Program Information for Agile 2022

If you’ve been to an Agile20XX event before, you know it’s an amazing conference where people from all over the world come together to discuss the latest in all things Agile ranging from technical to management topics and everything in between. To make it even better, we’ve changed up the conference quite a bit for 2022 and we’d like to give you an overview of some of the changes we’re making.

We’re here for the community!

Agile Alliance was founded by and thrives by virtue of its community. The Agile20XX annual conference has been the primary mechanism for bringing that community together year after year to expand and promote Agile values and principles, regardless of which Agile framework you follow (or maybe you don’t follow a framework at all).

Protecting the health and well-being of our community is of paramount importance to Agile Alliance. With COVID-19 being an ongoing concern, we are taking every practical step to make the conference safe for all participants–attendees, speakers, and staff will be required to follow health protocols so that we can enjoy being together safely.

NEW Simplified Conference Tracks

We’ve made some changes to the traditional track structure you may be used to. We’ve simplified from having 15-20 tracks down to three (listed below). We’ve made this change to simplify things; once the content has been confirmed, we will create “playlists” to group content by themes. For example, a playlist like “Leveling up your ScrumMaster skills” speaks more directly to an attendee’s individual learning needs than a generic track such as “Collaboration, Culture, and Teams”. We believe that deferring track definitions until the “last responsible moment” will help us improve the experience for speakers and attendees alike.

We hope this information is useful to you in understanding the changes we’re making with Agile2022. You can view the session schedule here.

We can’t wait to see you in July!

Energizing People and Teams

Jen Kreiger, Program Chair  |  Jenny Tarwater, Track Chair

Humans are an ever-changing species, and the events of the past two years are amazing evidence of the ability and the challenges in our evolution. We can likely agree that it has not been easy for anyone – in fact, it has been terrible in some ways. The lifelong habits we have been able to individually form for ourselves and our teams have been disrupted so thoroughly that we do not know how we are going to deal with anything new, chaotic, or ambiguous.

There is evidence that folks can successfully pivot in ways we would never have thought of – we would have said “that is not possible.” We want this track to demonstrate, educate and energize attendees at Agile 2022 that we have a unique opportunity for creative progress and problem solving for today’s world.

• How do we help people pivot to the new normal (habit building, it’s probably not about building change resilience, but a new form of resilience – what is that?)
• How do we help folks who attend this conference to build better relationships with their technical counterparts
• What is the language of developers and how to better communicate with them? (e.g. git workflows, async text-based working relationships, flow time and why it is important, and how you can help folks get it)
• Career Development (resume writing workshops, interviewing skills, etc)
• How do people learn in times of crisis?
• How do we accelerate the learning curve for folks who are new to Agile techniques?
• How do we meaningfully address burnout?
• Helping teams where they are today without comparing them to the lofty ideals that feel out of reach
• What do modern technical workflows look like and why should I know about them?
• How to help your teams make decisions, and get work done without meetings
• How do we support folks to ethically engineer (ethically coach, ethics in everything)
• What are the evolving practices for teams in hybrid office environments (all on-site, is it ok for some to be remote and some to be in the office)?

Like the world, we expect this description to evolve as we learn more about the things that are interesting to us and the community at large.

Accelerating Products

 Cat Swetel, Program Chair  |  Diane Zajac, Track Chair

On this track, we will explore Agile and Agile adjacent ways for designing, developing, and caring for great products. This track sits at the intersection of social and technical dimensions, and talks across that spectrum are very welcome.

Questions this track might answer:

How do we prioritize and sequence work? What metrics, if any, should we use to guide those decisions?
When is it right to decommission a product or service? How do we tackle that?
How do we care for products and services in production? Are our products maintainable over time?
How do we ensure the quality of products in production?
What can we do to understand how products and usage patterns evolve over time?
Are our products/models/services ethical in practice?
Are our products/services inclusive and accessible? What about the developer experience for creating those products?
What is the environmental impact of our products? How might we measure that?
What technology trends might enable innovation or sustainability?

Enriching Organizations

 Cheryl Hammond, Program Chair  |  Kathi Paquet, Track Chair

How often do you attend sessions, gain a wealth of knowledge, and then struggle with how to operationalize it within your organization across hundreds to thousands of individuals? The Enriching Organizations track provides sessions on everyday problem-solving and specific and actionable advice you can bring back for experimentation.

This track will explore topics including, but not limited to:

• Technical debt and legacy code
• Technical modernization
• Continuous integration, continuous delivery, continuous deployment
• Systems reliability engineering
• Systems thinking
• Portfolios, roadmaps, and planning
• Dependencies
• Organizational structures, team formation, matrixed reporting
• Career frameworks
• Budgeting
• Strategic goal-setting and tracking
• Business operations
• Diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging (DEBI) initiatives
• Organizational change and modernization
• and, of course, anything and everything at scale