In the past decade, Agile development has become mainstream in software development and now is spreading beyond software to other domains. It is crucial for leaders and managers to understand how to build, develop, and lead Agile teams - not just for the organization but their careers. Ray Arell introduces a cohesive set of methods, practices, and principles to maximize business results from Agile and lean development, while also cultivating a workplace where people thrive. The workshop topics are highly dynamic and customizable, and more than 80 percent of the discussion will be based on participants’ interests. Possible topics include Agile mindset, shared leadership models, building great teams, work environment, resources, transformation vision, creating common goals, experiments, value delivery, dealing with global culture, common Agile methods, lean - and much more. Join Ray in a workshop that has been taught to more than 2000 change agents, executives, and managers worldwide. Expand your abilities and tools in leading Agile transformations in your organization.

You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. These strategies take advantage of hardwired traits: “liking”—we like people who are like us; “reciprocity”—we repay in kind; “social proof”—we follow the lead of others similar to us; “consistency”—we align ourselves with our previous commitments; “authority”—we defer to authority figures; and “scarcity”—we want more of something when there is less to be had. Learn how to build on these traits as a way of bringing others to your side. Use this valuable toolkit in addition to the logical left-brain techniques on which we depend.

This is the first Agile HR certification in the world, being offered from ICAgile and it leads to ICAgile Certified Professional – Agile Talent. For HR and managers, agile is basically a way of thinking how organizations should respond to a complex and changing world. By increasingly developing flexibility and adaptability and working in short feedback loops as well as providing autonomy and transparency you can increase learning and value creation for the customer. More and more organizations are now seeing the value in applying the agile mindset also in HR and management, both in the internal work but perhaps most importantly how an HR department helps to support an organization’s agility. When traditional processes focus on command and control, an agile HR-functions role is to create value and support unique needs.

As the world changes at an unprecedented pace, imagine if organisations could navigate through change and use it as an opportunity to get better, rather than simply getting through. This unique program offers an intense, strategic appreciation for leaders and practitioners to understand the ingredients to create an Agile organisation that is responsive to value creation in a disruptive environment.

This practical workshop is designed to help you to speed your business up, to focus on what’s important, reduce waste and red tape and, most importantly deliver value to your business and your customers. This foundation is essential for leaders to jumpstart learning on how to thrive in uncertainty and create organisational success.

The ICP-BAF Certification from ICAgile is granted on the successful completion of this workshop, the subsequent 2 webinars, and a written submission. To obtain the certificate there is an additional $100 USD fee to be paid to ICAgile.

Have you heard the terms “Design Thinking” or “Human-Centered Design” and thought, “That sounds cool, but what exactly is it?” In this full-day, hands-on workshop, the Cooper Team will introduce you to the power of Design Thinking. You’ll learn the process of this strategic problem-solving approach, and how it can help you and your organization rethink the products, services, and experiences you offer to both internal and external audiences. The workshop will allow you to learn and practice a few Design Thinking tools and empower you to make your work more collaborative, innovative, and effective.

Hands-on development of asynchronous micro-services using a bus architecture.

While “micro-services” is becoming a heavily over-worked term, it has been interpreted many ways. In this hands-on workshop, we will explore a particular style, tiny asynchronous services, that was the core of one of the most successful implementations. Given an animated specification of flow, we will embark on delivering the proposed services, wrestling with the issues common to this new paradigm. Participants have a choice of languages, with new starting code in Java, C#, and Ruby. At the end of the workshop, we will discuss MicroServices challenges and organizations that are optimized for such architectures.

Get an in-depth understanding of the agile management model Beyond Budgeting, from background to philosophy to its 12 principles covering both leadership and management. Benefit from Bjarte’s long Beyond Budgeting implementation experience in two large organisations, starting in the mid-nineties, before Beyond Budgeting was born.

Understand how to trust and empower without losing control. Learn how to redefine performance – with dynamic and relative targets (or no targets at all) and a holistic performance evaluation. The workshop will also cover dynamic forecasting and resource allocation without budgets. Discover other examples of self-regulating management mechanisms, including transparency. Bjarte will also share insights into KPI pitfalls, the bonus ‘problem’, and the relationship between Beyond Budgeting and Agile.

You will also hear about companies all over the world who have embarked on this journey, including the Statoil story, Scandinavia's largest company which kicked out the budget (and much more) in 2005.

I have given several presentations about the use of stories instead of science in our industry, so I thought I should try to be more helpful and give a session on experiments. No, this is not too rigorous! I am not going to talk about statistics! I am going to talk about cheap, easy experiments, what to do, what to be aware of, including our cognitive biases. I share some of my experiences with teams who are really doing it. My goal is to encourage everyone to be a bit more methodical in decision-making and to replace "that won't work" with "how can we test it." I hope that participants will walk out the door with a plan in hand for one or more experiments to run in their workplace. I also hope to improve the scientific vocabulary a bit and describe some cognitive biases that get in the way of decision-making.

In the 21st century, organisations need to

• Put the customer in the centre of our focus
• Shed outdated ways of thinking
• Embrace an agile mindset
• Incorporate new ways of working
• Leverage the pace of change for competitive advantage

This talk explores what it means to be agile in a business context. It looks at the key elements needed, how they are interwoven and what is needed for organisations to transform their thinking and behaviour into new ways of working.

Business Agility is about putting the customer at the centre of the organization’s focus, changing from measuring activities to outcomes and creating an ecosystem which unleashes the productivity and innovation already present in the people in the organisation.

For decades, product development has been focused mostly on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the actual goal - delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value solutions. He includes an overview of heuristics and models that are critical to solutions - safe-to-fail probes, sensemaking for product requirements capture, the Kano model, the Cynefin framework, the Three-Circle model, Beer’s viable system, and other proven industry models that enable a coherent approach to solutions development. Join Ray as he resets the epidemic of activity-based thinking. Agile - or any other method/activity - is not the destination. It is time to move to a mindset of high-value delivery.

Corporate cultures, global mindsets, and employee priorities are changing, which means management and human resources departments must also evolve. To ensure teams are well crafted, motivated, and successful, managers and HR professionals must step outside their comfort zone and adapt to younger, newer ways of thinking - they must become Agile.

