Since the Continuous Delivery book came out in 2010, it's gone from being a controversial idea to a commonplace... until you consider that many people who say they are doing it aren't really, and there are still plenty of places that consider it crazy talk. In this session Jez will present some of the highlights and lowlights of the past six years listening to people explain why continuous delivery won't work, and what he learned in the process.

There is growing interest in learning more about Agile HR and its impact on individuals, teams and organizations.

It is important to separate fact from fiction: What are the real threats and opportunities of bringing Lean | Agile values, principles, and practices to HR? What can we expect in the future? Through anecdotal evidence and case studies, the session will explore the potential of Agile HR as well as provide guidance on how to approach the transformation.

 Issues covered in the presentation include: information on how to embrace the new talent contract, create inspiring, engaging, and fun places of work, shift to an iterative performance flow, take the issue of money off the table, support growth within an Agile enterprise.

With newer trends in the mobile world, there are plethora of apps that every user downloads on their mobile phone. However not every app is an ‘Instagram’  or ‘Snapchat’. The science behind what appeals to a user vs what doesn’t, has been an emerging field of research. There are multiple aspects when it comes to the question ‘What makes your app successful?’. From the core loop of the product to user experience, there are many parameters that decide the fate of an app.

In this workshop, I would focus on the usability and user experience testing, which helps in product discovery/development. We would discuss briefly about the structure and stages of usability tests. Later we will focus particularly on conducting user tests through hands-on exercises. The session will give you a dip-stick experience into running usability or user tests.

It was 2011 and I was invited to participate in an extremely exciting gig. Help out the Strategic Innovation team at a large Telco with both technical expertise and Agile/Lean Startup coaching. Working with some of the best designers in the business we created an amazing product that would still be ahead of its time 5 years later.
Unbeknownst to us however it had been doomed from the start with no chance of succeeding.
Join me in a reflection on how we build an amazing product, but how we ultimately were not able to get it in the hands of customers.

In his November 2016 New Yorker article, Om Malik calls out the Silicon Valley juggernauts as a warning to all of us: “The lack of empathy in technology design isn’t because the people who write algorithms are heartless but perhaps because they lack the texture of reality outside the technology bubble."[1] 

But the onus isn't just on the juggernauts of this era but on every one of us to understand and put into practice what empathy is - without it, we will fail to impact our products, our consumers and ultimately a world full of human lives with the potential we could. 

Because every product, platform, service or offering will end with the consumer, empathy is the first crucial step in the development lifeline to delivering impact.

Failing to recognize actual humanity as central to what we do is an easy (and hidden) trap.  We are surrounded by data and by technology and the temptation to forego the non-personable aspects that define people, the beings for which the ‘thing’­ is being created, in favor of relying on our data and technology, is veiled as logical. 

In this session, we will explore empathy as a concept, talk about why and where it belongs in the technology and product design space and how to help your teams develop and keep this skill central.

[1] http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/silicon-valley-has-an-empathy-vacuum

As we reflect back on our numerous struggles with making Agile Teams more efficient and operate like well-oiled machines, we are often overwhelmed with wondering how we didn’t learn the lessons faster or earlier.  Life is too short to learn from just our own mistakes – we have to learn from others’ mistakes as well.

In this session, Dipesh will be drawing upon more than a decade of Agile experiences in multiple organizations across nine countries to share stories and challenges of transitioning into an Agile Leader, while also focusing on what we in the Agile community are struggling with most.

There has been a lot written about techniques for creating great Agile teams.  Dipesh will take these theories a bit further, and look into how Leaders can build great teams, not by using a new method or management style, but rather by understanding their own Agile team dynamics and behaviour.  

You will learn about the assumptions and challenges surrounding self-organizing Agile teams and how to build a stronger team of Servant Leaders.

If you are a leader or an aspiring leader of an Agile team, this session will provide clear implications for where to focus your efforts so that you do not worry about the wrong things. You will be inspired by knowing how to establish trust within the teams that is required to embrace uncertainty and ambiguity while confidently making better decisions.

 This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile.  In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about scaling and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

"Can I have my cake and eat it too?  Of course, as long as it is one slice at a time!"

Do you love the idea of capturing customer requirements with lightweight user stories, but are struggling? 

Although user stories have been around since the early days of agile and fairly ubiquitous, teams continue to struggle with creating effective user stories that are truly useful in communicating the essence of the customer need and establishing the shared understanding between themselves and their customers.

In this session, we'll revisit established patterns and principles of user stories and learn concrete strategies for creating user stories that capture our customer's needs, as well as tips for avoiding the most common pitfalls that many teams fall into when they first begin working with user stories.  Leveraging easy to understand everyday examples we will collaboratively apply proven strategies and patterns to create small pieces of useful, testable functionality, and explore strategies for getting stories to “ready” and “done”.

Mob Programming is a development practice where the whole team works on the same thing, at the same time, in the same space, and on the same computer. It is a whole-team approach to doing all the work the team does including designing, coding, testing, and working with the customers, users and other stakeholders. This is an evolutionary step beyond pair programming and accentuates face-to-face communication, team alignment, collaboration, and self-organizing team concepts of the Agile approach to software development.

