I’m excited to share that on November 26, 2025, I will be speaking at the Agile Consortium Annual Conference 2025—the premier event for agile professionals in the Netherlands. This year’s theme, “Shaking Agility”, promises fresh perspectives and meaningful discussions.
I’m really looking forward to meeting you there, sharing experiences, and exploring how we can truly shake up agility—in the best possible way. You can register via https://jaarcongresnl.agileconsortium.net/
If you’d like to connect or discuss something during the conference or in advance, feel free to reach out.
In episode 4, Nienke Alma and Derk-Jan de Grood take you behind the scenes of their experience at ScanAgile – the largest Agile conference in Scandinavia. Together with André Scholten, they reflect on their own talk and discuss some of the most inspiring presentations they attended.
What to expect? An engaging conversation featuring:
Playgrounds, not pipelines – Linda Liukas
Strategic Storytelling in Agile Teams – Osita Ifezue
Agile Coach: The discomfort of a job title – Nienke Alma & Derk-Jan de Grood
Building Resilience – Tricia Broderick
Strategic Alignment and Cross-Team Collaboration with The Solar System – Cansel Sörgens
PeacePlanet Connecting Finland, Japan, and the USA with MobAI – Joe Justice
Get inspired by fresh insights, personal stories, and the international Agile vibes of ScanAgile!
Episode 4 of Inn het Midden is now available on all major podcast platforms. Full video version included in the show notes.
Have you ever felt trapped? Not literally, but perhaps you know the feeling of being caught in a web of expectations tied to your job title—expectations that don’t necessarily align with who you are as a professional.
Nienke and I are excited to share our experiences on stage. On March 27 and 28, we’ll be speaking at Scan Agile in Helsinki.
Derk-Jan de Grood and Nienke Alma have spent many years working in large organizations undergoing transformation. As passionate agilists, the evolving nature of Agile transformations has always kept them engaged. Recent conversations have made them realize that they share one common experience: the job title “Agile Coach” that they once embraced is increasingly feeling uncomfortable. Even more unsettling: they sense that this discomfort is shared by organizations looking for individuals who can support their transformation efforts.
What kind of support truly adds value in today’s Agile transformations within large organizations? How do we position ourselves to meet this demand? What job title best captures both the value we bring to organizations and what we are willing and able to deliver? And should we be concerned if that title isn’t “Agile Coach”?
Check out our promo video, and if it resonates with you, we hope to see you at our session at Scan Agile! More info and program can be found on the conference website: https://www.scan-agile.org/
This weekend, I spent time in Florence, Italy, where I gave a talk at the Italian Agile Days.
Italian Agile Days is the main Italian conference aimed at people interested in agile culture and practices. It began in 2004, and this year marks the twenty-first edition. With 600-700 particpants.it is the largest agile event in the country, and also counts as one of the longest-running and most active agile conferences in the world.
Although there were international speakers and the call for papers was open in both English and Italian, many talks were given in Italian. As a result, I was confined to the English track. This was rather unfortunate, as during the networking breaks, I heard enthusiastic stories about some of the Italian talks. Still, I felt welcomed, heard some great new insights, and even made new friends.
I attended interesting talks on visual test strategies ( Shining Chen), The imposter syndrome (Paweł Zajączkowski) the gap between business and developers (Attila Fejér), Platform engineering, team topologies (Giulio Roggero), and failing digital transformations and behavioral engineering (Michele Brissoni). Check out the full program on the conference website
My own presentation was about the Value Framework and how it can be used to make backlog ordering not only more efficient but also more value-focused.
Organizations seeking to enhance value delivery benefit from better planning and prioritization. The Value Framework provides a simple way to rate backlog items based on their value, aligning them with organizational goals and making priority decisions more transparent, including for stakeholders. The framework offers implementation guidelines, fostering awareness and alignment among product owners and enabling faster, more objective value assessment.
