Learning should be fun too! Open space is back!
Agile Day Riga 2017
It's time to set a new event in your calendars again. We will be glad if you join us on July 7-8, 2017. Let's use these days for peer-to-peer learning, collaboration and creativity. We invite you to join and share your insights and feelings, discuss the questions you care about.
This year we are going to explore different ways how to scale Agile and how to transform your organization in order to achieve it. Let's learn together!
Agile Day Riga 2017 for the first time is two days conference. The first day will be as usual - speakers from many countries will share there knowledge and experience in several tracks. Coaching Clinic will continue and we may have some workshop on the second day. Also the grand Open Space will take place on the second day! We cannot be 100% sure, but probably this is the first Open Space experience in Latvia, so please join and become part of it!
What is Agile Day Riga?
Goal of this conference is to provide a clear explanation why Agile and Lean software development approaches became so important nowadays, show how these approaches help to solve problems and facilitate discussions and experience exchange between Agile practitioners and newcomers.
What is Open Space?
It is agendaless event where people come together, create agenda under specific theme, and then learn from each other in small groups. Items in agenda can be anything: problems, situations, experiences, approaches, lectures, etc. related to the specific theme. Please take a read and watch couple of videos below to get you into the mood and ‘be prepared to be surprised’ on July 8!
You can find more details about Open Space format here. Also you can take a look at video #1 and video #2 to see it happening.
What is Scrum Alliance User Group?
Training and certification is the initial step on your journey, but joining a user group is just as important. User groups help you stay current on best practices, share experiences and knowledge. You can also earn Category A or D SEUs toward your CSP certification through events organized by User Groups.
What is Agile Latvia?
Agile Latvia is a community with a goal to spread information about Agile practices amongst Latvian software development professionals and industry newcomers. Scrum Alliance User Groups number in the hundreds and are located around the world. Agile Latvia is the one near you and we are happy to help you!
Platinum Sponsors
At Evolution Gaming, we are the leading provider of award-winning online live casino. We are seeking new colleagues to join our growing team of 300 bright and talented engineers working in Riga, Tallinn and Amsterdam. We strongly believe in functional programming on the Scala platform and agile development, using technologies such as Akka (including Persistence, Streams & HTTP), Slick and Scala.js. We also enjoy using React, Redux and TypeScript and value pragmatic developers who undertake constructive code-reviews. If you are interested in talking to us about this, visit our booth!
Gold Sponsors
Accenture is a leading global professional services company, providing a broad range of services and solutions in strategy, consulting, digital, technology and operations. With approximately 401,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries, Accenture drives innovation to improve the way the world works and lives. Accenture Latvia was founded in 2002. Last November, the company welcomed its 1000.employee.Visit us at www.accenture.lv.
Europe’s largest online and mobile consumer lending group. We get money to people when they need it – quickly, conveniently and responsibly. We use cutting edge technology and data to offer convenient loans to customers across 17 countries. Since we were established in 2008, we have provided more than 11,500,000 Single Payment, Line of Credit and Instalment Loans totalling over EUR 4.0 billion. 4finance is a responsible lender. We do not believe in burdening people, in hard selling, or in hidden charges and penalties. We are upfront and transparent about the loans we offer. We are a consumer finance group for today’s fast-moving world, a proven alternative to conventional bank lending. And we are growing fast.
Silver Sponsors
Become part of something bigger than you alone. Founded in 2001, Scrum Alliance® is the largest, most established and influential professional membership and certification organization in the Agile community. Scrum Alliance® is a nonprofit association, having certified more than 450,000 individuals worldwide. Its vision is to 'Transform the World of Work' with a mission to guide and inspire individuals, leaders, and organizations with practices, principles, and values that create workplaces that are joyful, prosperous, and sustainable. Come sprint with us at www.ScrumAlliance.org.