In this talk, management consultant Pia-Maria Thoren outlines how managers, human resources professionals, company decision-makers, and employees can adopt the flexible, fluid, customer-focused mindset of modern tech companies to inspire their workers and strengthen their organizations.

Ever feel like the market moves faster than your marketing team? Or, wonder how flexible your finance (& leadership!) teams would really be if self-direction glitched and blew $1M? Organizations introduce Agile believing it will lead in part to greater responsiveness and resiliency. Yet, why do so many fail to achieve those outcomes?

It isn’t just that they’re structured and operated by default along hierarchical lines rather than by design for iterative work. Achieving the full benefits of Agile comes from shifting the culture and mindset of a whole organization, sometimes as radically as encouraging it to “Make New Mistakes.” This very philosophy was a driver in the fastest division in HP’s history to reach $1B, a hardware division that was focused on manufacturing operations, with razor thin margins, and markets that changed 3x faster than the development lead time.

Through a series of short stories and exercises, attendees will explore 5 practices from that business which led to roaring success. We’ll probe their parallels in Lean / Agile practice. With each one, you’ll briefly self-inspect the state of your own organization, as well as create a backlog you can use to adapt in your “real world” beyond the conference.

Do you have, or want, a vision that takes you beyond high performing teams, to a high performing, resilient business? Come hear how you can help your organization shift from mechanics that “do” Agile, and walk away with a feel for what’s possible when not just development, but a whole organization surfs the flow of “being” Agile.

A true agile business transformation can’t result from simply “trying harder” in using known agile methods only because agile has no answer to such questions as legal organizational structure strategy, inspiration, or the role of support departments such as finance or HR.

For this reason, necessary key components for a successful enterprise agile transformation must be found outside of agile in other streams of development. These other streams can more readily guide us in developing:

• Continuous improvement strategies necessary to enable self-sufficiency and adaptation in every department - not just the software department.
• The executive and board roles in driving organizational agility.
• Processes, strategies, and structures that enable the current culture to self-organize for company-wide agility.

We suggest “BOSSA nova” as a composite of four streams of development that, together, can lead us toward a broad enterprise agile transformation. The acronym stands for: B = Beyond Budgeting, OS = Open Space, S = Sociocracy, and A = Agile. Bossa nova, the style of music, is a synthesis of samba and jazz. Similarly BOSSA nova, the enterprise strategy, is a synthesis of different streams of development. Bossa nova is also an intricate dance, where dancers adapt their steps to the music, and their movements and their spirit in turn influences the musicians. In the same way, BOSSA nova helps your company adapt to its complex context and also influence that context. And finally, Bossa nova in Portuguese means new trend, new wave - which is how we envision a true business agility transformation.

In this session, I will focus on the OSS in BOSSA nova and how those two streams of development (Open Space and Sociocracy) can be leveraged for a successful agile business transformation. These two components focus on answering the questions about the strategy for the legal organizational structure and the incorporation of the inspiration.

Many in the agile community suggest abandoning performance reviews, but few offer suggestions for alternatives. A large percentage of software developers work in an enterprise environment where performance reviews are mandated. What if you could do performance reviews that will honor agile values and not only suck less, but actually provide value to the individual and the organization? We have rolled out such a system successfully with strong support across the enterprise--from the individual colleagues, to people leaders, and even including HR. We will demonstrate the principles and the specific implementation of our system which you can tailor to your organization’s values and constraints.

Business Agility is achieved through proactive & quick sensing of Customer/Market needs and fulfilling those needs through end to end collaboration of Customers, Business Functions and Solution Delivery Functions in a seamless flow. Apart from technology and process elements, the critical success factor for such functioning is the mindset and culture aspects of people and organization units across the value chain. Mindfulness is a great tool to develop Emotional Intelligence which is the bedrock of leadership tenets for Agility Culture like proactiveness & self-organizing, cross-functional collaboration and facilitative leadership styles.

This session covers a case study of Enterprise wide Mindfulness transformation in a 2000+ strong global Technology company. The session covers aspects of:

• Creation of a [email protected] framework called BE-DO Framework – Being Mindful and Doing Mindfully. Being Mindful by Being Aware, Alive and Calm; Doing Mindfully by Perceiving Immersivity, Processing non-judgmentally and Performing Empathetically.
• Mindfulness techniques and practices at individual level like BreathWatch, BodyScan, Balanced Breathing, Journaling.
• Organizational and Team ceremonies to inculcate Mindfulness as part of work practices like Mindful Meeting, Sense Walk.
• Results captured after 6 weeks of practice of Mindfulness practices by the participants on Personal Wellbeing, Personal Effectiveness and Professional Performance.
• Organizational Change Management including unique role called Happiness Evangelist.

The session will be a joint presentation by the Happiness Evangelist and the Mindfulness Coach.

You have tried Scrum, Kanban, XP, Crystal and other even less known frameworks and methods that claim to help you to become Agile. You have applied them pure, you have tried to tweak them, and even you have made some homemade cocktails out of them. So yet you still can't say your company is Agile. Your Cxx-s are willing to change the company, and themselves. Your employees on all levels genuinely want to step into the Agile journey. Yet there is nearly no progress toward a real organizational agility.

What is the secret? Why is it so hard? Why there are so many crashes on this way in our industry? Why most of the companies will still fail to become Agile, and yours will most probably too.

I'm going to answer all these questions during this talk. We will figure out what aspects of a large-scale agile transformation have a mission-critical impact and how they influence each other. Where to put your efforts? How to cut corners? And moreover, how to survive on this journey.

If you think fighter pilots execute in a top down command and control hierarchy - think again. F-16 fighter pilots understand very well why that would not work and how to actually thrive as collaborating teams in complex and uncertain situations. While the environment might look very different from our business world on the surface, you might be in for big surprise on how usefull the fighter pilot way of thinking about and solving the challenges, we are also struggling with in the agile world actually are. The solutions are sometimes similar and sometimes taken one step further then what most business yet dare to do. This talk will both give you practical advise and inspire you to take the next step towards business agility.

Seeing the increasing complexity and dynamics in our business and organizational environment, a large, 2000 people product development organization within Ericsson started the journey towards Agile in 2008. We early understood, that this journey can only be successful, if it is not only done by our SW development, but also involves changes in the way we run strategy, financial planning and HR.

