After more than 5 years of supporting the thetrainline.com platform, ThoughtWorks worked with The Trainline teams to transfer knowledge and context  back to the Trainline Teams.

This methodology was co-created by ThoughtWorks and Trainline as a healthy sustainable and mature way to transfer knowledge. The transition itself was about a year long and involved multiple agile concepts around remote pairing, program MVP and above all, continuous delivery and non-disruption to business through the process.

This presentation would take the audience through the experiences and learnings of the process. This session is co-presented by ThoughtWorks and Trainline (vendor and customer) and will provide an insight across multiple spectrums of delivery and business.

How do you effectively scale skill-based, quality training across your organization?

Over the years, I've experimented with different ideas/models to scaling skill-based training across an organization. In the last 4 years, I've pretty much settled down on the following model. Its very useful when mentoring teams on skills like Test-Drive-Development (TDD), Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Product Discovery, Writing User Stories, Evolutionary Design, Design Patterns, Problem Solving, etc. I've successfully implemented this model at some very prominent fortune 500 enterprises.

The goal of this workshop is to explore what other successful models organized have used to scale skill-based training in their organization.

Over the life of an application as requirements change, application usage patterns alter, load and performance changes the need to change database and database architecture is inevitable. There are patterns of these changes such as

1. 1. Encapsulate Table with View
2. 2. Migrate method from database
3. 3. Replace method with views
4. 4. Introduce Read only table
5. 5. Split table
6. 6. Make column non-nullable
7. 7. Drop column
8. 8. Add foreign key constaint
9. 9. Merge columns
10. 10. Replace columns

In this talk we will discuss the above database refactoring patterns and different implementation techniques to enable blue, green deployments, allow for legacy applications to work with fast changing database and enable the teams to effectively refactor the database to fulfill the changing needs of the organization.

How do software teams become creative? If you're not a start-up, does creativity even play a role in the business driven world of software development? Idea generation is the basis of all our work - no matter how challenging or mundane. With a scientific approach to implementing change, creativity is the basic tool we have for addressing the challenges of software development.

This talk explores the elements of engagement and creativity along with the neuroscience of generating ideas. These give us specific insight into how employing different agile retrospective formats over the course of the product development process can extend our usual practices and develop a thinking mind-set comfortable with tackling daily work with a fresh and explorative approach.

At times we have great product ideas but the biggest barrier to entry lies in answering few questions such as:

- How do I define and validate Problem hypothesis, Solution hypothesis and Underlying assumptions?

- How do I quickly setup a platform for people to register their interest?

- What will keep the potential customers engaged, excited until the first release (or beta) is out?

- How do I get feedback from the early adopters?

- And eventually when I have answers to some of these questions, how do I make a decision to persevere or pivot?

If you've faced a challenge while answering any of these questions while building/validating your product idea, this session is for you. We'll look at tools and techniques to validate the product hypothesis early-on without spending months or fortunes. We'll also look at a case study to highlight how some of these tools, techniques helped us validate our product idea.

There is a level of "assumptions" that each one of us work with, while we deal with any system. Here in this case the system could be a team member, the manager, the management, or the entire organization. While we work with assumptions, the conversations or the discussions or the work we do, can seem like getting nowhere because of the conflicts, and a sense of frustration piles on .This is a common situation and a very common feeling amongst Coaches/Scrum masters/Project Managers or anyone dealing with project management scenarios. That is where "contracting" helps us get our way through!

Contracting is a concept of "Transactional Analysis" school of psychology. Eric Berne defines it as "an explicit bilateral commitment to a well-defined course of action". Sometimes contracts will be multi-handed - all parties to the contract will have their own expectations. In the unusual event that these are all congruent, then fine. However, if not, then discussing everyone's expectations will lead to greater understanding and therefore to a clear contract. The risk in not doing this is that problems in completing the contract will emerge at some stage.

3 Categories of contracts are administrative, professional and psychological.

Administrative contracts deals with the operational agreements- like fees, who has to do what, time, frequency, attendees etc.

