SDEC Workshops

New for SDEC11! – the following full day workshops will be available on Wednesday, October 19, 2011. Pricing: $349 with conference registration or $449 without.

Personal Agility – by Yves Hanoulle and Gerry Kirk

Agile in a Day – by Steve Rogalsky and Terry Bunio

BDD Immersion – by Amir Barylko

Post Conference Workshops

Personal Agility

Yves Hanoulle, Gerry Kirk

Are you or people in your organization feeling overwhelmed with their workload? Do they feel they are not getting the results they want from the actions they are taking? Does everything seem urgently important?

This workshop is for individuals who want to create more value for their organizations and themselves through improved personal performance.

If you have been wanting to learn more about Kanban, this workshop is for you. Participants will apply Kanban and other techniques to manage their own work, and by extension to teams. Each person will design and learn how to use their own activity board. Topics include:

• Visualizing work to uncover bottlenecks, gain clarity and peace of mind
• The damaging effects of too much work-in-progress, and how to reduce its effects
• Prioritize work so the important isn’t crowded out by the “urgent”
• The power of slack time!
• Continuous improvement that actually works
• Minimizing distractions using the Pomodoro technique

The workshop is lively, interactive, with lots of variety to maximize learning potential. Yves and Gerry designed this session using Training From the Back of the Room approach, which uses brain science principles for how adults learn.

You will leave this one day workshop with:

• Increased visibility into what you are doing - what you can see you can manage
• Practical answers on how to spend more time on the things that matter most to you
• Lightweight processes and tools you can use and adapt immediately to manage your workload
• A ready to use personal Kanban board

Agility occurs at many levels: organization, team and individual. High performing companies embrace all three to reap the rewards of Agile. Executives, managers, developers, product owners can all benefit from this workshop.

Agile in a Day

Steve Rogalsky, Terry Bunio

Are you struggling to understand how agile projects work and how to start planning for one? Have your initial attempts at agile produced more questions and frustrations than valuable software?

In this workshop we’ll walk end to end through an agile project with a primary focus on the activities required for starting the project. We’ll show you the techniques that have worked for teams we’ve worked with and we’ll answer your questions on the way. We’ll explain the value of many of the most common agile practices and how they all fit together. We'll also walk you through some of the mistakes we've made so that you can avoid them on your teams.

This workshop is aimed at reinforcing the agile fundamentals and helping you shorten the distance between your current understanding of agile and being a part of a high functioning agile team that delivers business value regularly. During this hands-on workshop, we’ll use agile practices to plan and then start to execute a real project so that you will be able to try out many of the agile practices including the following:

• User Stories
• User Story Mapping
• Agile Discovery techniques
• Team Estimating
• Agile Planning
• Visual Project Management
• Kanban
• Co-Located Teams
• Self Organizing Teams
• Customer Accessibility
• Iteration Planning
• Daily Stand-ups
• Manage to Done
• Iteration Demos
• Retrospectives
• Acceptance Tests

Requirements for this session: Bring a wifi capable laptop, a few 3x3 pads of post-its, and sharpies.
 

Behaviour Driven Development Immersion Workshop

Amir Barylko

If you are struggling with delivering the right thing, under budget and keep the quality of the software high this workshop is for you!

BDD is a methodology that helps combining requirements with actual running software. Using stories and scenarios to describe your features will help you flush out requirements and keep them alive accross the board until you obtain the same running feature.

Topics of the workshop include:

• The outside-in approach
• The BDD cycle
• Combining BDD and TDD
• Keeping it Agile
• Integration tests vs. unit tests
• How to improve productivity
• Test automation and regression testing

During the day we will work on the same problem, applying BDD + TDD + Agile methodologies illustrating the common software life cycle of a project. Software development should be a joyful task! And you are just a workshop away of discovering how!

The language for the examples (C#, Ruby, Java, Scala, Clojure, etc...) will be chosen closer to the workshop date based on the attendees preference. Don't worry if you are not familiar with the choice, as all the source in your favorite language will be available for download.