In this talk, Hendrik Esser, who has been one of the key drivers of this change, will share experiences from that journey.

He will share how we got the essential parts of business planning, finance, HR and SW development aligned towards business agility: what we found, what we tried, what succeeded, our set-backs and lessons learned.

Developing the capacity to thrive in uncertainty calls for a radical change in our way of thinking (mindset), working, and behaving. We will walk through some differentiating and thought provoking 1st Principles and practical insights to breakout of old mental models and patterns; and share a proven and practical framework. We will also share case studies from Silicon Valley and Large Enterprise Business Agility transformations and will walk away with a practical playbook and tools we can apply to accelerate our own Business Agility Transformation.

Diversity. It's the topic of the hour. Organisations are all putting 'diversity' and 'equal opportunities' on every job ad. But, for some organisations it still seems to be a struggle.

What's the goal? Do we want diverse teams because it's the "right thing to do" or is it "good for our teams and organisations"? Are we hiring minorities to keep up with quotas or our competition?

This talk will engage the audience in a frank discussion on what diversity is, why we need it and how we might achieve it. Guiding attendees through the latest research with practical exercises to demonstrate the issues and open discussion to find answers to the following questions:

• What does diversity mean? How does it relate to me?
• Why does diversity matter in effective teams?
• How can teams where everyone is different be effective?
• How can we increase diversity in our organisations?
• Is positive discrimination a feasible and ethical way to achieve diversity in our organisations?
• How can I employ a diverse group, when they are not applying?

Diversity is no longer just a moral imperative, it's critical to effective organisations.

- The Statoil implementation journey

- The problems with traditional management, including budgeting

- The Beyond Budgeting principles and companies on the journey

- Statoil's "Ambition to Action" model;

- redefining performance - dynamic and relative with a holistic performance evaluation

- dynamic forecasting and resource allocation and no traditional budgets

- from calendar-driven to event-driven; a more self-regulating management model

- Implementation experiences and advice

"Shipping is not success; let it sail" has been my mantra. Many organizations fall into the trap of project-based thinking and for them launching a product/service is success. We should step back and ask, "by launching this product/service, has it created any value (economic or otherwise) for the business and/or customers?" If the answer is no/not-sure, then it's premature to celebrate. Organizations want to achieve certain goals, expressed via measurable outcomes. Unless we see quantitative progress on those outcomes, our job is not done.

In this session, Naresh will share his experience helping organizations shift from project/output based thinking to product/outcome-based thinking. Not just at one team level, but at the entire organization level. Once we have the thinking in place, then how do we create a governance model which brings transparency and encourages collective ownership.

Is your next strategic initiative doomed to fail? According to a Brightline Initiative's survey, conducted by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU, 2017) with 500 senior executive leaders across the globe, only one in ten organizations successfully reach all of their strategic goals. On average, organizations fail to delivery 20 percent of their strategic projects. Ricardo Vargas, Executive Director of The Brightline Initiative, will share some insights and key findings of the research and discuss what Leaders are doing to successfully deliver their strategic objectives. Ricardo will draw connections between the research findings and the Brightline’s 10 Guiding Principles to help organizations close the expensive strategy-implementation gap.

All big organizations, even so-called "flat" or "networked" ones, are usually quite hierarchical in decision making. Any talk of Holacracy, Teal etc. is unrealistic in these places. In this presentation, Sriram argues that the underlying problem is not hierarchy itself but the opaqueness of decision making which is known to persist even in the absence of a formal hierarchy. He presents Cleararchy as a way to bring transparency, and thereby accountability and learnability, to decision making. This is necessary for decentralized decision making and true empowerment at lower levels of a big organization.

OzHarvest is Australia’s leading food rescue organisation, collecting quality excess food from commercial outlets and delivering it directly to more than 1000 charities supporting people in need across the country. The Commonwealth Bank is Australia's leading financial services institution.

During the talk I will share the story of how a few of us at CommBank helped Ozharvest adopt Agile to improve how they run their business. The outcome of the session is to stress the importance of helping our community with Agile, and I hope that people will be inspired to try something like this themselves. The session is also a good example of a non technology Agile story that will be helpful to business people.

Introduction

Having a clear purpose in both life and work is essential to happiness. Science and business support this view. Companies with a clear purpose perform better than companies without. Purpose is increasingly mentioned as the key to navigate the volatile and complex world we live in. And, people with a purpose in their life, live longer and are healthier. However, finding your purpose, your personal, team and companies purpose, is not an easy task. In this workshop we discuss what purpose means and what the key elements of a sustainable and meaningful purpose are. By playing the Purpose Journey Game, we elaborate the four steps to identify the company or team purpose and build your business around it.

Outline:

After sharing our knowledge, insights from science and best practices, we will immerse in the subject by playing the Purpose Journey Game. We play the game in small groups (pressure cooker experience). By answering questions, role-plays and discussion participants will experience the method and learn how to find the purpose of their company or team.

An Organisation is a living system build of people and their interactions. When a system is "threat" it reacts with preservation behaviours. Change and innovation are threats, from a system's status quo perspective, so change is hard, and innovation stops when creative workshops end. To preserve the status quo the system needs to (have the illusion to) stay in control, therefore a good number of activities such as risk analysis, estimations, reporting, are set in place to "control the future", so it will be the way we want it to be. These activities we need to perform to reinforce the self-reassurance on our capability to "control the future" self- have a cost. I call it the cost of fear.

The workshop offers an experimental space to eventually limit "the cost of fear", ie. those '"mandatory" activities driven by our self-reassurance related needs as stakeholders, rather than by a valuable outcome. It is designed to address test teams organisations, but it can be extended to a wider scale if required by the participants.

The world is changing more rapidly than ever before and organisations of every size are struggling to remain relevant in the eyes of their customers. The simple fact that the average lifespan of a company has decreased by more than 50 years in the last century demonstrates that not all organisations are prepared for this new reality. It is only high-performing, adaptable and agile organisations that will leverage, lead and thrive in this ambiguous and unpredictable market. We call this business agility.

The problem with a statement like that is that there is no common definition of what business agility means. And that’s actually a good thing. In a dynamic and changing market trying to lock it down will defeat the very advantage it brings. Instead, I want you to start thinking of business agility as the common thread. An adaptable and sustainable narrative that binds & guides, rather than directs, us into the uncertain future.