Tieto aims to capture the significant opportunities of the data-driven world and turn them into lifelong value for people, business and society. Having a strong role in the ecosystems, we use our software and services capabilities to create tools and services that simplify everyday life of millions of people; to help our customers renew their businesses by capturing the opportunities of modernization, digitalization and innovation and to foster new opportunities based on openness, co-innovation and ecosystems. Visit us at www.tieto.com or www.tieto.lv
We bring industry insights, the ability to execute on a global basis and a keen eye for our clients’ bottom line that makes us an ideal and trusted partner for responding to business and technology change. Our services focus on customer centricity, data analytics, core systems transformation and the application of innovative and disruptive technologies. Our solutions deliver top-line growth, competitive advantage, margin improvement and reduced complexity.
Info Sponsors
Schedule
Day 1
Nexus: How We Do Scrum with 150+ People
Artem Kolyshkin and Konstantin Razumovsky
11:00 - 16:00; Coaching Corner - The Coaching Clinic
Vladimir Ivanov
Day 2
11:00 - 13:00; 2nd floor - Workshop: Large-Scale Scrum simulation with LEGO!
Alexey Krivitsky 11:00 - 16:00; 2nd floor - The Coaching Clinic
Vladimir Ivanov
Detailed schedule
Day 1
Learning Through Osmosis (10:00 - 11:00; Daugava 1+2)
Many different roles contribute to building software: product owners, business specialists. testers. Yet knowledge of programming keeps these roles at a distance. In this talk, I will share how I have come to programming: not through wanting to program and taking courses on it, but through working with programmers in a style called mob programming. This talk serves as an inspiration for programmers to invite non-programmers to learning code a layer at a time, immersed in the experience of creating software together to transform the ability to deliver. Lessons specific to skillsets rub in both ways, leaving everyone better off after the experience. In this talk, you will learn: What is mob programming and why you should care about working in that style? How to use strong-style pairing as a means of connecting everyone regardless of their programming skill level? What contributions non-programmers make in a mob before they learn to program? How I became a programmer through working in mobs at work and at community meetups over learning by studying programming?
Maaret Pyhäjärvi
Maaret Pyhäjärvi is a software specialist with emphasis on testing. She works with a 10-person software development team at Granlund Oy as the testing specialist. On the side, she delivers hands-on testing trainings and consults on testing through Altom Consulting Oy. In addition to being an exploratory tester extraordinaire who teaches testing effectively in a mob testing format, she is an international conference speaker and an experienced organizer, facilitator and volunteer with various non-profit communities (Agile Finland, Software Testing Finland, Learn with Llew, Speak Easy, European Testing Conference) and book author, blogger and tweeter.
Leadership, Complexity, LeSS (11:15 - 12:00; Daugava 1)
This session focuses on common root causes that create unintended and unseen complexity in organizations. This complexity is disguised in the form of good management practices, and good intentions and local optimizations. We use one case to describe the rise of complexity and the death of a company Nokia Mobile Phones. Then we show that this pattern can be generalized to any growing company that does not pay attention how to grow. Next, we take a look at Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) framework and how it avoids building complexity in an organization by being minimalistic and starting the change by real change instead of change theater. Then we look at forces in LeSS that create ownership of change in the organization. We use real life case examples to describe how this is achieved and what key leadership actions are needed to happen, so the change is sustainable. Learning objectives: Insight how LeSS and new leadership thinking is used to simplify the organization.
Ran Nyman
Ran Nyman is an experienced software professional who has worked since 1995 in professional software development field. First programs he wrote in CP/M operating system using BASIC language in the middle of eighties. Since then he moved to more modern languages like C, C++, and Java. Ran has extensive experience in design patterns, UML, distributed systems, Test Driven Development and Specification by Example, Executable Requirements (also know as Acceptance Test Driven Development). Currently, Ran is working as a consultant and trainer helping large multinational organizations to move from sequential product development to more agile ways of working. The primary focus has been on how to move big products (over 100 people) to use Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS) and Lean. This work includes giving wide range of trainings, workshops, team coaching and management consulting.
Creating Products and Services of Next Generation (11:15 - 12:00; Daugava 2)
Alexey will speak about the Industry 4.0, digital transformation and other factors, that shapes business all over the world with focus on how to build team around understanding of value, that business creates for their customers.
