What if documentation was as fun as coding? Always up-to-date? And what if it could even improve your design? Reconsider how you invest in knowledge to accelerate delivery, with a touch of Domain-Driven Design inside!

Documentation is usually a boring topic, that needs to be done. But with agile practices and continuous delivery in particular, everything can change so quickly that you can't do documentation the old-fashion way any more. How to document your understanding of the business? How to document your design? How to do all that without spending time writing paragraphs of text?

In this fast-paced talk we'll show concrete techniques to achieve all that, and which make you feel like trying. And beyond the mere topic of documentation, we'll show how Living Documentation is also an opportunity to improve your code, design and processes!

Test

As a programmer, you most likely have written some functions which return a value, right? Do you know how to write code without any return value? Do you know what kind of design problem will come with the code which returns some value?

This topic will show you the value of no return value code via some real code sample. It will show you the benefit about such no return value design as well as something deep in the object oriented design.

If you're a programmer who wants to write better code, this is topic for you. Your development mindset might be stroke in this talk, please keep calm. :)

With over 5 years in the practice of tango, I would like to use tango techniques to explain the nuances in communication between product team and dev team. It’s not often straight forward or easy.

Tango is an extreme dance in coordination and non verbal communication. it is also not the kind of dance that can be guided by strict rhythm like salsa. Instead, it’s a decision between both dancers on how fast or how slow they want to take it. It is also one of the few dances where pauses are encouraged and takes the form of regrouping.

I’ll be using experiential learning to demonstrate techniques in communication. (Note: it’s not a tango lesson but a communication workshop using tango.)

In November 2014 an independent team of academic and industry leaders conducted a survey targeting the video games industry in an effort to understand the factors that distinguish successful teams from those that are less successful.  The results of the survey were dramatic and resulted in a series of 5 articles published on Gamasutra and numerous workshops and discussions within the games industry.  The results are presented here showing the statistical correlations that clearly identify things great teams do.  In March of this year, 2016, Paul Tozour, who lead the team in 2014, will be presenting a version of this presentation at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco.  

Design Thinking is a human-centred way of solving the right problems that balances commercial and technical realities. Whereas, Agile is about requirements and solutions evolving through collaboration between self-organizing, cross-functional teams.

Both have HUMAN at the core of it and it creates immense synergy to solve the right problems.

I will go through a case study where my team has helped an international logistics company to solve its sales problems using Design Thinking and Agile.

We are going to share a case study of how we kick start a LeSS (Large Scaled Scrum) agile transition in FDA (Food & Drugs Administration) regulated organization. The product is a surgery X-Ray machine and the team include software engineer, mechanical engineer, electronical engineer. After one year journey, the product get shipped within one year comparing to 2.5 years of previous version. No bug was found after shipping the product so far and the build time reduced from 20+ hrs to 2.8 secs. What made these happen? One of the biggest challenges is how to enable cross-functional and self-managing team and to make it more challenging, everyone had to choose their role and teams. In this talk, I am going to share with you how we official launched the change and how we as agile coaches support in their agile journey. 

We are entering a world where everything must be done quicker. You must deliver code faster. You must deploy faster. How can you deliver and deploy faster without compromising your professionalism? How can you be sure you are delivering what your client has asked you?

In short, testing is the only way to be sure you're delivering what someone asked you to. Often we use BDD Tools such as FitNesse which gained popularity over the recent years

There are a number of integration / BDD test tools out there that help you deliver a high quality software through tests. Its easy to pick up any tool from just their tutorials and start writing tests. But as I found out the hard way, this can quickly spiral into a state where the tests are giving you and your team hell and are worth less than the value the tests are delivering.

Using FitNesse and Junit as examples, I will share things that I have learnt working on large enterprise and vendor systems and help you avoid your own path to hell.

About how our startup Engineering team (~13ppl) learn, talk about the challenge, our philosophy and tactics. Inspired by different agile practice e.g. in spotify, enable interactions with processes. 

It will be largely based on the blog post
https://medium.com/translate-engineer-error/how-our-engineering-team-work-as-a-learning-organization-92aae2fbd26f#.jp183ulf9

30mins should it be, when more time available it will be Q&A. 
 
We believe

• Passion is key
• It’s about Process
• Build expertise Inside the team
• Maximize the diffusion rate
• Be Measurable
• Know the unknown unknowns
  
  

We learn by

1. Weekly Engineering Session
2. OKR (Objective and Key Results) framework
3. Expertise-based Chapter
4. Hacking Github as a knowledge base
5. Process for continuous and timely feedback
6. Share often, at right channels.
7. Stay connected with the world
8. Nudge for good

The User Experience practice has many similarities to the Agile philosophy, yet the two come from different origins and are often implemented in parallel in different parts of the organisation. User Experience practitioners also often fall back to a waterfall-like methodology and fail to involve other non-design parties in the process.

This talk aims at sharing the experience of implementing Agile to run the design and animation teams at GoAnimate, and how better user experience can be delivered by breaking down the walls between job roles: designers, developers, marketers, customer service representatives, all working together to deliver an outstanding product.

As an Information Architect, it is common to place an extreme importance on taking a long view towards the development and maintenance of any information system. This implies an in-depth systems design, which some might not think is very agile. However, over time and working with many clients, I have come to understand how you can apply agile principles to Information Architecture. The key lies in helping people produce information quickly without worrying about its ultimate placement.

This talk will primarily focus on media organisations and how the design of websites has confused our requirement for good sound principles of information architecture. There is nothing in the field that implies a deep systems design, especially when speaking about content.

IA is the art and science of making information useable and findable. The art portion of this requires continuous experimentation and evaluation. This is the key to making your IA agile.

Making the shift to being Agile in a small team can sometimes be hard enough. Attempting to shift many teams across an organisation that is very set in its ways can be even harder. Jun Ding is the IT Practice Lead at Cathay Pacific Airways and has been trying to do just that over the last few years by leading the Agile transformation there.

Jun will share her story of trying to introduce Agile to a 500 people IT group and the strategy behind it, including:

• the success in building teams to lead by example from the bottom up
• how technology can support an Agile adoption
• the differences between and importance of the role of Agile coaches in building capability
• making room for Agile on leadership team radar when they already have a million priorities to support
• the personal shift required in leadership style