Fear of decision making often leads teams to exhibit one or more of the dysfunctional symptoms of Agile ADHD. This tutorial will help agile practitioners overcome the fear of decision making by first embracing that there are no right or wrong decisions. Agile development is ultimately driven by a series of decisions, all of which are made in the face of uncertainty. Tutorial participants will take away principles and practices that enable their team to embrace uncertainty and be proactive in making better decisions at the most responsible moment.

It is human nature to avoid loss. We make rational decisions to improve our situation and respond to circumstances. But are we always rational? Whether it be the tendency of people to hold stocks that have lost value or teams that continue a death march, this irrational fear of acknowledging a loss can cause people to keep investing in a poor undertaking. This discussion is a brief exploration of how our desire to avoid loss can cause us to irrationally make our situation worse in the hopes of somehow breaking even as well as some techniques to identify and avoid these situations.

This session will focus on the unique challenges companies face when using agile on projects that involve FDA governance: large company conservative culture, regulatory documentation, requirements tracing, and a bias towards waterfall development.

Skeptics argue that agile is best suited to small- and medium-sized companies and wrongly perceive agile as a limited, negating its use in the highly regulated corporate world.

In reality we will show you how we’ve successfully implemented agile in large sized companies operating in a highly regulated world.

Traditional thinking holds that the more critical the application, the more tightly its development must be planned, staged, and controlled.

Two industries that extensively deal with risk are Investment Banking and Oil Exploration. As seasoned veterans involved in developing software in these industries, Chris and Todd will introduce a number of theories, tools and practices surrounding risk and risk management. They will share their practical experience using these techniques and approaches, explaining what works and what does not based on their experience and that of their colleagues.

Bob Scoble Esq. and Ted “Theodore” Logan are about to embark on a new technology start-up venture when a mystical figure with a fondness for beagles and the Galapagos Islands appears before them, promising great prospects for their new business if they first agree to accompany him on a unique adventure. They accept. Spotting a theme common across the many amazing conversations they have subsequently, Bob and Ted decide to follow the XP principle of doing extreme amounts of the practices that work: they implement the world’s first completely Darwinian complex systems risk management program.

For almost a decade our community has claimed that agile is a risk-driven approach. Yet there is very little published material on agile risk management. Traditional risk management is based on avoidance of external variations. While, traditional project scheduling treats tasks homogeneously from a risk perspective. Lean pull systems and Real Options Theory provide new means to manage overall business risk in technology projects. This tutorial describes 3 techniques that evolved in the kanban community that increase sophistication of risk management and provide improved business agility.