This talk will share the state of business agility around the world. We'll look at the Domains of Business Agility, interspersed with case studies from 4 multinational organisation in both the banking and utilities sector .

When faced with seemingly endless choices and a world moving at an increasing speed, how do you evaluate strategic options with speed and precision?

As a leader with over 30 years experience in sales, marketing and corporate roles within tech companies, Andy Cooper has pondered this problem for many years. Andy will explain how using concepts borrowed from Lean, Lean Startup, Agile Software Development, Beyond Budgeting and other adaptive approaches, you can create a highly effective process to make and evaluate decisions using a Value Engineering approach with the benefit that it can be used in multiple situations including evaluating product direction, strategic initiatives, or personal situations evolving value-based thinking.

In the session, Andy will walk through an example and show how this can be applied to solve many other tough value-based problems. Andy will also share how he has used this approach to solve sales and marketing challenges in the companies he has worked for.

Agile management has become necessary to survive, but is it enough to thrive? Many organizations have embraced Agile management on the assumption that if they upgrade existing products and services through cost reductions, time savings or quality enhancements for existing customers (i.e. operational Agility), they will realize financial gains. Owing to increased competitive pressures, this assumption often proves incorrect and consequently top management support for Agile often flags. It turns out that major financial gains are more likely to come from Strategic Agility, i.e. generating innovations that create entirely new products and markets, and that turn non-customers into customers. Strategic Agility is the next frontier of Agile management. The profit margins are bigger, and the value to society is often larger. Steve will show what’s involved in achieving Strategic Agility, including a playbook for systematically generating market-creating innovations and the necessary shift in culture that is required.

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.

Dan's talk will explore the practical steps that user experience teams can take to have a more positive impact on peoples' lives, and on society as a whole. Based on personal experience building products for Microsoft, Google, Capital One and Walmart, this is a call to action to user experience professionals to deploy their craft as an expression of humble service and to make their work more human, authentic and real.

An unstoppable revolution is now underway in our society, affecting almost everyone. The revolution is very simple. Today, organizations are connecting everyone and everything, everywhere, all the time. Knowledge is being shared on the fly. What has become possible is now increasingly necessary. Continuous innovation is the performance requirement for the 21^st Century organization, with instant, intimate, frictionless value at scale. To accomplish this, firms must embrace an Agile mindset and implement the three laws of Agile management: the Law of the Customer, the Law of the Small Team and the Law of the Network. Leaders must also recognize that the revolution is about “being Agile,” not just "doing Agile" or “implementing Agile processes.” In the Agile world of continuous innovation, diligent employees who simply follows orders can’t get the job done. Instead, firms must inspire innovation through an initiative, commitment, smarts, and passion. Agile is about creating workplaces that enable human beings to contribute their full talents to something worthwhile and meaningful—creating value for other human beings.

A deliverable is only as good as the idea that inspired it.

Fortunately, there is a method for anyone to generate inspired ideas.

In this workshop, you will learn and practice three skills that empower individuals and teams to generate (and actualize) compelling ideas. You’ll get hands-on practice with the latest ideating techniques, learn ways to generate detailed ideas so you can get meaningful feedback, and tricks for iterating your way forward so that your ideas become the inspiration behind user-centered deliverables.

"Great stories happen to those who can tell them" - Ira Glass

‘The Art of Business Storytelling’ a bite-sized workshop packed with frameworks and techniques that product developers and business leaders can use to tell the story of their product. If you have struggled with compressing your story into an elevator pitch or wondered how to weave numbers and data into narrative, then this workshop is for you. Ameen will share how to convey complex ideas in the form of simple, yet inspiring narrative, leaving every participant with not just techniques and frameworks but also a ‘bank of stories’ that they can start using immediately.

New technologies are driving a revolution in customer expectations, fueling a wave of competition which threatens the very existence of businesses with aging structures, processes and cultures. Many companies are turning to methodologies like agile, big data and design to not only drive innovation but to attempt profound internal organizational change.

This is the story of how design is helping transform BBVA — one of the world’s oldest, largest, and most traditional banks. At BBVA, design is not only creating more innovative products and services for customers, it is reshaping the organization and culture into a more customer-centric, collaborative and innovation-friendly entity.

Because the story is still being written, this is not yet a case study but rather a report from the field and an invitation to the conversation. We will explore the changing role of design vis-a-vis business and technology, where design should live in our organizations, how to get the most impact out of design and how to grow an internal design culture — not just in the Design Department — but throughout the entire organization.

We live in accelerated times where digital technology is transforming and restructuring our world in very interesting ways. As technologies race ahead - and intelligent machines shrink the gap between machine and human abilities - our skills and organizations lag behind. For many, this lag predicts bad news. How do we compete in a world where robotics and voice recognition automate many low-skilled positions and improvements in communications and collaboration technology motivate companies to outsource key roles to experts, leaving local talent underemployed? How do we get ahead of the curve? How do we innovate and reinvent ourselves? How do we develop a culture of innovation - a culture of experimentation; with the team at the core? In this presentation, we will draw from the insight of an education non-profit that is in the process of changing its culture - and its business model.

"Good ideas come from everywhere. It's more important to recognize a good idea than to author it." ― Jeanne Gang

You are surrounded by smart people, but are you really getting the most from that brilliance when it comes to creative ways to solve problems in your products?

Design Studio is a structured technique that involves many people coming up with prototype solutions to a single problem at once. It will help generate new ideas and share a nuanced understanding among your team about the problem you are solving and who you are solving it for. Better yet, it doesn't require much facilitation skill or prep.

I have used this technique to help teams increase their understanding of the problem, visualize the needs they were requesting, quickly experiment with new ideas, and provide detailed input to the design process. Often, the sketch (or a photo of it) acts as the deliverable for simple problems, eliminating the need for more formal wireframes.

This interactive workshop will give you a brief overview of the Design Studio tool and then guide you through an immersive and collaborative experience on how it works. By the end, you will be able to speak about the benefits of the technique as well as run it with your own teams.

This technique is accessible to everyone. You don’t need any special software and anyone on the team can use it.