Professional contracts deals with the expectations from each role and clarifies the essential setup required to achieve the same

Psychological contracts talks about how we work as people and help to understand how we express our comforts/ discomforts       

Amongst the three contracts psychological contracts are very essential and often ignored in projects. This type of contract will help us co-create any assignment and it’s a powerful tool for Agile coaches while they work with their teams, managers, organization etc.

Further to agree with any contract, both the parties should operate from a space where there is mutual trust and concern (I am Ok , You are Ok).

This report will discuss in detail about these contracts with examples from Agile projects, in an activity based sessions. We will also discuss the life positions based on 'I am OK, You are OK' theory.

Note: Please note that this presentation is not about the business/financial contracts that most of us are aware of. However, the framework of contracts could be applied in any situation including the business/financial contracts.

It is not a question of if a team is going to have a conflict; it is a question of when. Equipping them to deal with conflict is more than creating agreements or having a good facilitator. We look at a conflict model that focuses on dynamics of conflict by understanding- 1. Cognitive skills:self-awareness about triggers, hot spots, emotions,behaviors. 2. Emotional skills:reading emotions, body language, balancing emotions, using curiosity 3. Behavioral skills:understanding others’ perspectives and needs, avoiding 8 destructive behaviors, embracing 8 constructive behavior. In an organizational setting, it is important to understand the source (culture, interdependence, incompatibility, personality, power, etc.) and types of conflict (cognitive vs. affective). Creating awareness about conflict processes, retaliatory cycles and building a conflict profile can empower teams engage in constructive disagreements. 

At ThoughtWorks, a 50-people team is building a marketing website backend for one of the largest consumer electronics brands in the world. We are Play-Scala as our web framework which allows us to design the application in a very different but powerful ways. This experience based talk will talk about these differences, emphasizing on two of them: "Dealing with concurrency without threads" and "Dependency resolution with constructor injection".

Dealing with concurrency without threads
- The backend is end to end non-blocking with highly concurrent architecture
- Each page consists of 20+ reusable snippets, so each page request translates into 20+ outbound web service calls to get data for the snippet data in parallel
- Posting data involves download/upload of large images from/to remote services, also done in parallel
- We will show you how Scala Futures, Play and ReactiveMongo functional programming paradigm allows us to do all this without blocking any thread or managing thread-pools by hand

Dependency resolution with constructor injection
- Dependency injection is considered essential for designing applications that are easy to test. Usaully, dependencies are specified as constructors parameters
- Scala traits allow us to get rid of constructors by wrapping classes and their factories inside components that in turn can depend on other components, this enables a compile time mechanism for dependency resolution which is very flexible
- We will show examples of this pattern, its effects testing without external DI frameworks

We will briefly talk on how functional programming style in general helps with testing and software delivery on agile projects. Finally, we will also cover the pain-points these approaches bring out, and argue if it is worth to pay that cost.

Need buy in from a key manager or executive to adopt Agile? Desiring better team collaboration? Hungry for a saner life at home?
Try Personal Kanban, winner of the Shingo prize for Operational Excellence. It's the fastest, simplest way to taste test the goodness of the Lean Agile approach to managing knowledge work. Personal Kanban empowers small teams and individuals, at work and at home.Give that overwhelmed executive instant relief. Build your own system, and soon curious onlookers ask and then create their own. Look out, you've just released an Agile virus in your organization!
You've also discovered a way for you and your team to get more out of your efforts, to improve communication, and find time for the things that matter most.In this session you'll learn how to create a Personal Kanban system through stories, examples and interactive exercises. Walk away understanding the psychology behind visualizing work and limiting work in progress, inspired and motivated to make a difference at work and home. 

Willpower is the force that is between the brain activity (I want to do this or I need to do this) and the action itself (start coding). If there is not enough willpower, people find it difficult to start any activity (especially that involves
decision making).

What is the standard approach when you feel tired and find it difficult to concentrate? Take some coffee (but latest research shows that coffee depletes the brain activity, even when body has more energy), take some sweets (but sugar ends quickly and gives even more exhaustion to the body)? These widely used strategies generally do not work, and in long-term even add harm to the body and brain.