Alexey Eremin
Managing partner in Rocketmind, expert network that specialize in business-modeling, strategy consulting, user experience and digital communication solutions for leading Russian banks, corporations and government, including the Ministry of Communications, Rostelecom, Vimpelcom, AeroExpress, Alfa Bank, Skolkovo, Sberbank, Amedia and others.
Me and My Deadly Agile Sins (11:15 - 12:00; Casino)
Over the course of past years I have gotten into trouble with my co-workers and I would like to share this with others in hope that perhaps some of these you have not yet made. The focus will be on 3 habits: MissDoesALot, MissKnowsALot, MissFearsALot. I will list the negative downsides, how to identify and some steps to take to improve from there. My personal conclusion is that I was not as helpful to my teams as I have hoped. It’s amazing how sometimes one gets blinded by the good intentions that also contributes to growth of own ignorance and blindness. Luckily it is not all that grim and I have a list of 10 golden rules I’d love to share. These lessons were learned while volunteering at different conventions and conferences. Cheers!
Guna Petrova
I like to test, volunteer and give hugs. I have also been described as 'Question Assurance'. The testing world is like great ocean of knowledge. To keep your ship afloat one needs to experiment and adapt to the waves coming your way.
Nexus: How We Do Scrum with 150+ People (12:00 - 13:00; Daugava 1)
Nexus is a framework for scaled Scrum developed by Scrum co-creator Ken Schwaber and Scrum.org community. It addresses the most painful problems of scaled development – dealing with dependencies and building 'Done' integrated software every iteration. In our short talk, we are going to explain the key concepts of Nexus and illustrate them with our own case study where 150+ people successfully do Scrum to build software for a big North American retail company using Nexus.
Artem Kolyshkin
Artem Kolyshkin is a Senior Delivery Manager at EPAM with wide experience of product and project delivery. Currently implementing the Nexus framework on a project with 150 + people.
Konstantin Razumovsky
Konstantin Razumovsky is an Agile Coach and Professional Scrum Trainer by Scrum.org. He has an extensive hands-on experience as a Java Developer, Scrum Master, and Project Manager.
How Scrum Can Help Me to Save Money on the Long Term? (12:00 - 13:00; Daugava 2)
It was almost midnight when I heard my phone ringing. For my clients from the other part of the Globe it was middle of the day. And not a particular good one. Nothing was working for them because of a bug. What bug? Well, a bug which appeared when they tried to use the application with their new file format. Apparently this blocked their entire system. Damn (!!!) (sigh), not much to do at this hour, I thought, let’s wait for the morning to come to have the chance to talk with the development team, hoping that we will still meet our SLAs. Morning came and I called the technical guys. What ?? Only Alex can solve the problem and he is on holiday?? And he is coming back in two weeks??… As you can imagine, there was no happy end. And the company had to pay a lot of money for not respecting our SLAs. Does the story above sound familiar to you? Unfortunately, I am sure that many of you know what I am talking about. In this presentation we will discuss how to measure the cost of owning a software application and how to decrease this cost as much as possible. For measuring how much a software application costs, instead of considering only the purchase price of an object, the complete cost from purchase to disposal have to be summed up. This calculation is called Total Cost of Ownership, abbreviated TCO, and is designed to help in financial decisions by giving a picture of the profitability over time.
Raluca Bejan
I am an awesome speaker :)! Besides this, I have more than 10 years experience in Agile and Scrum in various software engineers projects. Besides this, I really believe in Scrum and because of this I am very involved in making people believe and understand what I am presenting.
DevOps at Scale Applied in Bunnyworld (12:00 - 13:00; Casino)
DevOps at Scale as a problem to solve is becoming more relevant every day. Although there isn’t that much of information how to do it on real multi-project. When I try to address it, techy geeks get into techy rumble and forget what was the question about. This talk abstracts from technology and focuses purely on cultural and organizational topics in a fun way. 'So… meet delivery lead John. He got a brilliant idea - how basically from nothing to make the cutest bunny in the world.'
Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis
I’ve been DevOps in some way since I was 12. Now it’s been almost 20 years applying its philosophy at everything I do.
