In this age of a variety of cloud-based-services for virtual Mobile Test Labs, building a real-(mobile)-device lab for Test Automation is NOT a common thing – it is difficult, high maintenance, expensive! Yet, I had to do it!

Attend this talk to understand the Why, What and How I built my own MAD-LAB (Mobile Automation Devices LAB). The discussion will include –

• Understanding the context,
• Why no cloud-based solution worked for me,
• The automation strategy for Android / iOS / Web platform,
• The tech-stack (cucumber-jvm / Appium), and,
• The core implementation to build your own MAD-LAB! (already open-sourced)
• How this results in Continuous Delivery (CD)

Agile Principle # 12 defines that at regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly. From Scrum to Kanban and other agile frameworks, this is accomplished through retrospectives and continuos improvement processes. The key to being a successful agile practitioner is to identify areas of improvement and then experiment ways of improving it. But it doesn't stop there; positive improvements ultimately become success stories for other teams and motivates them to experiment with newer ideas which eventually leads to innovation. A negative outcome isn't bad either since it adds to the experience of situations where ideas may not apply. Thus the key to this process lies in being a child, an explorer, and inculcate an experimentation mindset. The SLICE framework addresses this in the following way:

• S hare: Share an area of improvement
• L earn: Explore the area for ways of improvement
• I mplement: Search & apply the learning to identify the success factors
• C ollateral: Publish blogs, white papers, presentations, etc. as observations of the implementation
• E xpansion: Grow, Seed, and Split in order to explore new venues for success

In this workshop, I create an environment that inculcates an experimentation mindset and utilize the SLICE framework to drive the exploration.

Session is for Lean Agile Leaders which will help them manage portfolio Agile way.

Lean Agile principles when applied to portfolio management, will help you keep pace with fast changing business by giving you a disciplined approach to implementing you strategic vision as realistic work plan.

Keeping up with the new pace of change requires light weight processes and an adaptive mindset.

It will cover the following main pillars of Agile Portfolio Management

- Work Management

- Capacity Management

- Financial Management

- Value Management

- Continuous planning

- Continuous Visibility

APM session will help you look at the portfolio in different way; and help you outpace changing business.

Session name - Outcome based agile coaching

We all want to become good agile coach. But what does that mean? How do you get better outcome from your agile coaching sessions? In this session, participants will experience how to improve outcome of your coaching session. Some areas we will focus in this session are output Vs outcome, why, what, how of coaching, how to make coaching outcome etc.

This will be a hands on workshop with very minimal guidance from facilitator. Participants will have experiential learning through the activities to understand how to align agile coaching to deliver maximum impact on business outcome.

Lies, damned lies and Statistics!

(the phrase is frequently attributed to the British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli).

Many of us work in environments that value Agility or are at least attempting to be more Agile.

We frequently turn to data, metrics, reports to help us navigate through our complex software environments, to help make sense of what's happening, to support subjective information we see around us and gain insights about the way we work.

But with the myriad of reports and metrics available to us, it is easy to misinterpret, over-analyze, overlook and generally make a big mess of things.

Through this talk, I will present some of the popular Agile reports and metrics and how they can be misread.

I will also share tips of how to counter some of these "lies".

Most often people think that when anyone has an idea, they innovate. But why is that you have people around you who have lots of idea but never get them into "existence".

The reason is that it's not with an idea that Innovation starts.

Its easier to discuss challenges to get the ideas from concept to cash. But there finer human behavioral elements when we talk about innovation and this session tries to address fundamentals of how innovations starts.

This session is mainly about the myth that "Innovation starts with an idea" backed up by research of centuries and essence from Hindu Vedas

This session had got a round of applause and appreciation in APGI 2016 conference

The Key challenge organisations are facing today is having to deal with the exponential rate of change which is happening in the external environment. The extent and pace of change is so disruptive that no organisation, regardless of age or size can take their competitive advantage or even their survival for granted.

The main reason why organisations are struggling to change is that they are modeled as mechanistic or close-ended systems. On the contrary, all natural socio-economic systems essentially which are living systems have dealt with change very effectively since eternity.

This talk is about infusing life into organisations. The speaker will highlight the key characteristics of living systems which enable them to deal with change effectively and also suggest actionable guidelines that will help leaders/influencers to bring their organisations to life. This approach will enable organisations to not only survive but thrive on change.

Over the years, with all our experience and skills, one thing has remained constant - we just can't seem to hit out deadlines! Why is this the case?

I deep dive to help explain why this would continue to be the case, unless we learn to ask the right questions and then change the way to execute to deliver to the expected deeadline. I explain how Lean thinking gives us a solid mathematical basis to understand how Cycle Time forecasting works and what we need to do improve our probability of success - not based on subjective assessment but based on actual Cycle Time distribution data.

With every product we ship, we learn what we wished we’d known: what customers *really* wanted. What if you could gain those insights before beginning development? What if you could “unit test” a product idea? Or at a bigger level, what if you could “system test” your business idea/plan?

Engineering teams are experiencing productivity gains of 30-300% when applying Agile and Lean practices and methods. These same Agile and Lean principles can be applied beyond engineering, to the business itself. Using a lightweight yet powerful tool, assumptions behind a business plan can be tested and iterated almost on-the-fly. With a hands-on exercise, attendees will learn how to build a map of any business ecosystem, and how to use it to check and iterate solution viability. Come experience the application of Agile to Business so you and your team can focus on your richest opportunities over chasing your competitor’s taillights.

Contract and Agile ? Doesn’t really sound correct, right ?

However, there is no escape from contracts in the service industry where we deliver projects for clients. In this context, the intent of this talk is to describe the limitations of traditional contracts and how contracts for Agile projects need to be different from the traditional contracts.

Overall the talk will emphasize on the key principles of Agile contracting and what are the points that need to be considered when penning down contracts in Agile projects.