Agile Brazil 2011 - End of June, 2011 in Fortaleza - CE

Invited speakers

  • Jim Highsmith

    Jim Highsmith is an executive consultant with ThoughtWorks, Inc., having spent 30-plus years’ as an IT manager, product manager, project manager, consultant, and software developer.

    Jim is the author of Agile Project Management: Creating Innovative Products, Addison Wesley 2004; Adaptive Software Development: A Collaborative Approach to Managing Complex Systems, Dorset House 2000 and winner of the prestigious Jolt Award, and Agile Software Development Ecosystems, Addison Wesley 2002. Jim is the recipient of the 2005 international Stevens Award for outstanding contributions to systems development.

    Jim is a coauthor of the Agile Manifesto, a founding member of The AgileAlliance, coauthor of the Declaration Interdependence for project leaders, and cofounder and first president of the Agile Project Leadership Network. Jim has consulted with IT and product development organizations and software companies in the U.S., Europe, Canada, South Africa, Australia, Japan, India, and New Zealand.

    Adaptive Leadership: Accelerating Organizational Agility

    "Eight in ten CEOs expect their environment to grow significantly more complex, and fewer than half believe they know how to deal with it successfully," says a recent IBM study. A research study done by MIT Sloan School of management reports that agile organizations generate 30% higher earnings per share. The complexity problem and the agility solution are enterprise issues that go beyond agile software development to organizational agility.

    In some circles agile executives and leaders are admonished to buy pizza and get out of the way, while in others they are merely asked to support self-organizing teams. But leading agile organizations requires more. Adaptive leadership requires understanding strategic agility from a business perspective and how practices like continuous delivery and a mindset of sustainable agility combine to create highly responsive IT organizations who can make significant contributions to organizational agility.

    Adaptive leadership is two dimensional: Being Agile and Doing Agile. This presentation will explore those activities that an agile leader or executive must “do,” starting with four key levers for change: “Do Less,” “Speed-to-Value,” “Quality,” and “Engage/Inspire.” Next the focus will be on how to “Be” agile—by being adaptive, being riders of paradox, embracing exploring, and adopting a facilitative leadership style. This session will explore how Adaptive leadership is critical to revolutionizing IT organizations.

    Other aspects of adaptive leadership covered will include:

    • Creating an agile performance management system
    • Aligning agile transformation efforts to business strategy
    • Helping teams understand and deliver on business, product, and project objectives
    • Determining operational, portfolio, and strategic agility strategies
    • Facilitating a decentralized, empowered, collaborative workplace
    • Fostering adaptable IT, product line, and product architectures
    • Creating an agile proficiency evaluation framework
    • Creating proactive and reactive organizational adaptation processes
    • Creating guidelines, training; and support for agile delivery

  • Joshua Kerievsky

    Joshua Kerievsky is an entrepreneur, author, programmer and globally recognized expert in Extreme Programming and Lean Development. He is passionate about excellent software and discovering better/faster ways to produce it.

    His company, Industrial Logic, is often described as a "group of agile rock stars" who have spent the last decade steadily improving their own agility and helping others grow from beginners to advanced agile practitioners. Joshua and his colleagues begin engagements with assessments that help groups understand current strengths and challenges, consider where they'd like to be tomorrow and map out strategies for getting there.

    Leading companies such as Google, GE, HP, Standard Life and ThoughtWorks rely on Industrial Logic's Agile eLearning and live workshops to help thousands of people around the world practice and learn valuable skills from Extreme Programming to Lean/Agile methods. Joshua and his colleagues are skilled coaches who provide a mix of technical, managerial and entrepreneurial wisdom in their work with executives, managers, customers, analysts, developers, testers, coaches-in-training and others. We judge our coaching engagements by whether we helped engender a culture of continuous improvement.

    Joshua's 2004 bestselling book, Refactoring to Patterns, won a Jolt Cola award and has been translated to 8 languages. Joshua lives with his wife and three children in Berkeley, California.

    Prioritizing Happiness

    All of us like to be happy, yet how many of us prioritize work based on happiness? Consider the people who buy, use, sell or make your product/service. Are you focused on making all of them happy?

    When I reflect on a large Agile eLearning deal my company did with our biggest client between 2009-2010, it’s clear that we over-prioritized the happiness of some individuals while under-prioritizing the happiness of others. The smaller deals we are now doing with this same client in 2011 reveal the importance of prioritizing happiness across the entire community of people involved with our product.

    Prioritizing happiness has helped us expand our focus and discover work that really matters. In this talk, I’ll describe how prioritizing happiness can have a profound impact on your process, your people and your bottom line.

  • Vinícius Teles

    Software developer and founder of Improve It, a company created in Rio de Janeiro in 2001. Currently he spends most of his time time caring for Be on the Net, the company's first commercial product. For a long time he worked as coach of XP teams in various organizations in Brazil. He would also give trainings and lectures on Extreme Programming. In 2004, he published a book about Extreme Programming which is the first and only written about XP in Brazil.

    2012: the year when the Earth stopped ended, because software broke

    Although it has long been known that the Earth will meet its end on 21/12/2012, few know what is the real reason. Contrary to popular belief, the end of the earth will not be caused by a comet, or changes to its axis of rotation, or for other various esoteric reasons. The Earth will end on the day of GBS, or on the "Great Blue Screen".

    For years mankind has sunk in bad software and accumulated technical debt. Slowly, gradually, continuously, and almost imperceptibly, the account has grown to become priceless. In this presentation, for the first time in history, humanity will have the chance to meet the real future that awaits them and will be well aware of the chaos in which they will sink as a result of their negligence in the way of doing software. And, for the last time, they will get the chance to put the Earth back on track and perhaps save it from the dreaded "Great Blue Screen" that awaits it.

    Naturally, this will be an unconventional presentation, which will make you reassess your priorities, giving you the chance to think better about what to do with the few months that will remain until the fateful arrival of the GBS.