The willpower is not endless (so-called muscle theory of willpower), it can be saved, it can be trained, there are approaches how to keep the willpower level high. To keep the willpower (and thus, productivity) on the high level, people should know and use different approaches that lay in the field on the social and cognitive science.

There are a lot of evidences that SCRUM improves the developer’s productivity in terms of speed of development, code quality, and accuracy of design. Unfortunately mainly all recommendations from SCRUM coaches look like “believe me, if you do this, you will have better velocity”. Yes, it works. But why does it work?

Sometimes SCRUM does not give such great results even when main elements are in place. The question “Why” and “What makes the difference” is here again.

I will describe the model of relationship between the willpower related brain metabolism on very low level (specific amino acid cycle) and the SCRUM practices. I can prove that SCRUM addresses the productivity of the people’s brain using 3 different flows simultaneously. There are several tips that make these productivity flows working or not. You can make Agile productive, you can have non-productive Agile. I will show you where the difference is.

Overall there are 10 productivity tips that can be put into 3 flows.

As the outcome of this session, Agile coaches, and all people who can change the process (in fact that is any team member) will review their SCRUM: does the way they have it improve the productivity or they are losing all the power? The changes are cheap, the outcome can be huge.

Can you go faster with less weight?

We have all learned the benefit of reusing application servers like JBoss, ORMs like NHibernate or dependency injection frameworks like Spring that "solve all the plumbing code for you", but how real are these benefits really? Most developers struggle using techniques like test-driven development and refactoring effectively in their day to day project. Many developers spend a majority of their day finding out which magic incantations will make your framework solve your requirement.

Yes, frameworks probably will reduce the size of your code base. But will their reduce the time it takes to develop that code base? And perhaps even more pressingly: How certain are your estimates when you know that a the majority of your work is to find out exactly which few lines of code you need to change by debugging, reading documentation and searching for answers on stack overflow?

When I was first learning math, my dad told me that I didn't to use a calculator before I could do the math without it. In the same tradition, this talk builds on the premise that you shouldn't use a framework that you can't do without: I will create, live, a realistic web application without generators, without frameworks and without bullshit. Instead, I will use test-driven development to ensure steady progress to a solution with no magic.

Agile has always challenged people with the question on how much to design upfront! It doesn't end there, it even flows in the day-to-day work of the developers & the associated Engineering Practises. We do understand the need to have a scalable design, rigid code quality checks - but who is eventually driving these? How are the architects coping with the changing dynamics of development methodolgoy? Are we really driving those practises in reality or are they finding place in management slides only?

This session is an attempt to project how the practise of architecture is getting mis quoted/mis understood in most of the ongoign Agile projects & what has been the root cause behind them.

We also try to come to an agreement as what should be the ideal approach towards setting up an Agile Architecture.

In her theory of cycles of development, Pam Levin talks about 7 stages a human being goes through from birth to becoming an adult. Each of these stages have unique requrements for any individual. The way the environment responds to the individual in each of these stages will determine how the individual will make sense of themselves with respect to their environment.

Interestingly an individual goes through these stages when they enter a new situation. This could be as simple as walking into a roomful of new people or when they join a new team, or an organisation. Each one has their own own pace. While this is very logical for an individual how is this related to Agile?

I have seen that teams also go through stages in their development. This is not just the forming, norming, storming and performing stages which is the internal process of a team. This is about the team being identified as an entity and being supported in their journey of becoming a high performing team. In understanding the cycles of development, we get some clues of what needs a team may have at different points in their journey to becoming self-organised.

I would like to discuss Dr.Pam Levin's model in the context of a team and propose do's and don'ts that can support the journey of a team

The seven stages:

Transforming a Business to be Agile involves a lot of moving parts. Being Agile not only means delivering high quality software, but ability to respond to changing Customers Needs/Markets/Competitors/Stakeholders and more. Fundamental to this change is "People" within the organization. Keeping “People Over Process” at the center its important  to facilitate the People in the organization to be fully successful. So how do we ensure they are successful? How does goal setting change? How does measurement of these goals change? Focus on Organization adoption to Agile largely has been limited to Engineering function. But how has the HR process changed to facilitate this transformation to be truly successful?

