User stories were supposed to help us get away from thick requirement documents. Instead, we’re up to our necks with complex Jira descriptions, conflicting mock UI screens and thousands of little bits of edge cases we need to hunt down from Slack and email, in order to get the user story “done”.

What the hell happened?

Let’s get back to basics. We’ll talk about what makes user stories effective, how we can understand and write them better, so we’ll get the most of them, while not wasting our time. We’ll talk techniques, pitfalls and what happens when "the user" is another cloud computer. Maybe we should talk about this too:

“As an agile practitioners, I want to build something valuable for the user, so he can get his job done.”

Ugh. I think we need a better format.

Messy code that works. It’s been working for 5 or 10 years, and we need to keep maintaining it. Add a feature here, solve a bug there. And every time we go into that code, we pray we don’t break anything.
What we would like to have is tests around this code, but alas our formers did not think about us and didn’t write any. We don’t know what the expected results are, and if there are any side effects. All we know is: “It’s working, don’t break anything!”

How do we get from ”working code” to code we can work in, safely and surely?

In this workshop, we’ll introduce a method to the madness. We’ll analyze the code for possible test cases. We’ll talk about characterization tests and write them to find out what the “expected” results are and update the tests.
We then take a step further, and in see how to prepare the code for to be more testable. We’ll talk about safe refactoring techniques. Use the Mikado method for creating a safe plan, mark the boundaries of the system we want to refactor, and use Approval Tools to refactor the code safely, and then write unit and integration tests that can help us move forward safely.

Legacy code takes such a toll on us. It’s time to take the reins back.

Congratulations! You’ve just inherited a legacy system to support!
It works, even in production. Mostly. And the code is crying out for some refactoring. And so are the few tests that are hard to read.

So how we do we go from legacy code that “works” without tests, to clean code that works with tests?
In this workshop, we’re going to learn how to do just that.

We’re going to start with Characterization Tests. These tests help us explore the current code, and understand what it does, its inter-dependencies and connection to other systems.
We’ll then use Approval Tests and see how we can use them to lock the behavior we explored, while we’re refactoring the code. Finally, we’re going to write tests for the refactored code, leaving it shiny and sparkly, and see how TDD fits into the process.

Time to conquer the spaghetti beast.

Takeaways
- How to use characterization tests for exploring a working system without tests
- Identify test cases and build a test plan from exploration
- How to use approval tests with characterization tests to lock down behavior
- Refactor for testability
- Use test-first approach (e.g. TDD) to existing and refactored code

In our Design Sprint Workshop we bring in all our experiences from projects with focus on Design Thinking, Agile Developments, UX Design and customer communication. We follow the Google Ventures framework for Design Sprints and make workshop participants fit for this approach. Of course we set up our own in-house projects the same way we teach it to our customers - from understanding the current situation to a promising idea and testing a finished prototype with real customers. This enables us to achieve rapid, repeatable innovation cycles and make companies fit for their future and today's fast-moving markets.

The course teaches the entire sprint process. With the help of a real practical example we take you step by step through the individual sprint stages and let you feel how good and at the same time how challenging Design Sprints feels. After the course you will have an understanding of how a Design Sprint works, when it is applicable and what upfront preparation is necessary. Moreover we quip you with additional information on how to run your first Design Sprint and how to refine your facilitator techniques constantly.

Retrospectives can become tedious and boring after a while, u need to bring in some diversity in all kind of forms.
But it also handy that we know why we retrospect and are able to explain that to others so every one is on the same page.

In this training you will be tought about:
- Finding the perfect learning rate (getting out of the comfort zone)
- How to gather data, generate insight and decide what to do and act upon this new information gained during a retro
- Know how to Timebox
- How a coach can help to improve the team
- and much more....

The training is highly interactive, the attendees will be put to work !

The trainer is a very skilled and experienced agile coach and certified LeSS trainer. He will bring a lot of hands on experiences and examples.

All the basics you need to know to start as a scrum master.

Get to know:
What did we thought would work and actually know what works and all about being an agile minded organisation.

What is the agile manifesto
- get to know the values
- get to know the principles
- get to know the mindset

The origin of scrum, where did it come from ?
- what are the main idea's from scrum
- How does the framework look like
- All about the roles, ceremonies and artifacts

How do you work together with your product owner ?
How do you manage stakeholders ?
How do you protect the team and solve or handle impediments?
How do i get a good functioning team ?
How to product backlog managemnt ?
How to coach ?

Just some of the topics whe are going to experience, discuss, explain and share knowledge about.

The trainer is a very skilled and experienced agile coach, scrum master and LeSS trainer. He will bring a lot of hands on experiences and examples.

Just some questions:

Want to know how you can apply agile in your big and complex orginastion ?
Want to know what large-scale Agile is ?
Are you ready to hear the truth about Agile and Scrum ?
How we can simplify the unnecessarily big and complex organizational design and be agile rather than do Agile ?

Yes ?

Then join me for the webinar on Agile at Scale with LeSS and on the Scrum Master Role.

During this lecture we discuss the pitfalls of human centered design and how a non-human design approach is essential for a livable future.

During this workshop you get to know and discuss autonomous systems and design your own system in 2d or 3d.

Our lives are getting increasingly dependent on smart technology. Not just our personal devices, but also the supply line of our food, the logistics of our energy and so on. Machines are getting smarter and better than us humans in many ways. There is no doubt that we will soon share our society with autonomous machines. Recent fiction like Westworld, Ex Machina and Blade Runner, as well as the recent Saudi Arabian citizenship of Sophia have been showing us visions of a world where there will be autonomous machines looking just like us. However we believe that the actual autonomous machines will not look remotely like humans; in fact, there are already autonomous machines like trading algorithms working on the web, invisible to most of us. The question here is, what will autonomous machines be like? When do you call machines autonomous, when do they transcend simply being an algorithm or program? And following on from this, when will they deserve to be part of our society and how will they change it?

Are you struggling to get the teams to properly understand the requirements?
Do you often find that backlog items cannot be broken to smaller, sprintable, chunks?
Are you having hard time forecasting when work will get done?
In this 1 day workshop we will go through the role of the PO, covering:
* What is the PO role?
* How to create and communicate the product vision?
* Where to begin when a feature is a big unknown?
* What strategies to use when breaking features into smaller backlog items?
* Techniques for prioritizing
* Tracking progress and uncovering "smells"
* Raising the bar on teams' standards
Notes:
] Prerequisites: participants are expected to have experience as Scrum Product Owners and/or Scrum team members
] May be extended to a 2-day workshop
] Minimum 8 participants