In early November, the 21st edition of the Italian Agile Days (IAD) will take place, making it the premier conference for those interested in agile culture and practices in Italy. This journey began in 2004, and IAD has grown to become one of the longest-running and most active agile conferences in the world.
The Italian Agile Days 2024 will be held in Florence, Italy, on Saturday, November 8. The program was recently published, and you can find all the details about the speakers and sessions on the IAD2024 Conference website: IAD2024 Conference.
I’m excited to share that I’ll be speaking on how the Value Frame can help you effectively sort your backlog. My session is titled :
“Impactful Backlog Ordering with the Value Frame.” Organizations looking to enhance their value delivery need to focus on better planning and predictability. Equally important is ensuring that work is directed toward the right items, as any effort spent on the wrong tasks is simply waste. The Value Frame offers a straightforward approach to evaluate backlog items based on their value, improving alignment with organizational strategy and goals while making priority decisions more transparent.
I’m truly honored to have the opportunity to speak at this amazing conference, especially knowing that the number of submissions far exceeded the available slots.
In this full day hands-on workshop we discussed the basic concepts of Built-in Quality (BIQ) and applied them directly. In small groups we assessed the Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) and identified problems that came with it. Using the BIQ step plan analyzed where in the SDLC we could start our improvements. Special in this workshop is that included the agile maturity of the organization to determine what practices will or won’t work. The day was concluded with a pitch by the participant groups of their personal, tailor-made improvement plan that fits the goals and the problems of the organization. We had great fun and were inspired by the enthusiasm of the participants. Some reactions we got:
” This BiQ workshop definitely was a great start for the 4-day Agile Testing Days Conference.” ” Thanks for that awesome workshop. We got a lot of new ideas to bring back home to our organization.” ” Using the waves of agile was useful. It made me realise that we focus on the wrong improvements.”
Last week I had the opportunity to host a session on the IPMA VAKdag Back to Basics which was held on Tuesday 17 November 2022 in Amersfoort. The conference was focusing on the ICB competence model for project managers. I was asked to tell about agile and thought this to be a nice challenge. What do you tell project managers about agile? That there are neither projects and project managers in agile? Precisely that!
But I wanted to turn the talk into something use-full. So, I offered a solution. To add value as project manager you have to understand agile and have an understanding of the challenges the teams are dealing with. It doesn’t work project managers ignore the content and the struggles of the team and superimpose deadline pressure on them. The wave model that I introduced in my book serves as a tool to identify challenges that are relevant. Secondly, I suggested to use the competence model to identify skills and knowledge that may be relevant when searching and implementing solutions for that challenge. This enables project managers to step forward and contribute to the value flow.
The message was received well and with IPMA we will see if we can organise a follow-up on the session. In the meanwhile I’ll share my slides below.
In 2021 I collaborated with Eric de Graaf and Rene van Veldhuijzen on a presentation about test automation. Although we streamed this presentation during the QA&Testing Conference in Bilbao. I never put it online. Recently Rene asked me for the file, and I decided to share it with more widely. In this presentation Eric and Rene help me to discuss the impact that maturity has on the introduction of test automation.
The program of the InflectraCON™ 2022 is announced. And I am proud to be part of it! Set in the heart of the US’ s capital, InflectraCON 2022, is a two-day multi-track conference celebrates all aspects of Software Development, Testing, Agile, DevOps, Cyber, Leadership, and Innovation.
I will contribute with a great story, and hope that together with the other speakers, we will inspire you about what’s on the horizon for technology in 2022 and beyond! Check the line up on the event-page and see who’s there beside Mindy Bohannon, Jennifer Bonine, Ard Kramer and Jeffery Payne.
Join us for an all-out party marking the 16th anniversary of Inflectra and our collective emergence from the pandemic! Be part of the conversation about digital transformation! Network and rekindle friendships with your teammates, fellow technologists, and friends during the end-of-the-conference reception and party!Come to InflectraCON 2022 and join the people like you who are influencing their organization’s growth and the future landscape of Agile and DevOps!
