Gojko Adzic

After an extensive research of how teams in different contexts implement specification by example, behaviour driven development and agile acceptance testing implementations for his new book, Gojko Adzic presents great war stories that will inspire you to improve your software development process. Learn why and how teams all over the world succeed in bridging the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams and how they got users, developers and testers to collaborate in defining great requirements and tests to produce software fit for purpose. Gojko will also present a summary of the most important success patterns for different contexts and talk about how to solve most common implementation issues.

A panel debate moderated by Emily Bache. Audience members are invited to submit questions to our panel of debaters. Each panel member has written a short position statement outlining their opinions (see below). We anticipate lively discussion.

Gojko Adzic
Most IT certification programmes are just pyramid scams. They are designed to sell training and not to provide either the certified people or the companies hiring them any assurance of competence. Mass certification that is easy to get loses any value very quickly and ends up producing exactly the opposite effect for the certified people after a while - instead of distinguishing themselves they become just one drop in the sea of incompetence.

Arne Åhlander
To me Scrum is one way of several to manage product development. What possibly attracts me most in Scrum is the possibility to visualise and address problems and limitations. Because of this I have offered Scrum trainings for several years. The last two years Scrum certification trainings have been included in my offering. In doing this I have noted that the certification trainings attract substantially more participants than the non-certification trainings.  For good and for worse.

I believe the good parts out weigh the bad parts and my experience is that participants of my training classes bring with them a wish and desire to improve the possibilities to develop better products when they get back home.

Tiberu Covaci
After coming second out of over 400 applicants at two different job interviews, just because I wasn’t certified, I decided to take that step, in spite the “paper certification” general feeling. By doing that I discovered that a certification is not about the paper, but about the journey, and a lot of doors opened to me after that.

Effect Mapping is a technique for high level project visualization. It provides an excellent level of visibility to stakeholders and helps drive software projects towards delivering the right product with a high level of quality. Effect Mapping also facilitates the application of several techniques of agile planning, product design, prioritisation and scoping. In practice, I've found the combination of these techniques by far the most powerful way of iterative product management. Gojko Adzic presents Effect Mapping with several examples and discuss how it can help teams avoid some typical problems with user stories for long term planning.