In this session will look to bring in some of the best practices that are followed in the organizations through a Mix of Case Study and Research across Product and IT Services Organizations.

Inspect & adapt is an important agile practice. Inspection helps us to see the reality beyond our filters. Better awareness of reality helps us to more effectively re-plan our work and modify our existing way-of-working.

There are multiple benefits of this practice, but in this workshop we focus on how it can lead to continuous improvement in productivity.

Inspect and adapt can be used while carrying out regular work activities across the entire agile life cycle. However our focus will be on the Scrum ceremonies and common artifacts.

In this workshop, through discussions and exercises, we explore Innovative ways to expand our capability to carry out inspection & adaptation, without adding any extra overhead.

During the session you also get a few simple yet powerful tips which can be practiced immediately once back from the conference.

In this session I will introduce the audience to the concepts of Gherkin language. Gherkin is a popular language used to encapsulate the requirements in agile world.

This was successfully implemented in our group across India & USA. I will go through this case study also.

Yellow or dry leaves of a tree have more to do with its root, rather than its color, which is just an indication of need to water the roots. For a tree to flourish, to bear green leaves, with fruits, it’s the root that needs to be watered

This is to say, put focus and care into your core every day and then the rest of the things will simply flourish and express itself.

At times, we are too busy in discussing and analyzing things at a very high level, trying to improve the color of the yellow leaves of the trees, by applying patches, thereby ignoring watering its root.

We are so obsessed with achieving better results every time, that ,metrics, processes and numbers become the focus of discussion in the organization. We keep on doing the same thing again and again, and expect different results, every time.

Measure more, measure accurately, implement jazzy-flashy processes with new fashioned terminologies of promises of skyrocketing results, make everyone occupied, and reduce cost at any cost!

And most of the times, you get the same results, or even worse.

Here are some of the things,I believe, are watering the tree of Product Development that bear the fruits of success.

• Focus on automated unit tests and refactoring the code every time you see an improvement opportunity, quality will take care of itself.
• Focus on having open, honest and professional discussions with customers; trusted partnership will take care of itself.
• Promote culture of failing fast and encourage making mistakes, time to market and innovation will take care of itself.
• Implement the DNA of Value Flow into the organization, and cost will take care of itself.
• Focus on respecting and improving skills of the people in your organization, the results will take care of itself
• Destroy the cubicles , both physically and mentally,  and the waste will have a tough time to find a place.
• Focus on building great teams; and great products will take care of itself.

In lot of agile teams, often times, all the team members will be doing the grooming and planning exercise as a team. Often times, defining the behaviors is either ignored, overlooked, skimped or done by individuals on their own without a common understanding as a team.

To solve this problem, I have used this hands-on time-boxed activity for all of my teams to define behaviors as they move along in the sprint. This will help all the team members to have a shared understanding on their users and their behaviors as it relates to their user story. This is an activity that any agile team member can take and implement the next day at work.

A project can face varied challenges through its life, foreseen and otherwise - runaway scope, high defect volumes, depressed velocity, and many more. Addressing many of these first requires recognition of the problem and then action from one or more sets of project stakeholders. Telling the story with simple visuals can be a very powerful way to articulate a challenge (the what), the potential root causes (the why) and the options available to fix it (the now-what). Teams typically already track a lot of data related to throughput, quality, scope and cost. Creative use of this data combined with simple, hand-crafted visuals can be much more effective than hundreds of bullet points. In this hands-on workshop, you get to exercise your visual thinking and visual communication skills. We introduce some simple visual thinking techniques like Look-See-Imagine-Show, and then let you apply them in a project simulation, so that you can practice hand-rolling simple visuals that speak volumes (no fancy tools needed!).

In the session two processes will be explained viz. Release Planning and the Release Level Retro. Step by Step approach will be discussed so that the same can be readily used in your Agile Projects.

I have created these approaches of conducting effective Release Planning and Release Retrospectives in Agile projects. I have used these processes in various successful Agile projects.

Note: Please refer to the Links section below to see the steps invoved in both of these processes.