Agile teams supposedly build their collaboration on a shared language of their problem domain, ideally reflected all the way down to the code. But most teams take this shared mental model for granted, without ever taking the simplest steps to check if they're on the same page or to help new team members get up to speed effectively when entering an unfamiliar problem space.

Concept maps to the rescue! One of the simplest of all tools, yet rarely used in agile circles, concept maps have decades of research behind them demonstrating the significant positive impact they can have on all types of learning and knowledge sharing. In this session you'll find out what they are, how to use them and how to demonstrate to your team on your first day back at work that the language is not as ubiquitous as they had assumed all along. You'll also learn what to do about that via a case study and demonstration of the tools we've used to help our teams share knowledge.

This talk received the highest proportion of 3 star ratings of any talk at Agile Australia 2015, the largest agile conference in Australia. The video of the talk can be found here: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/concept-map

What Attendees Will Learn:

• understanding of the learning impact of concept maps
• understanding of how to apply concept maps to introduce new team members to an unfamiliar problem space
• understanding how to diagnose and treat a team's lack of shared mental models of their problem space