This week Jan Jaap Cannegieter and I gave our brand-new tutorial on Built-in Quality. I this tutorial attendees get hands-on experience in defining those practices that have a quality impact for their organization. We made an inventory of the SDLC and discussed where we want to have feedback loops in the process. Additionally we defined those feedback loops and performed a root-cause analysis. Using the waves of agile each group selected those practices that would fit the organizational context. This resulted in a Built-in Quality strategy that could be pitched to explain how we build quality in and improve the value delivery.
This video gives an impression of the experience we had and is shot at the Agile Testing Days 2021 in Potsdam Germany. Thanks goes out to all the participants that made this day incredible.
On 22 October I gave a presentation on the Agile Tour London. I talked about the value of refinement and stated that refinement should focus on divining a good solution. So rather than updating the workflow tool, like Jira. And rather than talking process and planning, refining should aim to bring team members together to share their minds and ideas. Working in distributed team challenges this, due to time zones, language problems and cultural differences. I referred to the SF series for all mankind, to explain what needs attention during online collaboration. You can read an article on this topic on the agile connection site. Since the conference theme was breaking silos we discussed how we can use challenging questions to bridge the gap and involve people.
The QA&Test Conference in Bilbao is a conference I frequently visit. If not because I am part of the technical committee, then it is for the great atmosphere, the great people and the nice city of Bilbao. Although visiting the city isn’t an option this year, I love to contribute this year with an online presentation. This year I collaborated with my colleagues Eric de Graaf and Rene van Veldhuijzen and we sat back to evaluate test automation.
Description: Test automation is a key practice these days. But how come that I see so many organizations still relying on manual tests. In this presentation we look at continues cycles in test automation. Derk-Jan will share the journey he made while trying to implement test automation practices at various organizations. He’ll compare his experience with today’s state of automation. For this talk he brought some friends along that and together we’ll discover how much has changed and what challenges seem to be consistent. Test automation is about testing. But automating tests forces us to think about requisites, maturity, and business cases. Test automation can be used to drive test improvements. But: What if you have a test automation framework, but the tests just ain’t no good? Does that mean you are back to square one? We’ll explore a successful marriage between testing and automation and explain why the success of AUTOMATION actually lies in automating good TESTS. With contributions from Eric de Graaf and Rene van Veldhuijzen.
The presentation is part of : TRACK 2: Test Automation, 20 October | 16:30 – 17:30. Check the schedule at the conference website
This november the Agile Testing Days will be held in Potsdam Germany. This is special to me since it will be the first onsite conference I attend since a long time. Most of the conference are on-line and virtual. During the conference I will team up with Jan Jaap Cannegieter for the built-in Quality workshop. In this highly interactive workshop we will be exploring how we can build quality in. It’s based my latest book “the waves of agile“. We made a workshop to bring the story to live and give it practical application. If you want to learn how to design feedback loops, improve the flow in your SDLC and how you can select practices that boost quality, join our tutorial.
The video below is or personal invite to do so. We hope to see you in Potsdam.
Check out the speakers of this year’s edition of Pacific NW Software Quality Conference (PNSQC). I am proud to share the stage with my fellow keynote speakers, Erik van Veenendaal, Julie Wong and Mirjana Kolarov. Together we will cover a nice range of topics and I am glad that agile is a prominent topic.
Check out the program to see the topics of the keynotes and the other fine speakers. Please join us in October on the PNSQC.
If you think October is too far away, you can join me this Thursday on a AMA session, this will be a special preview of #PNSQC2021 as we gather ‘round the campfire for an “Ask Me Anything” discussion with:
– Erik Van Veenendaal – Derk-Jan de Grood – Tariq King – Mirjana Kolarov – Jonathan Lipps
Derk-Jan de Grood 