We all know that innovative organizations are more successful. But how does happiness at work fit into the equation? Definitely, there is a link between happiness, creativity, innovation, and success in organizations. In this interactive workshop, you will learn about Happiness at work and use the method of Design Thinking to enhance Happiness in your team. How can Design Thinking lead to a happier and stronger (agile) team? We will provide practical tips on how to empower your creativity, empathy and thus happiness at work.

Enterprise users are demanding great software experiences, but the demand seems to be outpacing the ability to supply designers at many companies. And even if you could meet demand, how do you maintain consistent user experience across an enterprise? Come hear the story behind how ExxonMobil introduced an enterprise-wide design system to help scale great UX practices, enhance designer/developer interactions, and accelerate development of applications across the company.

Have you ever wondered why customers who say they will use your solutions, don't? There is a big gap between customer intention and real behavior. As human beings, we often speak in the form of our intention rather than describing our behavior, which makes it hard to build deep empathy with the customer. Deepa Bachu will share techniques on how to really understand your customers even better than they know themselves. She will teach you to go deeper than interviewing and observing your customers, giving you methods by which to discover what drives them and to grasp their needs and challenges.

Most, if not all disruptive innovations have started with a deep insight, one that inspires innovation. There is an art to deeply understanding customers and connecting the dots in ways that provide these customer insights. It is in the observations, in understanding their coping mechanisms and their ecosystem that you can truly design solutions that are delightful, and design for disruption and change.

ING has been undergoing a large-scale transformation with respect to how we work. From waterfall to end-to-end agile, from a few, large, manually controlled IT changes per year to ten thousands of fully automated changes per month. From outsourcing where ING thinks and partners do to co-sourcing where thinking and doing is distributed with the partners. We have become proud but intrinsically face the risk we focus too strongly on how we work and forget what we do. Hence the strong focus on strategy definition, a QBR process, and Obeya rooms being the start and end of design thinking.

In a recent publication by the National Center for Women & Information Technology, it was found that gender diversity at top management levels improves companies’ financial performance - yet the numbers show that we're far behind in hitting goals of balancing leadership roles. Join an international panel of leaders from design and tech for presentations and a town hall discussion. Learn how these individuals develop goals and practices to move toward leadership equality while addressing the similarities and differences between American, European, and Asian cultures and the way we work together.

Panel
Sue Cooper, Co-Founder, Cooper
Reema Diwan, Corporate Director - Technical Services & Interiors, Taj Hotel
Mary Wharmby, Head of Design Transformation, BBVA
Deepa Bachu, Co-Founder & CEO, Pensaar
Poornima Girish, General Manager – Digital Development, Shell
Sujitha Karnad, CEO, Sekai Solutions

Facilitated by
Teresa Brazen, Senior Director of Professional Education, Cooper

Great service experiences involve elegant orchestration of all the moments customers engage with your company, whether they are using your product, engaging with an app or website, visiting a physical space calling an 800 number, or receiving an SMS alert. In this workshop, you’ll get acquainted with tools that will help you see your customer’s entire journey with your service clearly, identify ways to make it more seamless and delightful, and unite your organization in delivering on this vision.

In this workshop, you’ll learn to:

• Understand service design as it relates to a product and services company.
• Map the entire customer/user journey across all existing and future touchpoints that allow for your company to service your customers in a delightful manner.
• Understand individual touchpoints and the moments within each touchpoint that allow for a positive service experience.
• Design a service that mixes digital and non-digital interactions.
• Identify opportunities for your service to evolve and grow.

Design Dive (D2) is a 2-hour programme that offers leaders and managers a simulative experience of the powerful process of Design Thinking. The workshop offers a design challenge that provides an overview of the steps of Design Thinking through a quick hands-on experience of application and feedback.

Amazon Alexa, the cloud based voice service that powers Amazon Echo, provides access to thousands of skills that enable customers to voice control their world, whether it’s listening to music, controlling their smart home devices, listening to the news, or even ordering a pizza. This talk will provide an Introduction to the Alexa Skills Kit - how it works and a deep dive of the tech behind it. The talk will also cover basic concepts like intents, utterances, and slots while touching upon the principles of designing for voice interfaces.

At Google, we believe it is critical to get user feedback frequently and consistently so that we are able to iterate and develop the best-in-class designs for our users. In this talk, we will discuss different UX Research methodologies that have helped various teams in order to put new ideas, designs, and concepts in front of users on a regular basis. We will also share some of the best practices that we have gathered by applying these methods to various of our products.

Biases are mental shortcuts for decision making. It’s like applying automatically and subconscious a rule of thumb. That is fast and saves energy but can lead to errors. To build great customer experiences, it's a no-brainer that we need to keep the customer at the center, understand their needs & pain points, but the problem interpretation & proposed solution often gets overpowered by our cognitive biases. For a product manager & designers, these biases can lead to bad decisions. But being aware of these biases and keeping them at bay, with a sound data-driven design approach can save the day.

I'll be talking about some real-life examples of such situations and share experience/ learnings on how we approached it in past.

Agile development has fixed lots of problems in software development, Companies using it consistently deliver working software more predictably than ever before. But, the software they make isn't necessarily better, or more successful in the market. Because the things we need to do to make a product successful aren't baked into agile development. And, in fact, strict adherence to common agile practice can result in even worse products.

This talk explains why and gives you 5 concrete changes to Agile development you can make to improve things. These aren't things your product owner or product manager must do. They're the things the whole team need to do. And, they're not easy things. But, they're necessary if you want to more consistently make products people love.

Governments the world over are beginning to recognise the need to embrace digital change and transform how they provide services. A pioneer of that was the UK which in 2011 began an ambitious programme of digital change, led by a new unit called the Government Digital Service. Over five years they transformed users' experience of dozens of government services, saved billions of pounds in the process, and embedded significant new capabilities across government. James Stewart was one of the founders of that unit and led much of its work on technology and security. He'll share some lessons from that journey and how they can be used for others on a similar journey in any complex organisation (not just governments).

You have great ideas. You're smart. The people in your organization are smart. Post Hoc, Ergo Propter Hoc -- the rest is easy -- simply make a transition plan and transparently explain the benefits. These and other organizational change myths will be tackled by Linda's talk about patterns for introducing new ideas. She will provide some useful tips for helping you start on Monday morning to grow, step by step, any innovation.

