What's the Big Idea?

A Birds-of-a-Feather session is a discussion among people who share an interest in a topic. The ALM Forum schedule includes Birds-of-a-Feather sessions the first two afternoons, giving you the opportunity to find and engage with other attendees who share your passion about a subject area. Time is also reserved on the afternoon of the 3rd day to present the discussion of an attendee favorite BOF session as one of the Lightning Sessions in each track.

Several Birds-of-a-Feather sessions will be held concurrently. You're free to move among the sessions to find the conversation that is right for you.

It's a discussion, not a presentation

A Birds-of-a-Feather session is an open, face-to-face conversation with fellow conference goers. It is not a presentation or lecture. There is no projector, there are no slides. This is all about direct exchange, interchange, and exploration of ideas.

For many people, especially public speakers and thought leaders, it is hard to break out of the mold of lecturing. You are used to presenting material and answering questions. This is different.

Convener gets things rolling

Each Birds-of-a-Feather session has a convener who gets the discussion started and keeps it moving around the group. The convener is often the person who originally proposed the session, but it need not be so. Some folk like to team up and have a few conveners, and that can create a nice dynamic, too.

The convener is not the person with all the answers (or all the questions.) Asking questions, offering answers, and sharing opinions is everyone's job.

Law of Two Feet

If you find yourself in a session where you are neither learning nor contributing, use your two feet to go to another session.

Sometimes conversations go it directions that may stray away from our own interests. So no one will hold it against you if you move on to another session. You are free to move about to make the most of your time.

BOF topics from ALM Summit 3

And if you're still completely at a loss for a topic to propose, here's a list of the ones that ran at ALM Summit 3:

• Overcoming Organizational Gravity
• Agile in Global Teams
• Agile for Agnostics: No Purists Allowed
• Metrics That Suck and Metrics That Don't
• Building Effective Teams
• How to Get Management to Approve Budget for Agile + QMS?
• CI and Legacy Code
• Practices of a High-Performance Scrum Team
• DevOps: Application Monitoring in the Wild
• Making Getting Better Funner
• Liftoff: Launching Teams and Projects
• Specification-By-Example (ATDD, BDD) in practice
• Best Practices for Customizing Work Items
• Deploying Stuff
• Improving Legacy Code
• Cross Platform Device Testing with Visual Studio
• Building an ALM Data Model
• Strategies for TFS Team Projects & Collections
• Scrum vs. Kanban? Scrum and Kanban?
• Synching Scrum and HR
• Migrating from SVN to TFS