CP Day London Keynote and Master Class

I'm very pleased to be asked to deliver an opening keynote for XP Day in London. The title and theme I've chose is "Embrace Uncertainty." Since Kent Beck's Extreme Programming Explained in 2000, we've been asked to "embrace change" when using XP and other Agile approaches. But more and more I find that XP teams, customer teams in particular, operating in a way that hopes to reduce the amount of change by working out details ahead of time. Behind this is the idea that we're all uncomfortable with uncertainty. I want to describe how being certain about what you want isn't necessary, and is likely even an distraction, to predictably getting something valuable in a short amount of time. You can read more here.

I'll be teaching a half day course on User Story Mapping. I'm observing an emergent best practice of modeling user stories in a more useful way than the simple story backlog. Story Maps provide a way to explore and explain the product we're building and the user stories we've chosen to build it. You can read more about the course here.