...help I need three clones at the conference with me. Join me on what promises to be a truly insane and busy week.

Tuesday, Aug 4. 10:45 - 12:15

Expanding Agile Horizons: The Five Dimensions of Systems: Mary Poppendieck - "What does Agile want to be when it grows up". Mary is always an amazing speaker. Worth listening to even when you're not interested in her topic.

Tangible Bug Tracking using LEGO bricks: Takeshi Kakeda - Dammit I've always wanted an excuse to play with Lego. Benefits: Intuitive visualization of the quantity of software bugs for everyone.

Continuous Testing: TDD Turned Up To 12: Ben Rady - "is a developer practice that involves automatically running tests after every change, even so much as a single statement. ... This session will cover the history, theory, practice, and daily application of CT to real-world projects." I'm really hoping to read a summary of this online.

Systemic Coaching Techniques for Agile Coaches: Michael Spayd and Doug Rosenberg - Coaching for the entire team: "By cleanly standing outside the team, we help reveal the system to itself, leading to greater team self awareness, higher cohesion and more conscious self-organization. Moving beyond the right and wrong of individual issues, we facilitate long-term persistent changes which benefit the whole system. We will demonstrate three techniques with the audience as participants to demonstrate this exciting new approach."

Learning Kaizen from Toyota (with MindMaps): Kenji Hiranabe "After presentation of key TPS concepts, small groups will explore commonalities between Agile and TPS by developing Mind Maps, and then exchange the results". Mindmaps from last year's session are on Kenji's blog

Leadership Success Recipes for Agile in the 21st Century: Jean Tabaka and Chris Louvion: "with their cookbook of Agile for the 21st century Executive Chef. In this upbeat real-life experiences presentation, we offer the recipes that succeed; how they succeeded; and, what the amazing results were. Additionally, we intend to arm you with warning signs that your recipes for agile adoption may produce very unsatisfactory results and even flop."

Extremely Short Iterations as a Catalyst for Effective Prioritization of Work: Mishkin Berteig "In this client organization, agile methods were not producing expected improvements, primarily because the stakeholders could not agree on priorities of the work. The team decided to use extremely short iterations to expose the problems caused by a lack of prioritization." I've heard this story from Mishkin when I took my CSM course a couple of years ago now.

One slot and already I'm overwhelmed by the choices. Staying focused primarily on coaching is important to me so I will either choose Systemic Coaching (Michael and Doug) or Leadership Recipes (Jean and Chris). Perhaps Jean will announce a new book and solve the problem for me.

14:00 - 15:30 and 16:00 - 17:30

Diana and Esther’s Excellent Retrospective Adventures: Diana Larsen , Esther Derby - I attended a session with them last year and they're great presenters. They will take your retrospectives to 12 (not just 11). The only downside at three hours this is your afternoon.

The Pomodoro Technique: can you focus - really focus - for 25 minutes?: Staffan Noteberg - my wife will tell you just how much I need this. I found a description (pdf) and notes from the course. BTW I'm using it to run my day and its working so far. Really its just plan, work in 25 minute chunks (+ 5 minute breaks), reflect. Scrum for my day. Too cool.

Coaching self-organizing teams: Joseph Pelrine and Steve Freeman - tutorial, with exercises. "This tutorial presents an approach utilizing leading-edge research and techniques from social complexity science and team dynamics to change the dynamics of a team with the aim of optimizing their work together." Damn its also three hours long.

Beer Miles! The Product Owner Simulation: Robin Dymond and David Douglas - "Working in teams, students participate in hands on exercises that go from business case through to a first production release." I keep on thinking that I need to learn more about the product owner role. Also three hours.

16:00 - 17:30

Most of the above sessions are three hours long (I will probably try Coaching self-organizing teams - its a big weakness for me, I spend a lot of time wanting to push on string). If I bail on my previous session (it has happened) then I will try:

XP: My Greatest Misses 2000-2008: J. B. Rainsberger - I saw his talk last year at Agile 2007 - JB is a hoot.

Agile Contracting: Rachel Weston and Chris Spagnuolo - even if its an internal engagement there is still an implicit contract. "In this workshop we will offer a toolbox of strategies to help deal with different contracting scenarios and promote Agile practices, protect the development organization, and provide value and protection to the contracting organization."

Money for Nothing and Your Change for Free: Agile Contracts: Jeff Sutherland - not much to say he's an amazing speaker (like Mary P.) and his insights are always valuable.

Building High-Performance Agile Teams: Paul Hodgetts "We’ll discuss the nature of leadership within teams of peers, and how to motivate teams to take the initiative and self-organize. We’ll cover how to run effective team meetings, how to reach agreements as a group, how to resolve conflicts and how to form a team that continuously learns how to better work together."

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