumptions about us as agile practitioners. As agents of change are we actually helping? 

Diversity, Chocolate and Safe Cracking plus Agents of Change

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Andrew Meyer

NHS Digital is the national information and technology partner to the health and social care system, using digital technology to transform the NHS and social care. It’s vision is to harness the power of information and technology to improve health and care. Their systems and information Gary Green at Agile Yorkshirehelps doctors, nurses and the health care professionals improve and make care safer.

Over the passed 3+ years the NHS Digital Delivery Centre has been on a journey to transform itself. It was previously heavily reliant on large managed national services that were expensive and difficult to change. It has quietly and diligently been transforming itself into a Lean, Agile, DevOps capability reducing the cost of national health care solutions by 10’s of millions of pounds.

This talk, is to explore how it started, the transformation journey, where it’s going next and, most importantly, what did we learn.

Attempting to Create a Dynamic, lean and Innovative Organisation

Kevin McCabe

In this session Kev will give a very brief overview of the Core Protocols and Commitments.
These can be used to create highly performing teams by creating psychologically safe zones.

The Core Protocols are a set of practices that enable people and teams to:
* learn results-oriented behaviours,
* enter a state of shared vision and stay there,
* trust each other,
* stay rational and healthy,
* make decisions effectively, and
* keep moving toward the team's goals.

In this state, teams can be very effective. Teams with these practices innovate, create, and get things done. 

Core Protocols for Shared Vision

The software industry has transformed it's self over the past two decades by finding new ways to work that properly recognised the unpredictable, problem solving nature of much of it's work and at the same time reduce risk and significantly increased the rate of value production. The mantra has been to question the cost of every activity in light of the risks it mitigates or the value it realises. This has led to much innovation within the typical product development pipeline and many smaller businesses have capitalised on this as a significant commercial advantage.

Achieving these changes within a small team can transform performance with little disruption however as the size of an organisation increases so does the resistance to change. There are a lot of hearts and minds to realign, right from the coal face to senior leadership teams and resistance normally exists in one form or another at every level. 

For any large organisation to truly transform it's self and realise the commercial benefits is a long slow process requiring a lot of leadership and good dose of personal risk taking. This month we're going to hear a couple of experience reports that are definitely worth listening too. 

Attempting to Create a Dynamic and Innovative Organisation

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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

Andy Butcher

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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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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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

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.


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