Accelerated Agile: From Months to Minutes - Workshop by Dan North

This pre-conference workshop (additional registration required) provides a full day covering Accelerated Agile by industry thought leader Dan North.

Great software professionals build better software faster. Agile methods, continuous delivery and software craftsmanship helped speed up delivery from years to months or even weeks, but then what?

Some teams are able to deliver software at a speed of change like you have never seen before, delivering quality software in days or even hours, again and again. So what is keeping the rest of us from doing so? Now is the time to go from months to minutes, to rethink the way we organize and improve our software development and delivery process.

Accelerated Agile is for people who believe it can be done. People who feel themselves limited by current Agile, CD and Craftsmanship thinking. People who want to go back to basics and uncover new, simpler ways to deliver great software. Are you a seasoned agile developer who is frustrated at how slow your “hyper-performing” process feels? Are you suffering with an unwieldy feature backlog, the pantomime of estimation, the card wall where cards go to die, the efforts to automate where it obviously isn’t adding anything? Are you fed up with the artificial commitment of sprints and the unwelcome surprises that still seem to derail your projects?

Accelerated Agile brings agile principles into the 21st century. You will learn new techniques that both enhance and replace existing agile practices, some of which are counter-intuitive and many which are completely counter to current “agile” doctrine. Using a mixture of discussion, instruction and exploration you will start to think differently about design, architecture, development and testing, operations, automation and team dynamics, as well as working with legacy systems and integrating with third parties.

What you will learn

• How to challenge the received wisdom of established Agile methods
• How to design and architect for rapid and sustainable delivery
• Why understanding risk and embracing uncertainty are at the heart of faster delivery
• How to manage build, release and operations
• How systems thinking can help you plan effectively and estimate accurately
• How to identify and reduce gaps in your testing strategy
• How to engage with legacy systems and integrating with third parties
• How to manage different levels of skill and experience within a team

Praise for Accelerate Agile:

• “one of the best courses I have ever attended, if not the best!”
• "really interesting with good discussions and lots of relevant information”
• “[not using slides] made the course flow in a neat and agile way”

About the Presenter

Dan North has been coaching, coding and consulting for over 20 years, with a focus on applying systems thinking and simple technology to solve complex business problems. He uses techniques from Lean operations, Theory of Constraints and Agile software development to help IT organisations anticipate and respond to the challenges of changing business needs. Dan is the originator of Behaviour-Driven Development, an agile approach to software development that encourages teams to deliver the software that matters by emphasising the interactions between stakeholders. He also proposed Deliberate Discovery, which challenges assumptions around software planning and estimation. He argues that there are no best practices and that everything we do is subject to opportunity cost. He is a popular keynote and session speaker at international technology conferences, on topics as diverse as software architecture, behavioural psychology, simplicity, uncertainty and learning. His presentation style has been described as Eddie Izzard meets the Architect from The Matrix.

For more information

If you have additional questions about the Scrum @ Scale workshop, please contact Dan North dan@dannorth.net.