You have a great idea and you want to build the product and launch it in market as soon as possible. Before anyone else can launch it. Great! But building the product takes time, money and opportunity cost. While building and launching a successful product, several things can go wrong:

• Have you really understood the core problem from the user's point of view?
• Will your users like the user experience?
• Have you validated your core-loop which makes your product very engaging?
• Is your business model flushed out and validated?
• And so on...

So how do you minimise these risks? 

In this 90 mins workshop, you will run some real tests with real users to de-risk yourself and gain validated learning.

In recent years, two similar-sounding but distinct approaches to product discovery have emerged: Design Thinking and Lean Startup. Most of the literature and experience reports refer to one of them, with similar frequency, without really giving much guidance on when to use which one of these approaches. This creates a confusion whether one is using the right approach. While a method must not be used for the sake of using a method, it is important to understand why, if at all, a given approach is likely to be more effective in a given context.

In this talk, I will compare and contrast these two approaches and address the following key questions:

1. Why do we have two (or more) approaches to product discovery?
2. What, if any, are the fundamental differences between these two approaches? 
3. How can I decide which approach is likely to work better in a given situation?

The talk will focus on contemporary literature, expert guidance, industry data points, and author's own experiences, and will provide action guidance for the practitioners to apply in their daily work. 

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.

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

By working with some of the most successful tech-product companies, I realised that code is NOT an asset, it's a liability. We should strive hard to minimise code. In 2011, when I started to hack on ConfEngine, I questioned my belief in TDD. I had also started playing around with APL style Array-Programming and Functional Programming. I felt, may be, I was getting a bit too dogmatic about TDD and automated tests in-general. As a thought experiment, I decided to build ConfEngine without ANY automated test. At first, it was really scary not to have the safety-net of automated test (something I took for granted for almost a decade.)

As I scaled ConfEngine without any automated tests, I had certain interesting realisations:

• How to embrace Simplicity and Minimalism WITHOUT automated tests
• Why Throwing Away Code frequently helps you achieve a better decoupled-design and how this helps in better experimentation
• Fear of Refactoring WITHOUT Tests is over-rated (Good IDE and safe-refactoring techniques can take you a long way)

ConfEngine grew from a pet-project to a 8 member product team. It has over 60K users and has done financial transactions worth over half-million USD. And we continue to push forward without ANY automated tests. Its not perfect, but it has certainly helped me challenge my dogma around TDD.

Background: In 2001, I stumbled upon the Test Infected paper. For the next 2 years, I struggled to really apply the test-first concept on real projects. Finally in 2003, I felt that I had fully internalised TDD and was able to apply on almost all projects. Then I started playing around with FIT and FitNesse, using ATDD on some of the projects. In 2006 I published "Avatars of TDD" paper in which I explained various styles of TDD and its design implications. Until 2011, I was a very big advocate of TDD, ATDD and BDD. I still like those practices, however I would not recommend it in all projects.