Agnostic Agile (14:00 - 14:45; Daugava 1)
Being agile is all about embracing change. Therefore, the notion of agility should apply to the process itself. If it is not changing over time, chances are, you are not being agile. In today’s dynamic business environment, we should be careful with “one-size-fits-all” frameworks and rather tailor the process to people and context. In this talk, we will focus on the mind-set, principles and values required to become Agnostic Agile.
Toms Rusovs
Product builder devoted to Agile principles. Working for Accenture as Scrum Master and Product Ownership Evangelist. With a product development and brand management background, he focuses on empowering self-organized teams to understand and create true value for their customers.
Stefano La Porta
Stefano La Porta is working as Agile Coach for Accenture Latvia. A globetrotter (before moving to Riga, he worked in Italy, Brazil and Romania), he firmly believes that rather than molding people to a set of common processes and practices, processes and practices should be molded to the team itself. As Agile Coach, his main goal is not to follow a process “by the book” – it is to help self-organizing teams to deliver high-quality working software as frequently as possible.
Lessons from Silicon Valley (14:00 - 14:45; Daugava 2)
The Silicon Valley and San Francisco are the birthplace to some of the most valuable companies in the world. Many of these companies started in a garage (Apple Computer) or in a dorm room (Facebook). The nimble, lean approach to collaboration is the key ingredient. Let’s examine some of the most successful companies in the Silicon Valley and how we can apply lessons learned there to other organizations around the world.
Jason Covington
Jason Covington grew up in Cupertino, California, in the heart of the Silicon Valley. His father was one of the first Apple Computer employees, and out of that culture of innovation and entrepreneurship, Jason saw small collaborative teams take iterative approaches to technology such as the first mobile and wireless devices and the Blackberry. Jason lives in South San Francisco and is an agile transformation leader and coach. He has led transformations at American Express, General Electric, Cisco, and many others.
Code Smells - Developing Design Sense for your Code (14:00 - 14:45; Casino)
'In order to make delicious food,you must eat delicious food…. you need to develop a palate capable of discerning good and bad. Without good taste, you can't make good food.' - Jiro Ono (World’s Best Sushi Chef). The same is true for great code. If we want to make great code we need a refined palate for what great code looks like. We need to look at code and develop a sense for it’s properties and smells. Sadly this is rarely ever done. Programmers are expected to just 'know' what is good and what is bad with ever getting a chance to develop and curate an aesthetic sense. Worse, code is rarely looked at unless it is causing us problems so we are expected to be gourmets while spending our time eating at McDonalds. Come work on your sense of code. We will look at many snippets to compare and contrast different aspects of what good code is. Learning Outcomes: How to identify and correct, Clutter, Long lines, Long Methods, Bad Names, Duplication, Inconsistency.
Llewellyn Falco
Llewellyn Falco is an Agile Technical Coach specializing in Legacy Code and Test Driven Development. He is the creator of the open source testing tool ApprovalTests (www.approvaltests.com), co-founder of TeachingKidsProgram (www.teachingkidsprogramming.org) and a PluralSight author.
Learnings from Agile Transition Journey (15:00 - 15:45; Daugava 1)
Extensive product with biannual releases. Numerous customers worldwide with customised solutions including specific business and regional market requirements. More than 100 developers and 20+ years of continues product development… is a successful transition to Agile methodology possible in few months in such circumstances? Find out more about Tieto’s Learnings from Agile Transition Journey. What were we afraid of and what should we really be afraid of. What matters more: people, emotions and soft skills or practices, techniques and methodologies?
Romans Korsaks
Romans Korsaks is Product Ownership unit Manager at Tieto. A professional experienced leader with deep knowledge of software product development, customer service and IT. Certified LeSS Practitioner, CSPO and CSM.
