Welcome to Agile India 2019

How can the entrepreneurial spirit and culture scale beyond start-up size? Holacracy® offers a radical new answer to this question, in the form of a set of tested and customizable self-management practices. With Holacracy in place, every team member gains the ability to make meaningful decisions and drive change in service of the organization’s purpose. In addition to clarifying agreements and expectations, and increasing transparency, the Holacracy approach promises to fundamentally rewire your organization’s approach to power.

Grofers doubled its revenue every 6 months for the last 2 years. In January of 2019, we did it in one month. During this time, we've gone through 2 funding crunches, brutal government regulation changes and the entrance of two behemoths (AMZ and WALL) as direct competitors.

This talk will explore how to optimize the organization towards big bets, and how we have created a culture of risk taking, managed chaos and rapid alignment to push through changes like:

• The 2nd largest membership program in India in 2 months
• A sale we set up in 2 weeks that doubled our revenue
• A logistic innovation which halved our cost AND errors within 3 months
• Launched 600 private label products in 6 months

If you struggle to get your teams to see the bigger picture, or work together on "the most important" thing, maybe this will be helpful for you.

Join us as design expert Amy Jo Kim shares advice from her new book Game Thinking.

How are market-leading products born? What conditions set the stage for successful innovation?

By definition, successful innovations reach a mainstream audience. But they never start off that way. That’s the paradox of innovation: the “typical” people in your market are not the same ones you need to “woo” when bringing your idea to life.

That’s where Game Thinking comes in. Game Thinking is a proven system for accelerating innovation and creating products that people love...and keep loving. Game Thinking empowers product managers, designers, and entrepreneurs to engage customers deeply over time - using design techniques from hit games. Learn how to create products that empower your customers to get better at something they care about -- like playing an instrument or leading a team. Building on the principles of Lean, Agile, and Design Thinking, Game Thinking delivers powerful strategies that help you:

• Keep customers engaged with a coherent, compelling journey to mastery
• Build a product customers love using insights from high-need Superfans
• Rapidly improve your product concept by testing and tuning the core experience
• Build the right MVP for your product using the Game Thinking roadmap

Would you fly in a plane designed by a craftsman or would you prefer your aircraft to be designed by engineers? Engineering is the application of iterative, empirical, practical science to real-world problems. Craftsmanship is a wonderful thing, and as a reaction to the terrible abuses of the term Engineering in software development Software Craftsmanship has helped in our learning of what really works.

The term "Software Engineering" has gained a bad reputation. It implies "Big up-front design" and "Mathematically provable models" in place of working code. However, that is down to our interpretation, not a problem with "Engineering" as a discipline.

In recent years we have discovered what really works in software development. Not everyone practices approaches like Continuous Delivery, but it is widely seen as representing the current state-of-the-art in software development. This is because at its root CD is about the application of an iterative, practical, empirical, maybe even science based approach to solving problems in software development. Is this a form of software engineering?

Software isn't bridge-building, it is not car or aircraft development either, but then neither is Chemical Engineering, neither is Electrical Engineering. Engineering is different in different disciplines. Maybe it is time for us to begin thinking about retrieving the term "Software Engineering" maybe it is time to define what our "Engineering" discipline should entail.

In the global marketplace that transfers knowledge at the speed of light, we have a massive time delay and that is modern transportation methods. The hyperloop is the first new mode of transport to be created in over 100 years. The motivation is to connect people, reduce congestion, and protect our planet by eliminating CO2 emissions from terrestrial transport. The hyperloop can best be described as space travel on the ground - a magnetically levitating, electromagnetically propelled, passenger vehicle in a vacuum tube. With the elimination of aerodynamic drag and surface friction, power consumption plummets, speeds can reach 700 mph, and waste and cost are minimized. With the use of autonomy the service is on demand and delays become a thing of the past. Dr. Sengupta will discuss how space-age tech coupled to the VC funded innovation environment are enabling the revolution in green transportation from suborbital rocket flights, to electric airplanes, to space travel on the ground with the hyperloop.

From autonomous vehicles, 3D printed rocket engines, and “affordable” consumer-owned satellites to rapid advances in AI and secure, decentralized electronic currencies, the past several years have shown us that the only prediction we can confidently make about the future is that it will arrive more quickly than any of us imagined. Yet with all of these major technological advances, the way we develop, test, deploy, and manage software has been incrementally changing over the years. Many of the most forward-thinking paradigms, practices, and technologies are based on concepts and even implementations created decades ago.

How can software development itself benefit from the disruptive changes in technology in recent years? This talk will explore influences, tech trends and coming innovations which will change how we as an industry approach to software creation, maintenance, management, and even employment.