Mob Programming can be a highly effective approach to software development. There are numerous teams doing Mob Programming all over the world, including distributed teams, and there has been a great deal of positive reports of success. Please join me as I share how the concept got started, the benefits, techniques we use, and some of the problems we've faced.

Philips - SW transformation program is involved in the deployment of (Scaled) Agile framework to enable TTM and Quality in Business from the year 2014. We started with Pilots and then followed with Mass deployments. We have:

1. 44 Agile Release Trains launched since Aug 2014 and 220 + PI planning sessions completed.
2. Currently, focusing on System Business with multiple ART’s launched in Systems Business, including 1^st ART launch in Philips –China.
3. 3700+ people engaged in (Scaled) Agile way of working globally and part of ART's and 1300+ are formally certified in Agile and SAFe

We have learned that when engaging, deploying, an important and not-to-be-forgotten first step is to brief Executives and leadership about the approach, changes .This typically takes 4-8 hours, which sounds like a huge investment, but almost always is seen as paying off. Involving Leadership along has been a key element of our Success in our deployment

Let’s explore the purpose and use of estimates in the management of software development efforts, and consider possible alternatives. We depend on estimates to make important decisions, and yet we’re often disappointed by  the results. Are estimates for cost, time, or effort always needed? Is it possible there are other ways to approach our work?

The default use of an "estimate-driven" approach is pervasive in software development efforts, and while estimates  can be useful, it is worthwhile to scrutinize our use of estimates for cost, time, and effort, and to seek better ways to manage software development projects.

There are a number of things to explore and many questions to ask. For example, do we really need estimates for all the things we are currently using them? Are we getting a reasonable benefit from them? Is it possible to manage software development projects without these estimates, or at least with fewer estimates?  Is there a way to prove that estimates are helping us make good decisions?

In this session we’ll participate in some interactive information gathering exercises to see if we can gain a shared idea of our current understanding of the purpose and use of estimates.  We will examine the nature of software development projects, and see if we can work together to come up with some ideas about alternatives to using estimates.

Traditional business models are struggling to keep up with the needs of the modern economy. While business has never been predictable, technological and cultural change is occurring at faster rates than ever before. In this climate, modern enterprises live or die on their ability to adapt – which is where Business Agility comes in. Business Agility provides a context for organisations to embrace change; changing how to think, changing how to work and changing how to interact.

But is your business agile? I don't just mean IT - I mean Finance, HR, Marketing - your very organisational DNA. If not, let's hack your organisation to embed business agility.

What is a hackathon. Hacking is creative problem solving. (It does not have to be about technology) and a hackathon is any event of any duration where people come together to solve problems (from https://hackathon.guide/). In this mini-hackathon, bring your business ideas and problems, and let’s solve them together. It could be an ineffective business process (project management to #noprojects anyone), a market opportunity, or maybe you want to find new ways of engaging staff and customers.

APPROACH

Before the hackathon:

• Come prepared and understand your problem
• Bring a team. They don't all have to be from your own organisation, bring folks who are passionate. Don't have a team, don't worry - we'll form teams on the day as well.

During the hackathon (Phase 1):

• Split into teams of 3-6 people.
• We'll dive deeply into the problem domain - examining stakeholders and existing processes
• Using design thinking techniques, we'll ideate, rank and refine potential solutions

During the hackathon (Phase 2):

• Hack it - this could involve creating future state value-stream-maps, communication and change plans, new organisation structures.

After the conference:

• We'll regroup (virtually) as a team a week or two after the event to see how effectively the adoption of the hack is going...

Agile is not about doing scrum, kanban, lean or any other flavour of the process.  An organization cannot be “doing” agile, they must “be” agile.  They must believe in and understand the agile principles.  

After going through a successful agile transformation and running scrum for 3 years we realized that it’s just not working for us anymore.  The team was suffering from scrum fatigue.  It felt like there was a sprint planning, stand up or retrospective meeting happening all the time.  

We decided to take a hard look at how we were working and turn it on its head.  We looked at all the different agile options such as scrum, kanban, lean, xp, etc and decided to take the best parts from all of these instead of sticking with one approach.  This session will take you through our journey and share what worked for us that could also work in your organization.

Demonstrate how IaC - "infra as code" enables teams to manage and collaborate on large scale infra making fault proof automated one click deployments possible. Providing the advantages of version control. Learn the nuances of Infrastructure as code, Phoenix environment, Immutable servers & such.

Every enterprise would like to automate their deployments, aiming for a one click deployment removing any human errors. After attending this talk, the attendee will get a framework on how to implement one such system, which is resilient, very efficient and completely scalable. In this talk I would like to share with you my experience of having architected a fully automated system for the Airport which is the gateway to South India. I will demonstrate from the ground down on how the infrastructure and environment can be defined in simple human readable plain text up to how in one click, it can be orchestrated to provision the environment, configure it, build, test and deploy the fully functional app, all from the same repository. All this using the readly available open source tools and leading Cloud platforms. Figure out how Packer.io, configuration management tools like Ansible, Puppet or Chef, Cloud platforms, CI tools like Jenkin’s, Go.CD can be improvised to automate the creation environments and app deployment at the click of a button. Walk away being an expert in who understands what is Phoenix environments, Immutable Servers, Software Defined Environments, XaaS along how Infrastructure as code can be implemented in your organization to reap its innumerable benefits.