Most organizations today have adopted IT infrastructure automation tools and dynamic infrastructure platforms such as private or public clouds. However, the technology alone isn't enough to help IT respond quickly and reliably to changing opportunities and challenges. At worst they can lead to a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" situation, where the ability to rapidly spin up new infrastructure leads to a sprawl of poorly maintained systems.

Infrastructure as Code is an approach to managing infrastructure that leverages software engineering practices. Companies like Netflix, Facebook, and Etsy have pioneered a new generation of principles and practices for IT change management. IT teams who have adopted these ideas find that they can not only make changes far more frequently than they could with old ways of working, but they can actually increase the reliability, security and quality of their IT services.

Twitter has rapidly evolved in how we do Machine Learning over the last few years. We rapidly evolved from making incremental improvements to our existing Logistic Regression models to a wave of new Deep Learning architectures. At the same time, we were faced with the challenge of uneven distribution of ML expertise across the company. This is the story of the Cortex team that enabled this machine learning transformation across the entire company by making a set of careful strategic investments.

The ever-increasing computational capacity has enabled us to acquire, process and analyze larger data-sets and information. We increasingly want to take a data-driven lens to solve business problems. But business problems are inherently 'wicked in nature' - with multiple stakeholders, different problem definition, different solutions interdependence, constraints, amplifying loops etc.

There is no one trick to solve them. What is required is learning a structured approach to problem-solving that can be applied to a large set of these problems. One possible way is to use a Hypotheses Driven Approach - problems definition, scoping, issue identification and hypothesis generation - as a starting point for this. In this workshop, you will learn how to apply a hypothesis-driven approach to any business problem through seven pragmatic steps:

1. Frame
2. Acquire
3. Refine
4. Transform
5. Explore
6. Model
7. Insight

The focus will be to learn the principles through an applied case study and using an iterative and agile methodology.

The digitalization calls for rapid organizational flexibility and adaptability. This has an impact on all dimensions of a company: its strategy, structure, and the processes. Agile will help implementing some of this flexibility and adaptability yet mainly in terms of processes. Thus, the digital transformation needs companies to change beyond Agile. Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, and Sociocracy provide the missing links for a company to fully embrace digitalization. The combination of these concepts enables a company not only to survive but also to thrive (digital) disruptions.

"It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory." - W. Edwards Deming

Work takes time to flow through an organization and ultimately be deployed to production where it captures value. It’s critical to reduce time-to-production. Software - for many organizations and industries - is a competitive advantage.

Organizations break their larger software ambitions into smaller, independently deployable, feature -centric batches of work - microservices. In order to reduce the round-trip between stations of work, organizations collapse or consolidate as much of them as possible and automate the rest; developers and operations beget "devops," cloud-based services and platforms (like Cloud Foundry) automate operations work and break down the need for ITIL tickets and change management boards.

But velocity, for velocity's sake, is dangerous. Microservices invite architectural complexity that few are prepared to address. In this talk, we'll look at how high-performance organizations like Ticketmaster, Alibaba, and Netflix make short work of that complexity with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud.

Drawing on his experience advising clients on platform adoption, James Lewis explores the benefits that platforms can bring, the organizational limitations that make platform adoption attractive, how we currently overcome these limitations, and the paradigm shift in thinking needed to get the most out of them.

Leadership is a dance of stepping up to provide guidance and then stepping back to let the team deliver. This is easier said than done. As one of the co-authors of the book “Stand Back and Deliver,” Todd will demonstrate some of the tools that he has used to help with this leadership dance. These tools include:

• Purpose Alignment Model
• Context Leadership Model
• Business Value Model
• Trust Ownership Model

Dr.Bauer and her team have been working to build genome-scale data pipelines that address the computational challenges and limits present in today’s cancer genomic (bioinformatics) data workflows.

Dr. Bauer and her team have built solutions which use modern architectures, such as serverless (AWS Lambda) and also customised machine learning on Apache Spark. AWS Community Hero. The CSIRO team is pushing solutions at the cutting edge of bioinformatics research which best utilizes advances in cloud technologies.

In this demo-filled session, Dr.Denis will discuss and demonstrate some of the work they’ve done in the bioinformatics research.

Architects in the enterprise are often regarded as ivory tower residents who bestow their utopian plans upon project teams in the form of colorful diagrams that bear little to no resemblance to reality. The most suspicious in this group are often the "Enterprise Architects" who are perceived as being furthest from actual technical problems.

However, large-scale IT operation and transformation require transparency across hundreds or thousands of applications running on all sorts of middleware in data centers around the globe. The very enterprise architects are likely the only ones who stand a chance to bring transparency into such an environment and who can direct IT investments in the hundreds of millions of Euros towards modernization and run-cost reduction. This sounds a lot more exciting and valuable than drawing pictures!

This session takes a serious but light-hearted look at the role of enterprise architects in modern IT organizations.

Unikernels are specialized, single address space machine image constructed by using library operating systems and are gaining a lot of attention in the industry. Due to less amount of code deployed, they have smaller attack surface and hence improved security.

This talk describes what Unikernels are, what are their advantages & disadvantages and how are they different from containers & microkernels. It uses MirageOS as an example to show how the developer selects the minimal set of libraries which correspond to the OS constructs required for their application to run and these libraries are then compiled with the application to build sealed, fixed-purpose images which run directly on a hypervisor or hardware without an intervening OS.

This is an experience report giving challenges while building automated , AI empowered application that converts the mundane job of an IT recruiter to an augmented job.

Problem: Recruiters hated transcribing resume data into long forms to enter into our ATS (Applicant Tracking System) . Using standard resume parsers didn't help because these parsers could not understand most of the technical words in the resumes. We tried buiding our own parser using the GATE library. It worked but GATE is single threaded and runs into memory issues at scale. Also training the parser to recognize thousands of technical words would need us to invest in a large team of professionals. We had to make this work at web scale so that many users could train the parser to recognize technical terms that were common to each user's context.

The UX has to be as smooth as a prosthetic extension. The user experience should get the user dependent on and addicted to using the application. Performance assumes central role - latency of a few milliseconds can send users off to other distractions. Building user retention and loyalty is even more challenging. This report shows how the principles of "Game Thinking" can be used to engage and motivate the users to become trainers of ML/NLP algorithms.

