ThoughtWorks at Agile 2010

ThoughtWorks was excited to be a Platinum Sponsor at this year's Agile 2010 conference in Orlando, FL. We are proud to have had eight ThoughtWorkers speak, and very much enjoyed meeting and engaging with other conference attendees.

The Agile 2010 conference is the premier agile conference and this year's theme was Learn. Practice. Explore... This theme represents various stages of learning from beginner through expert, with sessions that spanned all levels of expertise. These sessions were organized around three broad themes, Business, Leadership & Organization, and Technical.

In addition to our booth on the conference floor, ThoughtWorks hosted several organized talks and break out sessions in our Connections Lounge.

Casino Night for Charity

Everyone enjoyed a fun night out while contributing to a good cause. ThoughtWorks' Casino Night for Charity had attendees playing poker with Neal Ford and watching Martin Fowler snort derisively at all the gamblers' inability to do math.

Conference Connection for iPhone and Android

The Conference Connection application, created by ThoughtWorks, is a free, interactive tool designed to help conference attendees better manage their event experience.

Features include:


To download this free application please visit the iTunes Store or the Android Market on your device. You can also click on the links below:

Speaker schedule & abstracts


Large Scale, Distributed Development Simulation

Presenter: Neal Ford
When: Monday, 9:00am – 12:30pm
Stage: Large scale & Distributed Agile
Location: Asia 5
Level: Introductory
Reading and hearing about agile practices is one thing, but actually doing it is completely different. This workshop puts you to work in an agile fashion, applying agile development practices. During this workshop, we're going to take a problem and iteratively develop the solution, using test-driven development, pair programming, retrospectives, pair rotation, and other agile management & development techniques.


Continuous Delivery
Presenters: Jez Humble & Martin Fowler
When: Monday, 1:30pm – 5:00pm
Stage: Team-Room Agile
Location: Asia 1
Level: Practicing
Businesses need to deliver valuable new features to users as frequently as possible in order to make money. But they need to make sure releases are stable and well-tested. In this tutorial we discuss how to deliver features rapidly and reliably through an automated build, deploy, test and release pattern called the deployment pipeline. In this tutorial we take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible.


Ten Tips every Agile Team Should Know About Performance Testing

Presenter: Jeff Norris
When: Wednesday, 9:00am – 10:30am
Stage: Testing/Specification Practices
Location: E-1
Level: Practicing
This session covers 10 tips successful agile teams have used to ensure their success. Learn performance anti-patterns like "Too green for his own good" and "Scrooge" and how to spot them before it is too late. Learn how to prevent problems in the first place using techniques like "Test early, test often" and "Listen to your users" (Yeah, that one is obvious). You will even get to play a fun game that will teach you spot some performance problems like a pro.


Making Feedback Work in Your Teams

Presenter: Sumeet Moghe
When: Wednesday, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Stage: Building High Performance
Location: Asia 3
Level: Introductory
One of the key values of XP is 'feedback'. While teams and software development organizations focus on systemic issues and technical improvements for their Agile journey, the importance of sharing feedback amongst each other somehow falls by the wayside. Feedback in peer groups allows us to rapidly move from forming, storming and norming stages, to performing. On Agile teams that are focused on communication, this is key to success. In this workshop, I will share with you how we approach feedback at my workplace and explain some of the principles we use to give and receive feedback every day.


Product Road-Mapping using Agile Principles

Presenter: Anupam Kundu
When: Wednesday, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Stage: Product Management
Location: E-2
Level: Practicing
As agile practices become more prevalent, Product Management divisions face increasing challenges to adapt agile techniques. Most Agile project teams prefer direct collaboration with the strategy makers for decision making over reporting metrics; the reality is that only a few product/portfolio managers are actually capable of paradigm shifts to accommodate this drift. What is needed to make this shift? The paper outlines an agile-enabled framework adopted by the digital division of a publishing house to charter their product roadmap and enable their project team with the “big picture”.


Project Vital Signs

Presenter: Stelios Pantazopoulos
When: Thursday, 11:00am – 12:00pm
Stage: Project Management
Location: Asia 3
Level: Practicing
In order to foster trust and credibility between a project team and its stakeholders, the team has the responsibility to clearly communicate the health of the project. As the leaders of a project, we can apply the metaphor of medical care and their use of "vital signs" to help form a holistic view of the state of the project. Come learn the five "Project Vital Signs", their associated quantitative metrics and how to enable a team to effectively use them as a tool to diagnose and treat project health problems.

Orlando
Monday-Friday, 9th-13th August 2010

Agile 2010 - Main site

Learn. Practice. Explore ...

Visit the main conference site for more information, and to catch up on events of the conference.

click here >

Agile Connections Lounge

In addition to our booth on the conference floor, ThoughtWorks hosted several organized talks and break out sessions in our Connections Lounge.


Adaptive ALM : A day in the life

Who: Adam Monago, Patti Mandarino and Matt Quagliana

The right tools really can make a big difference, particularly when their primary objective is to make individuals and their interactions more productive and meaningful. The Adaptive ALM suite provides teams with the flexibility they need to work effectively, while providing management with insight and flexibility into product health and progress. Join our Agile ALM experts for a 2-hour hands-on experience.

Tuning-up your Creaky Platform

Who: Matt Simons

An interactive session to share war stories and discuss the following:
  • Evolving your architecture safely and incrementally
  • Using visualization techniques to identify risky areas of your code-base
  • Test strategies that minimize the risk of changing 'unknown' areas of the system
  • Release planning approaches that maximize market impact



Continuous Delivery workshops

Who: Jez Humble

For those unable to attend Jez Humble and Martin Fowler’s session on Continuous Delivery, each day we picked a topic around continuous delivery and discussed it for 60 minutes. These sessions helped people get together and share their experiences around implementing continuous delivery. Topics included:
  • Database migration and continuous deployment
  • Implementing automated end-to-end functional tests
  • Infrastructure automation, including cloud and virtual systems.



Got a Distributed Agile question?: Ask our experts

Who: Matt Simons and Anupam Kundu

Bring your most difficult questions and challenges and talk to our subject matter experts, Matt Simons and Anupam Kundu.

Building mobile applications using Go for continuous delivery

Who: Adam Monago and Patti Mandarino

Using our measures of what it takes to release quality software in the enterprise, we have begun to provide a close look at the technologies that are leading the charge along with their supporting ecosystem for Continuous Delivery. The Go Mobile project demonstrates how Go provides a differentiating platform for organizations looking to continuously deliver value into the mobile space.