Projects with high uncertainty are likely to fail. In tough times, big projects that fail are likely to take a lot of jobs with them.

This raises an interesting question: How can you succeed (and keep your job) when collisions with reality completely destroy your schedule?

We'll look at how uncertainty impacts Return-on-Investment decisions. We will describe how to structure projects to deliver value when uncertainty is high, by using an agile strategy for project management. We will examine two very different projects that try to produce the same results, and see which is more robust when things go wrong. Finally, we will capture lessons learned from the experience.

The one-hour presentation will be followed by discussion. Participants in the audience should be able to contribute a lot of practical experience in this area, and provide a lively discussion.

Summary: So you have a large project code base that you keep changing, with a team of members with mixed skills. You need to ensure that the code you write, including the tests, is of high enough quality so that two moths from now you can still read them, understand what they do, understand why they do that, and change them. At the same time, you want to give others the time and tools to adjust to test infected development and hopefully eventually test-driven development.

Does the above sound challenging enough? That is what we are trying to do at Guidewire through the releases. I would like to share three things with others who are facing the similar situation: design of the JUnit extension, continuous integration tool, and the branching strategy.

Format and duration: I would like to keep it short. So I'll go over one topic for no more than half an hour and start the conversation. I think with the three items it will run over time so we should keep a cap at two hours.

Brainstorm: How to introduce agile practices into a silo-ed client.

Small meeting among agile project managers and pragmatic programmers to figure out ways to incrementally add agile practices.

This workshop engages participants in exercises that promote the crafting of personas that represent real users. Participants will collaborate to identify useful personas, to gather the relevant data for them, and to write descriptions that are meaningful to product owners, designers and developers. Discover how to incorporate personas into your user stories, and to use the personas you create to help steer your development process.

Self-organizing teams are 10,000% more effective, make people happy, and will save the world! At least that's what some Agile and Lean advocates seem to suggest. Teams will form, solve problems, optimize systems, and learn-by-doing. The lessons in this unscripted learning lab will come out of your experience, not from a PowerPoint slide. Worry not! We promise there will be no "trust falls", ropes course, or singing.

Integrating Waterfall with Agile. How to make it work. How to deal with the merge and clash.

Try to get one or more individuals with Kanban experience to present the theory and relate real world experiences, and discuss/debate its merits, including equal time for any community members who criticize departure from standard Scrum (sometimes referred to as "doing Scrum but...").

Agile development teams need to be able to provide estimates for sets of User Stories in reasonable amounts of time. The Team Estimation Game offers an interactive way for teams to quickly estimate user stories using relative story complexity, without numbers. (This ain't Planning Poker!)

In this experiential learning lab we're going to launch a fictitious aerospace company, build and ship product, and track our financials to see how we are doing. We will apply the "Five Focusing Steps" from the Theory of Constraints, as well as other lean and agile practices to evolve and improve our operation and ultimately our profitability.