Solution: We built a highly scalable containerized microservice to parse resumes using GATE. We deployed these Docker containers on AWS and used Kubernetes to do auto scaling which led to an amazingly fast resume parsing service which could parse a hundred resumes in less than a minute. We worked around the memory leak issue by implementing the circuit breaker pattern.

According to Raph Koster users derive pleasure by learning to use your application. We built the application to "teach" the users to "train" the parser to recognize terms that are relevant to their specific context. This is supposed to give the users a pleasurable experience and a feeling of empowerment.We will present how the progression of hypothesis-driven sprints is helping us get closer to the goal.

Organizations can improve their Agile scaling efforts by focusing on 5 common challenges: the way teams are chartered, how people come together to form teams, how their values and working agreements are protected, how they are helped to remove impediments, and how they learn to improve what they deliver based on feedback. These common challenges can derail and distract the efforts of the organization to reap the benefits of agile, empirical product delivery. This presentation discusses these challenges and strategies organizations can use to overcome them.

IoT, the prevalence of specialized interconnected devices, has invaded business and home. The myriad of devices, hubs, and APIs has created a Tower of Babel that makes the Android phone scene seem mild. Such devices are inherently less network ­reliable than previous products, primarily due to the casual attachment (convenient outlets). Add to this heterogeneous soup the security exposure that has already been exploited in DDoS attacks, and you have an environment begging for technical solutions.

We propose Asynchronous MicroServices as a solution. Borrowing a page from historical J2ME thinking and more recent implementations using IFTTT, we introduce small bridging MicroServices for the various devices. Further, also consistent with MicroServices, we keep these services very simple: They broadcast device status to an event bus, or listen for action commands to relay to the devices from the same bus. Interaction among the various IoT devices is delegated to yet another set of MicroServices.

One exemplary composite application would accept signals from motion detectors to turn on appropriate lights, or alternatively alerting the owner of unauthorized intrusion. Using the same motion detectors, lights can be dimmed and eventually turned off. Room temperatures and even audio/video gear could be adjusted as well. Using Asynchronous MicroServices, we can also set up controlled access from the outside world, rather than exposing each device with its own vulnerabilities.

Finally, we wrap up talking about the challenges of implementing this in my own flat using Hue lights, Amazon Alexa, and 4th generation Apple TV. We run these MicroServices in local containers attached to the same home network. Docker support of ARM devices enables low-cost redundancy as well.

Building and scaling data science capability is an imperative for enterprises and startups aiming to adopt a data-driven lens for their business. However, crafting a successful data-science strategy is not straightforward and requires answering the following questions:

• Strategy & Tactics: What part of the business should I target first for adoption? Should I take a jump-start approach or a bootstrap approach?
• Process & Systems: How should I set up an initial process for data science? How to integrate data-driven processes with existing business systems?
• Structure & Roles: Should I adopt a functional or a business-focused data science structure? What specialized roles should I be hiring for Data engineering, ML expert, Visualisation expert, and /or Data Analyst?
• Tools & Stack: Should I build a vertical or horizontal data science stack? How do I integrate data science models with existing applications?
• Engineering & Technical: What are the pitfalls to watch out for? How to avoid pre-mature over-engineering of data science? How to manage the ongoing technical debt for data science?
• Skills & Competencies: How do I up-skill and build differentiated data-science competency across the organization?

The speakers draw upon their experiences in setting up and advising data science teams at enterprises and startups to share best practices on how to craft a successful data strategy and then go on to execute it. The will use case-studies to discuss what worked and failure points to watch out for.

In the hospitality industry, Analytical solutions are used to price hotel rooms. These Analytical solutions must incorporate additional data feeds that represent the variables impacting hotel prices in the real world. While incorporating these data feeds like prices published by the competitors on the Web or reputation of the hotel in the social media there are unique challenges. In this case study, I want to share my experiences in solving these problems that involve understanding the hidden patterns in the data feed, resolving data sanity issues and finally incorporating these data feeds into the solution in an iterative manner. This journey requires close collaboration with not only the internal teams but also the external clients. In some cases, clients suggest enhancements to this usage of additional data feeds that need to be incorporated a relatively short timeframe. There is no one size fits all solution for using these data feeds. Additional configuration items need to build around these data feeds. In this case study, I want to share a success story in incorporating these data feeds using agile principles.

Large Insurance enterprises find difficult to renew and find new ways to transform their customer experience, improve operational process and find new business models. As an experiment they engaged an insure-tech startup to lead their digital transformation journey.. This case study is about a point of view, approaches, challenges and cultural surprises that we faced during this journey..

The more we share more we learn!!

The presentation will demonstrate why SAFe is the most widely adopted agile scaling framework by global international companies and gaining traction in India. SAFe’s practices have evolved from Agile practices and methods, Lean product development, systems thinking, and observation of successful enterprises.

This presentation will introduce the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe version 4.5), including its core values, principles, and practices, along with a roadmap for implementation. The presentation will explain the roles that are needed to successfully deliver value at scale. SAFe provides guidance and training for scaling Agile development across the portfolio, large solution, program, and team levels. The presentation will describe the most critical elements needed to realize the Framework’s benefits.

Digital success demands market-responsive teams that can truly solve problems and not just build some software. Software projects are a popular way of funding and organizing software development. They organize work into temporary, build-only teams and are funded with specific benefits projected in a business case. These methods are unsuited for these new demands. In this talk, Sriram presents an alternative to projects called Product-Mode. Product-mode uses durable, ideate-build-run teams working on a persistent business issue. Product-mode allows teams to reorient quickly, reduces their end-to-end cycle time, and allows validation of actual benefits by using short-cycle iterations while maintaining the architectural integrity of their software to preserve their long-term effectiveness. This approach is very popular among digital natives and is gaining ground with old-guard businesses.

Over 3 months John recorded over 75 hours of interviews and spoke to some of the most respected people in the industry to produce an audio documentary that attempts to answer the question “What is safety? And why is it important anyway?”

