...The good news my choices seem a little easier I only seem to need one or two clones.

8:30 - 10:00

Stop Thinking So Small with Agile: Ryan Martens and Jean Tabaka + Driving Agile Transformation from the Top Down: Peter Morowski. A pair of talks that fill one slot. Ryan and Jean will ask the question is the original Manifesto holding us back? "Are we stagnating and unnaturally suffocating the transformations that must naturally occur in order for a system to sustain itself? Are we thinking too small with Agile and are we afraid to allow and support the natural progression Agile’s usefulness and sustainability?". Peter follows on with a talk about the ongoing Agile transition at Borland: "What does an agile transition look like when it comes as a mandate from the top? How do the “rules” of agile apply to a large, established development organization? How do you scale agile principles from a single team to an enterprise with multiple teams working on multiple projects?"

Resistance as a Resource: Dale Emery "how to turn resistance from a frustration into a resource. Whatever else it may be, resistance is information — about the people we are asking to change, about the environment in which the change will happen, about the changes we recommend, and about ourselves." I expect that this an expanded version of Dave's paper Resistance as a Resource (Originally published in Cutter IT Journal Vol. 14 No. 10, October 2001).

Overcoming Resistance to Change: Dave Nicolette and Lasse Koskela "The facilitators hope that participants will gain a deeper understanding of why people resist change – possibly even why they themselves resist change – based on an improved appreciation for different perspectives and different priorities. We also hope participants will be able to return to their own organizations with a toolkit of effective and practical methods to overcome resistance to change." This is a three hour session.

Coaching Agile Teams: Rachel Davies and Liz Sedley - a workshop format to simulate coaching experiences and then help participants create their own coaching guidelines. Rachel is our conference chair so this has to be good.

Building Your Coaching Skills: Johanna Rothman - another coaching workshop with next years conference chair. Help. I'm drowning with good choices. This one is three hours long.

New Car Development in Toyota: Kenji Hiranabe - "Nobuaki Katayama, Chief Engineer of Lexus/SC and IS, talked to software engineers about process, principles, and practices of new car development in Toyota, at Developer’s Summit 2008 in Tokyo on Feb. 13, 2008" Kenji has translated the talk and added some of his own insights.

At this point I'm a little confused, frankly they all sound good. But it gets worse because the next slot also has some good choices:

10:30 - 12:00

An Agile Classroom Experience: Teaching TDD and Refactoring: Brandon Carlson - "In this session we will discuss how I embrace the Agile principles of simple design, low tech tools, and evolutionary development to teach Java in a test-first manner, giving students a foundation in unit testing and refactoring while learning the Java language." This is only a 30 minute paper.

Fostering Software Craftsmanship in a Corporate Setting: Scott Dillman "provides ideas and approaches on how to promote a culture of continuous improvement and perpetual learning among teams of software developers in a corporate setting. It provides specific examples of approaches that have been successful at large companies such as Travelers Insurance and Google, focusing not only on how to spread knowledge, but also on how to evaluate progress and measure success." We could so use a dose of this - then again so could any organization that I've seen.

Helppppppp - probably one of the two sessions on Resistance and then over to Scott Dillman and fostering craftmanship. Dave and Lasse if attend your session and bail early, it was for good cause.

14:00 - 15:30

Don't Sell Buzzwords to Business Leaders, Learn How to Describe and Demonstrate Real Value: Richard Sheridan and James Goebel - Rich will answer business leadership questions such as… “Why should I pay for two to do the job of one?”, “Why should I pay for unit testing? Get it right the first time!”, ...

Coaches Are Producers: David Hussman - "In the recording industry, producers help guide production by balancing creativity with costs, quality, and schedules. The great producers value and nurture the uniqueness of each project. The producer helps the players (and others) complete the project while providing a time and space for improvisation. ... Sustainable agility often starts with an agile coach helping a community find its unique groove. Like the music producer, the coach needs to help the individuals as well as the community innovate and deliver."

Narrative Testing: Tools for Story Test Driven Development: Michael Phoenix and Rand Huso - "Narrative Testing leverages script-based testing tools and DSTLs to express Story Tests in the user’s own language. Developers and customers cooperate to create customer-readable scripts based on User Stories, which are executed interactively against the application UI. Through Narrative Testing, customers are able to view the executing test, and to experientially tie steps in the test to changes in the application state, increasing customer confidence in testing." Damn I have a team that is currently feeling this pain. Too bad I can't be in two places at once.

Overhauling a Failed Project Using Out of the Box Scrum Matthew D Edwards and Agile Project Leadership - my top 10 value driven principles Lynne Ralston - two successive experience reports.

Based on no more than a gut feeling I think I will get the most value for my time out of David's session.

16:00 - 17:30

Scaling Software Agility: Best Practices for Large Enterprises: Dean Leffingwell based on his book (of the same name) which I still haven't finished, you can hear live from Dean instead.

Leading Agile Teams: Mike Griffiths "This 90 minute presentation exposes the weaknesses of trying to use formal project management on emergent endeavours and outlines the leadership and collaboration based alternatives. Using humour, analogy, and case studies the limitations of a command-and-control management along with carrot-and-stick motivation approaches for software projects are examined and leadership / empowered teams based options introduced."

Defining the Role of Agile Manager – Theory and Practice: Michael Spayd and Lyssa Adkins "In this session we define a framework for Agile managers with eight competency areas, then springboard into a highly interactive discovery session with breakouts by competency. Participants will leave with tools and best practices they can use immediately to help the manager in their life. Competency areas include organizational change management, value stream & internal partner management, agile portfolio management and performance management."

The Hidden Life of Groups Dan Mezick - "When individuals become a members of a group, behavior changes. The group becomes focal and the individuals become background. The group behaves as a system and exhibits system-level behavior. Groups as a system exhibit primitive emotional behaviors that can derail the group from its stated primary task". This is my bread and butter, see my series on Why Scrum Works and  Does Scrum Work.

It will either be "Leading Agile Teams" or "Defining the Role of Agile Manager"

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