It’s an exciting time to be agile! For the first time, our industry has found a real, sustainable way to solve problems that generations of software development teams have been struggling with. Agile is popular because many teams that have “gone agile” report great results: they build better software, work together better, satisfy their users, and do it all while having a much more relaxed and enjoyable working environment.

But while some teams have made great progress, the reality of agile is different for many other teams that have not had as much success with it. The majority of companies that build software have experimented with agile, and while many of them have found success, there are many teams who have gotten less-than-stellar results. They’ve achieved some improvement in how they run their projects—enough to make the effort to adopt agile worth it—but they haven’t seen the substantial changes that they feel agile promised them.

The goal of this full-day course is to explore agile from both many perspectives: what makes Scrum and other agile methodologies "tick", and how a deeper understanding of agile can improve your project results in the real world.

This class includes a "deep dive" into Scrum, the most common agile methodology in practice on real-world teams. One goal of the class is to help you “get Scrum” by building on its practices and patterns, and through those practices understand the value system of Scrum, and the ideas behind the principles of collective commitment and self-organization.