Now that we talk to our computers, what new possibilities and tradeoffs (and business models) will emerge? Today's "digital assistants" are relatively weak, but hint at an evolution in our way of living and working and transacting. In this session, we'll explore the current state of conversational interfaces, speculate about the future of the intelligent assistant, and point to how humans will play a role that new world.

Agility starts with Mind. It’s about open, curious, energetic mind constantly looking for doing better things and in better ways. Such Agile Minds manifest in proactively sensing market/customer opportunities/needs early, quickly adopting to changes  to create new value in the changing contexts, continuously learning, exploring & experimenting new things. It requires courage, self-drive and taking people along. If we notice, all these characteristics are distilled in Agile Values & Principles.

But how to develop Agile Minds? Typically our education system and corporate trainings  are predominantly IQ oriented; whereas Agile Mind is about Emotional Intelligence (EQ) – self awareness, self regulation, self motivation and empathy. EQ is an essential ingredient for a culture of self-organizing, collaboration and servant leadership – which are the tenets of good Agile culture. Mindfulness is a practical & effective toolset to cultivate EQ and create Agile Minds. 

Being a Mindfulness practitioner, this talk will cover my experiences of consulting & coaching on Mindfulness in organizations driving Enterprise Agility.

Disciplined Agile (DA) is an IT process decision framework for delivering sophisticated agile solutions in the enterprise. It builds on the existing proven practices from agile methods such as Scrum, Extreme Programming (XP), Lean software development, Unified Process, and Agile Modeling to include other aspects necessary for success in the enterprise. DA fills in the gaps left by mainstream methods by providing guidance on how to effectively plan and kickstart complex projects as well as how to apply a full lifecycle approach, with lightweight milestones, effective metrics, and agile governance.

The one-day workshop is not technical and is suitable for all team members. Many group exercises reinforce the principles learned. The workshop is also valuable for management tasked with moving from traditional approaches to agile.

There are various ways we can improve the testing of mobile apps. These include:

• Better testing
• Test automation
• Scaling testing
• Using software tools e.g. static analysis

For mobile apps we can also incorporate two complementary forms of feedback: analogue - created by humans - such as app store reviews, and digital - built-into the apps - such as mobile analytics. This talk introduces ways we can incorporate both analogue and digital feedback to help us better understand the qualities of our previous work and ways we can improve our work in future so we release better apps while also working more effectively and productively.

The feedback we receive can help us adapt and react nimbly, reducing the annoyances for users of our apps. We're also able to see beyond our  team's horizon to the rich and varied domains where mobile apps are being used.

Software development teams recognise testing is relevant and important. Testers want to add value and do purposeful and meaningful work, however software automation is encroaching and in some cases obviating much of the hand-crafted tests - including some of the 'automated tests' created by teams. As Nicholas Carr says in his book The Glass Cage: "Who needs humans anyway?"

And yet, humans - people - have much to contribute to crafting excellent software, including testing the software. This presentation investigates:

• leading automation techniques to understand more of what they can offer us in terms of testing our software.
• how structured testing techniques can help all testers including "exploratory testers"
• where analytics can help
• tools, approaches and techniques to help test more effectively

In the early 2000s, eXtreme Programming (XP) introduced agility to software engineers. Contemporary cultural and technical innovations - container technology, distributed version control systems, the proliferation of free and open source software, and the DevOps movement - have significantly expanded our possibilities.

In this one day, hands-on workshop, we’ll build a modern continuous deployment pipeline based on Git, Jenkins, and Docker. Starting with continuous integration, we’ll practice Git workflows enabling parallel development with pull requests and explicit dependency management through the use of forked repositories. We’ll then extend the ecosystem to support ad-hoc testing environments, multi-versioned deployments, and build promotion. We’ll survey tools and techniques for production deployments touching on Docker Swarm, Google Kubernetes, ChatOps, and emerging tools used in serverless architectures such as Amazon Lambda.

While technologies change, values and principles continue to guide our choices. We’ll end with reflection and a guided discussion on how core XP values - simplicity, feedback, communication, courage - can serve as a compass for environmental and workflow decisions that impact our customers and teammates.

Let’s explore the purpose and use of estimates in the management of software development efforts, and consider possible alternatives. Why do we estimate and are we making estimates that are actually useful?  We say we depend on estimates to make important decisions, and yet we’re often disappointed by the results.

Why are we so challenged at estimation?  Are estimates for cost, time, or effort always needed? Is it possible there are other ways to approach our work?  If we didn’t estimate, how could we still be successful at making businesses successful?

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 explore some real data to shed light on the art and science of software estimation.  Our exploration goal is to see if we can work together to come up with some ideas about improving on the traditional approaches to using estimates.