Dublin (Ireland)

9:30-10.45

Colm O’hEocha – Agileinnovation

Executive Briefing – What Agile and Lean IT means for your business – Benefits, Challenges and Next Steps

Targeted at Senior Managers, this intensive session examines how agile benefits the bottom line, the challenges you’re likely to see as it changes the way work is carried out, and some steps you can take to ensure your adoption isn’t just another failed initiative.

Agile applies Lean Thinking to software development and operations. We’ll look at the benefits from three perspectives:

          - Project Economics: We discuss the ‘Economies of Speed’ and illustrate the benefits by an example

          - Systems Thinking: Looking at development as a complex adaptive system can help us see waste, bottlenecks and inefficiencies

          - Physiological/Cognitive: How agile supports Innovation, Knowledge Creation and Motivation

But to gain these benefits, agile demands real changes throughout your organisation, not just in IT. Here we look at some of the ‘friction points’ and likely barriers you’ll face.. We’ll review possible changes to roles, responsibilities and structure, commercial contracts, the relationship of IT to the business and the importance of investing in your development capability for long-term competitiveness.

11:15 – 12:30

Fran O’Hara – Inspire Quality Services

Workshop on Effective User Stories

User stories are simple, brief descriptions of functionality told from the perspective of a user. In Scrum or any agile development project, they are written to capture functionality a user or customer wants and they form the basis of the product backlog. This workshop will discuss, with examples and short exercises, how to write effective user stories including acceptance criteria. It will discuss the roles involved in their development, typical pitfalls and how stories can be used to estimate and support release planning.

9:30-10.00

TargetProcess

10:00-10:30

Storm (TFS)

10:30-11:00

Hewlett-Packard

11:00-11:30

TargetProcess

11:30-12:00

Storm (TFS)

12:00-12:30

Hewlett-Packard

13:45-14:20

John Coogan – Ericsson

The presentation will outline the benefits and challenges in introducing agile testing to a new project in the OSS development unit in Athlone.  Scaling of Agile, tester mindset and profile, continuous integration and the agile testing quadrants will be discussed.

14:25-15:00

David McGuiness – Fineos

David’s presentation will focus on his personal, on-the-ground experience working in an Agile environment in FINEOS. From early days, how and why the team started using Scrum, its evolution in the intervening time, challenges, mistakes made, and lessons  learned, some tips, what he sees as the benefits, and planned next steps.

13:45-14:20

Paraic Hegarty – Akari

Based on a joint paper with University of Ulster presented at the EuroSPI2013 conference, Paraic's presentation is on the Application of Agile Practices to multiple Product Lines.

14:25-15:00

Alistair Bishop – ThoughtWorks

Coming up with a process to prioritise development based on what will deliver the most value, and finding out whether what your building is having an impact is something that teams do not invest enough time and effort into. Yet these are fundamental building blocks in understanding not only your domain and your customer base but also in finding out whether the business case behind your project holds true. I will be talking about how to get teams focussing on delivering valuable software through the introduction of some lightweight processes that will help with prioritisation and reduce the uncertainty of the impact of what the team is developing.

15:45-16:20

Leo Blonk – Duolog

Scrum is easy: just follow the procedures and tweak as necessary. Scrum is hard: people are asked to change their mindset. I present what we have done to introduce Scrum, what has worked well and what has not worked, and the issues around getting people to truly adopt the scrum values.

16:25-17:00

Ger Hartnett – Goshido.com and Thierry Michel – PaddyPower

This talk will describe lessons learned implementing a phased rollout of agile and scrum across the PaddyPower organisation.

15:45-16:20

Ken Brennock – Independent test consultant  

What has Agile done for Testing?

As IT professionals we are always trying to improve the software development lifecycle, faster times to market, better quality and producing software more cost effectively. Agile methodologies have supported this objectives by encouraging team to continuously review, question and consider how software is produced. However, for over the last decade or so, testers seem to struggle with the Agile practices. This presentation and discussion will consider;

- What is the role of the tester in software development and process improvement?

- What is it with Agile methodologies that appear to cut across the gain of most testers?

- And ultimately can Agile support better testing?

16:25-17:00

Colm O’hEocha – Agileinnovation

Where Scrum Won't Fit

Scrum uses a Timebox where work is planned, executed and delivered in a regular cadence. This focuses the team, enables continuous feedback cycles and helps identify issues and improve predictability. But what if a team can’t plan even a week of work – what if their ability to ‘shape demand’ is limited since they need to constantly respond to events outside their control – production issues, customer support requests, unplannable business priorities? Based on the Lean ideas of ‘just in time’, ‘pull’ and ‘limiting work in progress’, the Kanban approach can be used to synchronise work in ‘interrupt-driven’ environments while maintaining agility. This talk introduces some of the ideas behind Kanban and how it can help realise agility in IT Operations and Support