Leadership Begins with Responsibility (15:00 - 15:45; Daugava 2)
Are you stuck or facing problems in life? Would you like to learn to lead yourself and others better? Are you wondering how to get your sub-ordinates to take more responsibility? Would you like to live a life of freedom? Then join this talk, and learn about Christopher Avery's Responsibility Process. It is a psychological process, that explains how we all naturally react to problems, and how our brains create obstacles for us in taking responsibility. Understanding and practicing Responsibility may help in: Leading yourself and others, Building teams, Understanding organizations, Breaking through problems, Understanding behaviours such as blaming and shaming, Living a life of freedom, power, and choice
Ari Tanninen
Ari Tanninen is a humane engineer, a product developer, and a trainer at JCI Finland. Early in his career Ari's plan was to save the planet with perfect software and Agile methods. Then after bumping his head on organizations he graduated to advocating lean and systems thinking. In later years, he has moved on user-centered design, and to human beings. It turns out, that free, motivated and empowered human beings are the core of everything. Which brings us to The Responsibility Process, which Ari has practised for 2,5 years.
Remote Team Facilitation and Scaled Scrum: How to Make It Work! (15:00 - 15:45; Casino)
Near-, and off-shoring introduces complexity in scrum teams. When we scale scrum, this complexity is amplified and drastically reduces meeting efficiency. Is there a silver bullet to make remote teams high-performant in a (scaled) scrum environment? When facilitating agile workshops, you probably experienced the difficulties of keeping the remote participants involved. And maybe you also know how hard it is to facilitate a highly interactive session with more than 50 people? Or how much harder it gets when 10 of them are connected remotely? I learned time after time participants feel left out, not listened to or find it impossible to follow discussions. Your sessions, intended to boost productivity, demotivate your remote teams. Join this talk if you are a facilitator working with one or more near-shore teams. I will share my day-to-day experiences and insights that will help you to involve your remote teams.
Roland Flemm
My technical background in development and infrastructure spans a period of more than 20 years, but more relevant are the 7 years I am working as a scrum master and agile coach. I worked on numerous projects in various international companies, mainly in the banking industry. All of the projects I contributed to, near/and offshoring was involved. Currently I am working as an independent consultant in the role of Agile coach for the CX-tribe of Backbase R&D (Amsterdam). Backbase has 3 near-shore teams in Kiev at Levi-9. I have build up a reputation for a “non-compromise Agility” approach. I was very fortunate to work closely in projects with renowned Dutch agilists like Cesario Ramos and Adrie Dolman.
Agile Organization - Organization 3.0 (16:00 - 17:00; Daugava 1+2)
The rules of work are changing. Organization 3.0 reflects Agility, an understanding of tribal leadership models, and a recognition that new rules are needed to navigate new organizations that are changing the world today. Teamwork, collaboration, and positive relationships are what matter. If you cannot adopt the new standards, you will be left behind. Previous organizational structures and processes also reflected their times. Organization 1.0, showed the mentality of industrialism, with stable hierarchies and rule following the norm. Organization 2.0 rewarded specialization, processes, and structure over teams and groups. The 'me first' workplace served the lucky few, but is now being replaced by a new generation, with a more thoughtful organization of our lives and work.
Zuzana Šochová
Zuzana 'Zuzi' Šochová is an independent Agile coach and trainer and a Certified Scrum Trainer with more than fifteen years of experience in the IT industry. She started with Agile and Scrum back in 2005, when she was implementing Agile methods in the USA. From that time, she has been credited with Agile transformation and implementation for many companies and teams around the world. As a Certified Scrum Trainer (CST) with Scrum Alliance, Zuzi has trained thousands of ScrumMasters and Product Owners. By creating and sustaining Agile leadership, Zuzi believes the worlds of work and life can be made happier and more successful. She is an author of The Great Scrum Master: #ScrumMasterWay book (Addison-Wesley Signature Series (Cohn)). She is a member of the Board of Directors of Scrum Alliance. She is a founder of the Agile Association (Agilni Asociace, agilniasociace.cz) Czech Republic, organizing the Agile Czech community and annual Agile Prague Conference (agileprague.com). She is a regular speaker at international conferences. The talk is based on concepts described in my new book The Great ScrumMaster.
