Using examples from his award-winning design consultancy, Alan Cooper shares the secret to his success: working backwards. Working backwards means taking the time to ask the hard questions before wading into unfamiliar territory. It can be scary (and for some, frustrating), but it's the only way to innovate.

Story is a profoundly important device to unite design teams around a shared product vision. This powerful communication tool helps us retain information and empathize with others. As companies scale and teams sprint through product iterations, it’s easy to lose sight of how your product should fit into the lives of your customers. The best way to keep everyone pointed in the right direction is with a clear, compelling story—a story that will unite and guide teams towards success.

But how do we fold storytelling into our design practice? Aarron Walter uses real-world stories of product teams at Disney, Apple, Airbnb, Twitter, and more to show how storytelling improves team communications and elevates design practice.

Since its founding, Google has created six products that each have at least a billion monthly users. Google continues to innovate rapidly, and in many new areas. The organizing principles and cultural elements that drive this monster of innovation are a hot topic among designers. So what are they? Find out in this engaging talk by Google’s Chief Evangelist, Brand Marketing.

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is an instant computing infrastructure, provisioned and managed over the Internet. Quickly scale up and down with demand and pay only for what you use.

In this demo, we will explain and demonstrate

1. Infrascture as a Code - Key DevOps practice
2. Azure - Key Concepts
3. Script Infrastructure as code
4. Provision Infrastructure
5. Compare and Contrast Azure with other Cloud Providers like AWS / GCP

A lot of organizations don't have version control systems in place for the database. Even if they are, change scripts are being generated manually for deployment process causing significant risks to the releases. In this demo, we will demonstrate patterns that can be used for taking care of database deployments and minimizing the risks

Shared Services Teams, such as DevOps, Infrastructure, Security, Networking, etc., for a variety of reasons do not receive agile training and coaching specific to their needs. This often results in failure to consistently deliver expected outcomes, resulting in costly delays in overall delivery, often undetected until it is too late.

Shared Services Teams are expected to simultaneously:
- build assets, such as delivery pipelines, networking, cloud, infrastructure, etc. on time and on budget, and
- support Agile Development Teams and Operations, often at short notice.

These two different types of tasks are typically managed in the same way and usually as a dual priority Kanban, which is not addressing their different nature, thus causing costly delivery delays.

This talk explores this Dual Nature of work and the difficulties arising from addressing both types by a single team. The lecture presents experience with Coaching different types of Shared Services Teams.

It shows ways how their specific needs can be addressed at various agile maturity levels, including areas such as Governance, Capacity Optimisation, Supplier Reliability and Support Mix Optimisation.

Improv your coaching skills (pun intended) and your team performance! On a superficial level, improv techniques introduce play and fun into every team. On a deeper level, it helps you create a culture of safety, experimentation and true collaboration. It helps people to welcome change, uncertainty, open up and helps infuse teams and individuals with a dose of EQ. It also helps you to improve your own coaching skills! Wanna know more? Come and find out! This workshop will introduce you to improv by throwing you heads-first into one exercise after another.

How to choose a suitable programming language for developing Microservices?

We start our discussion with the most important characteristics of Microservices.

The following aspects of programming languages are discussed, keeping Microservices in mind:

• Functional Composition, we will look at some features that are missing in the most popular languages - C, C++ & Java for composing functionally, and some alternatives
• Managing Concurrency, we will look at how some programming languages are simply concurrent, thus avoiding the need of managing mutability, as we often do in C, C++ & Java
• Frameworks & Tools
• Popularity, there are the popular ones and the esoteric, but what is interesting are the ones in betweeen

We conclude by comparing some popular programming languages using these and drawing some inferences.

We will compare the three most popular languages - C, C++, Java with some multi-paradigm languages like javascript & python and with some functional languages like Scala & Erlang.

Most organizations and teams talk about DevOps practices. Most of them might find it difficult on how to get it started. If you are a Microsoft shop, this would be a good session for you and your team. In this session, we will demonstrate different DevOps practices using Visual Studio Team Services & Docker