This highly interactive talk will present the findings and guide and challenge you through a journey to understanding safety. Including short interactive sessions and role play exercises to cover the following topics:

• What is safety?
• What are the elements that make a team effective?
• Is psychological safety the foundation to team performance?
• What can we all do to help foster psychological safety in our teams?
• What is the relationship between safety, stress and engagement?
• What is the profound impact of a lack of safety and engagement on society?

This talk has grown as John created the new podcast The Agile Path. The first season on this podcast is about safety in teams. John has interviewed world renowned specialists in the field; Christopher Avery, David Marquet, Jerry Weinberg, Esther Derby, Johanna Rothman, Woody Zuill and many more in over 75 hours of audio. This has been a fascinating deep dive learning experience for John and he hopes to explore these insights with the audience.

In 2017, 1 Million candidates applied for UPSC prelims exam to fill 980 vacancies. That is a 0.1% chance of getting selected. Candidates spend over a year preparing for these exams. Unlike many other exams, these exams require a lot of real-time knowledge of News and Current Affairs. Also, they need to prepare not only for objective questions but also for essay type subjective questions.

So while preparing for these exams, candidates can't just go through static content from previous years. To evaluate their answers and to give them instant feedback, we can't rely on curated content.

To address these challenges, we built India's first education platform powered by Artificial Intelligence. We provide

• instant feedback on the descriptive answers
• provide in-depth analysis of candidates strengths and weaknesses
• create a summary of current affairs with timeline, opinions and linked syllabus concepts

We believe this is the future of online education. Come to this talk to understand how digitization can disrupt current educational platforms.

A deep reflection on the continuous improvement journey post the Agile Transformation era.

In this talk, I will share our successes and failures in moving the agility needle in line with organizational goals.

Do come and learn how to roll the wheels of continuous sustainable improvements.

Shell is one of the largest energy companies in the world, with a long history in Oil & Gas. The Oil & Gas market is known for its long (multi-year) projects and pay-back periods. However, the rise of renewable energy and a changing technology landscape requires doing business differently. One of Shell’s responses to the changing environment is embracing digitalization as an opportunity, and fundamental element of doing business. Nils Kappeyne (VP & CIO of Integrated Gas & New Energies) will share his perspective on how Shell is ‘acting its way into the future’. In this key-note, Nils will explain more about the ‘digital ventures’ that are part of Shell’s New Energies business, and share how a corporation with >90,000 staff is on its way to embed digitalization in the way we do business on a daily basis.

All transformations have to start from within. This session was an attempt to create awareness on Diversity and Inclusion.

Agile methods and DevOps approaches can bring enormous benefits to an organization by increasing flexibility, reducing time-to-value, all while increasing quality. However, these are not methods you simply "adopt". They require a substantial transformation of a company's values, beliefs, and processes. For example, DevOps is about removing impediments from the flow in the software delivery to the business. Likewise, agile requires changing the way the company budgets and funds projects.

This session reflects on the experience of truly transforming IT inside a large organization as opposed to simply adopting DevOps.

People often say that they're practicing continuous delivery, and then add something like "I can let the security team know any time" or "I just have to run the performance tests." Ken Mugrage explains why you're not done with your continuous delivery journey if you can't push your software to production right now. Along the way, Ken explores code management strategies, deployment patterns, and types of continuous delivery pipelines you can use to make sure you can deploy right now.

Infrastructure as Code is a radically different way of working for many infrastructure teams, and for application teams.

Users are used to raising tickets, sending emails, or coming around to the desks of infrastructure people to ask for things to be done. Infrastructure people are used to carrying out work by following checklists and running scripts. Managers are used to having detailed designs and project plans for major work, and change request forms and change review boards to handle smaller tasks.

Infrastructure as Code is very different. Infrastructure is defined in files in source control. Change management pipelines - like application deployment pipelines - propagate changes, automatically integrating and testing changes before they are pushed into production. The end result of this is that it's possible to have much more rigorous control and assurance of infrastructure implementation and changes, with much less planning and ceremony.

This talk aims to describe the moving parts of a typical organisation using Infrastructure as Code. Moving beyond the general patterns, to looking at exactly how changes are implemented and rolled out.

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)

The tech industry thrives on the new, with leaders telling us to "move fast and break things." But what about writing software with the expectation of a lifespan longer than the average Javascript framework?

Kris has been working in the tech industry for over 20 years, and she's seen many projects and products come and go. One of her own projects is now in its second decade of life online, and she'll share with you the lessons she's learned from it. You'll learn about several key decisions that can set your project up for longterm success, and what trade-offs you can choose to make when speed is of the essence.

Modern software-based services are implemented as large scale, highly distributed systems running in cloud or data centers. Disruptive real-world events like hardware failures or software bugs can create turbulent conditions in the environments where these systems and can lead to unpredictable outcomes. Chaos Engineering is a study of system’s ability to withstand such disruptive turbulent conditions. It works by purposefully injecting failure into the production environment that mirrors the actual failure modes and monitors the recovery.

Chaos engineering uses experimentation to study effects of such disruptions. These experiments typically start by defining “steady state” of the system and come up with metrics that can be used to measure this steady state. Then various events that mirror the failure modes (aka “Chaos”) that are possible in our production environment (e.g. server crash), are injected systematically in the system in controlled environment.

Effect of the injected “Chaos” is observed by collecting and analyzing the metrics identified above. If the system is able to recover successfully, this builds confidence in system’s ability to handle an actual unplanned outage.

If a failure to recover is observed, then it becomes a target for improvement before that behavior manifests in the system at large. By continuing to run these simulations, it is possible to identify several such vulnerabilities. Fixing these vulnerabilities strengthens the system over a period of time. Extensive monitoring and logging is essential for the success of Chaos Engineering in its goal to improve the resiliency of the system.

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

Are you finding writing unit tests to be hard, time-consuming or error-prone? Is the hardest part of making a change in your production code changing all the tests that are affected? Are your tests hard to understand or change? Do you lack trust in your tests' ability to catch errors in your production code? Are all these things keeping you from writing unit tests or doing TDD?

Come see and practice techniques for making your tests easier to read and write by aligning the terminology of the tests with the terminology of the code-under-test's domain. We'll look at test code, discuss the test smells that hint at issues and demonstrate techniques that can be used to make the test code simpler, easier to understand and quicker to write.

If you have some of your own test code that you think is too complex or hard to understand, please bring it along and we can help you improve it.