The Coaching Clinic (11:00 - 16:00; Coaching Corner)
Coaches’ Clinics are a unique and free service designed to help you with specific challenges you’ve encountered on your way to a more Agile way of working. Organized by Agiletransformer.com training and coaching community, these short coaching sessions are available during our event that our coaches and trainers attend to support the Agile Latvia community. Based on their individual needs, participants are matched with volunteer coaches, to discuss technical practices, organizational change, Scrum, Kanban, Agile Coaching as a career, and topics such as breaking down development silos to coordinating multiple teams and educating upper management for enhanced agility.
Vladimir Ivanov
Vladimirs Ivanovs (40), have realised that I am the 'fox' and as philosopher Isaiah Berlin puts it 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. Since then I’ve started to form teams with the 'hedgehog focus'. agiletransofrmer.com is a perfect hedgehog, as is formed by the practitioners for the practitioners around one big thing – Agile (closely connected to Lean and Kanban). I love exploring cross-cultural differences and travel, so I do that in a form of 'workations' – public speaking on conferences + site seeing. Events are not only Agile related (also IPMA, PMI, itSMF, IT) in the following countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, India.
Day 2
Open Space (10:00 - 16:15; 2nd floor)
What is Open Space? It is agendaless event where people come together, create agenda under specific theme, and then learn from each other in small groups. Items in agenda can be anything: problems, situations, experiences, approaches, lectures, etc. related to the specific theme.
Workshop: Large-Scale Scrum simulation with LEGO! (11:00 - 13:00; 2nd floor)
Since invented in 2009 lego4scrum has become a very popular simulation to teach Scrum. Nowadays how to get several teams to scrum, seems, is no longer a secret. Though knowing how to make agile work in a large-scale multi-team environment is. So In 2016 I was able to scale lego4scrum to over 155 people (22 development teams) all building an overall product. This approach is described in a newly released book called (what a suprise!): 'lego4scrum'. This practical session we will simulated a large-scale environment with 10+ teams (we need your help - please come to this session!). What will we be doing: working closely with the market representatives to know their needs, achieving shared understanding of a product with 10+ teams working together, setting up a suitable (flat) organizational structure capable of delivering, putting a lightweight process on top that is barely enough but enables self-management, building a working product that satisfies the market needs. Great helpers here are understanding complexity and system thinking, knowing how Scrum really works on the team-level, and few core ideas from LeSS framework, such as: an overall product backlog, a single Product Owner, joint team meetings.
Alexey Krivitsky
Agile Coach and Certified Scrum Trainer at www.agiletrainings.eu ,the author of the mini-book Agile Retrospective Kickstarter and a hands-on Lean-Agile practitioner with the first Scrum experiment dated back to 2003-2005. Alexey kicked off the AgileUkraine community in 2007, co-produced dozens of Agile events, including the sounding Agile Eastern Europe Conferences. Also he is inventor of a simulation #lego4scrum and creator of a coaching tool Agile Coaching Canvas.
The Coaching Clinic (11:00 - 16:00; 2nd floor)
Coaches’ Clinics are a unique and free service designed to help you with specific challenges you’ve encountered on your way to a more Agile way of working. Organized by Agiletransformer.com training and coaching community, these short coaching sessions are available during our event that our coaches and trainers attend to support the Agile Latvia community. Based on their individual needs, participants are matched with volunteer coaches, to discuss technical practices, organizational change, Scrum, Kanban, Agile Coaching as a career, and topics such as breaking down development silos to coordinating multiple teams and educating upper management for enhanced agility.
Vladimir Ivanov
Vladimirs Ivanovs (40), have realised that I am the 'fox' and as philosopher Isaiah Berlin puts it 'the fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing'. Since then I’ve started to form teams with the 'hedgehog focus'. agiletransofrmer.com is a perfect hedgehog, as is formed by the practitioners for the practitioners around one big thing – Agile (closely connected to Lean and Kanban). I love exploring cross-cultural differences and travel, so I do that in a form of 'workations' – public speaking on conferences + site seeing. Events are not only Agile related (also IPMA, PMI, itSMF, IT) in the following countries: Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Sweden, UK, Germany, Netherlands, Croatia, Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, Kazakhstan, India.