QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Presentation: "Accelerating Agile: hyper-performing without the hype"

Track: Agile in Actuality: Stories from the Front Line / Time: Thursday 14:30 - 15:20 / Location: Whittle Room

The fastest teams I've ever worked with have been agile. Not big-A, all-about-the-TDD, automate-everything, methodology-over-thinking Agile, but quietly-getting-on-with-business, delivering-the-goods, making-the-trade-offs agile. Think agile manifesto over agile methodology. It turns out the things I thought were great agile practices, while useful in certain circumstances, are by no means the whole story. Kaizen, or continuous improvement, must be coupled with kaikaku, or abrupt change, in order to avoid getting stuck in the local maximum of 1990s Agile methods. This talk is about how really high-performing teams work. Not just one or two flukes but enough that there might be something to it. The patterns and ideas in this talk are genuine experiences from active practitioners. This is agile in actuality. Agile is an attitude, not a rulebook.

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Dan North, Agile Troublemaker & Inventor of BDD

Dan North

Biography: Dan North

Dan North is a technology and organisational consultant helping CIOs, business and software teams to deliver quickly and successfully. He believes in putting people first and finding simple, pragmatic solutions to business and technical problems, often using lean and agile techniques. He finds most technology problems are really about communication and feedback, which explains his interest in organisational design, systems thinking and how people learn. He has been coding, consulting and coaching for over 20 years, and he occasionally blogs at dannorth.net.

Twitter: @tastapod