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.

Many agile methods and strategies are geared towards small teams working in reasonably straightforward situations. That’s great work if you can get it. Most organizations that are adopting agile today have been in operations for decades and sometimes centuries. They are typically dealing with significant investments in legacy systems and processes that won’t go away any time soon. They have an existing culture that is usually not-as-agile as it could be and an organization structure that puts up many roadblocks to collaboration. Their staff members are often overly specialized and many people do not have skills in agile software development techniques, and there are many thoughts as to what needs to be done to improve things, the adoption of agile being one of many. This is certainly not the startup company environment that we keep hearing about.

In this keynote presentation Scott Ambler reviews the challenges faced by established enterprises when transforming to agile and what enterprise agile means in practice. He then overviews the Disciplined Agile (DA) framework, a pragmatic and context-sensitive approach to enterprise agile, working through how it addresses the realities faced by modern organizations. Scott then works through advice for transforming your enterprise to become more agile, including the people-process-tools triad and the skills and experience required of enterprise agile team coaches and executive agile coaches. He ends with an overview of proven strategies for adopting agile in less-than-ideal environments

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.

There's little need to work in a vacuum as an isolated developer or team. Our software tools, our apps, and our users all provide information we can use to help us improve our practices and the apps we produce. Some tools provide leading information - that's available and can be applied before we release the app. Other information lags the release of our app to testers and users, we receive the information as the app is being used. 

The information may help us reflect on our existing work, what went well and what we missed or didn't do quite as well as we'd like to do. We can also use it to improve how we work in future, for instance to test more effectively and efficiently, to learn from production and real world use of our software, etc. We can choose to work faster, increase the value of the feedback we receive, and shorten the feedback cycles so we can iterate faster and more purposefully.

In this interactive workshop we will be able to investigate and review some of the many and varied tools and sources of information. We will compare information that is easily available with techniques such as implementing and applying mobile analytics and designing automated tests to help us collect high-value, relevant information explicitly. We’ll also investigate the capabilities and tools that are available to developers and those who support mobile apps to harness these tools and the data they provide to refine and improve our testing. We'll also consider automated testing, their sweet-spots and their blindspots.

In addition to general mobile testing techniques we’ll investigate ways to help decide what to test next and what might survive in the morass of “won’t be tested”. As we learn more about specific aspects of an app, we can further refine the testing and use various analytics and research to improve our testing. There’s plenty of data available to help us improve the testing and even the development of mobile apps if we choose to collect and use it. Privacy and protection of the users is also key and part of being a trustworthy, professional tester so we’ll touch on these topics and how they’re generally designed and implemented in mobile apps.

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.

An agile enterprise increases value through effective execution and delivery in a timely and reactive manner. Such organizations do this by streamlining the flow of information, ideas, decision making, and work throughout the overall business process all the while improving the quality of the process and business outcomes.   This talk describes, step-by-step, how to evolve from today’s vision of agile software development to a truly disciplined agile enterprise. It argues for the need for a more disciplined approach to agile delivery that provides a solid foundation from which to scale. It then explores what it means to scale disciplined agile strategies tactically at the project/product level and strategically across your IT organization as a whole. Your disciplined agile IT strategy, along with a lean business strategy, are key enablers of a full-fledged disciplined agile enterprise.