This talk provides an overview of the history of design in technology, highlighting what we have learned over the years in developing for a screen. Designing for the ear is different from developing for the screen though. This talk establishes best practices for voice-first design contrasting them with GUI design principles. You will learn of the similarities and differences when developing for voice, compared to screen-oriented mediums. Learn how to create engaging experiences where customers can speak in their own words, receive individualised responses, and easily find what they need via voice.

The Principles in the Agile Manifesto provide us guidance on how to have an Agile mindset in our organizations. Principle 11 within the Manifesto states "The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams". While this works well for autonomous teams, it proves to be challenging for large organizations with dozens or even hundreds of teams who need to share common architectures and design patterns.

This talk will present a case study of a large retail organization and explore their journey from a highly centralized/governance-based technology organization to a more distributed/collaborative one and explore their lessons learned and success/failure patterns along the way. In the end, we'll answer the question about whether or not Principle 11 scales!

I'll present how the dynamics of today's world means that old ways of organizing power in businesses are no longer working.
We need to re-look at our organization structures so that the emerging culture allows for more effective ways of using power.

I'll cover:

The Decay of Power and What It Means For Your Organization

Current Structures Make it Difficult to Get Things Done

Holacracy — A New Social Technology To Organize Power in Pursuit of Purpose

5 Ways Holacracy Organizes Power to Thrive in a Rapidly Changing World

1. The purpose is the new Boss
2. Autonomy: Everyone is a Leader (but lead roles not people)
3. Create Fractal structures (not Hierarchical or Flat)
4. Power vested in rules (not people)
5. Dynamic org structure that evolves (instead of rigid top-down ones)

Embrace Change, Execute with Purpose

Unlocking Agility is based on the concepts from the Addison-Wesley book by Jorgen Hesselberg, an agile transformation executive at companies such as Nokia, McAfee, and Intel. In this interactive workshop, change leaders are invited to learn what it takes to create sustainable change and embed a digitalization mindset in large organizations. Participants will leave with a set of concrete actions to pursue at their organizations and a copy of Unlocking Agility for further study.

A resilient organizational can not only adapt and respond to incremental change but more importantly, can respond to sudden disruptions and also, be the source of disruption in order to prosper and flourish.

The traditional risk management approach focuses too much on defensive (stopping bad things happen) thinking versus a more progressive (making good things happen) thinking. Being defensive requires consistency across the organization and this is where methodologies like Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) come in. However, PDCA approach does not bake in the required progressive thinking and flexibility required for a fast company organization which operates in a volatile environment.

Professor David Denyer of Cranfield University has recently published a very interesting research report on Organizational Resilience. He has identified the following four quadrants across to help us think about organizational resilience:

• preventative control (defensive consistency)
• mindful action (defensive flexibility)
• performance optimization (progressive consistency)
• adaptive innovation (progressive flexibility)

In this talk, I'll share my personal experience of using this thinking to help an organization to scale their product to Millions of users. I've dive deep into how we structured our organization for Structural Agility and how we set-up a very lightweight governance model using OKRs to drive the necessary flexible and progressive thinking.

Lot has changed in the last 20 yrs. We have evolved from handcrafted server deployments to managing tens of thousands of devices programmatically, from monolithic architectures to distributed async-microservices, from waterfall to continuous deployment, from siloed culture to collaborative DevOps culture and from hierarchical resource management to outcome-oriented structures.

In this talk, I will review the key shifts in technology, culture, and people during the last 20 years that enabled us to stand where we are. I will share my experience on why many teams struggle to keep up and how leaders in those organisations can help such teams achieve InfraOps Agility.

Superorganism is defined as an organized system that is conceived of analogous to a living being. A superorganism is a highly resilient and scalable structure, and social insects such as ants are great examples of it. However, does such eusocial behavior permeate through the human race as well? While we generally accept Darwin's survival theory, the undeniable reality is that our ability to survive and thrive could be largely attitude to our ability to work in larger groups where common interests have brought us together rather than sticking out solo in pursuit of individual self-interests. In this talk, we shall discuss the idea behind superorganism, and describe what constitutes such a mindset, and how could it be used to create more effective and agile structures?

Facing constant problems with Test Infrastructure instability? Does this hamper the pace at which you deliver your changes into production?

Myntra has 500+ microservices in a service mesh. This means that there are a lot of changes that are getting baked and the need is to enable all our engineering teams to be able to move fast on their changes - to be able to test them in a reliable test bed and take them to production without any issues.

In this complex setup, having a stable test environment plays a vital role in helping engineering teams to be able to develop, test and certify the changes before production rollouts.

In this session, we will talk through how we have solved the above challenges by building a reliable, robust and available Test Infrastructure platform aka Dockins. This talk will give you insights into the high-level architecture of this platform and the scale at which it operates. Towards the end, we will also show you a glimpse of the working of this platform and how we intend to leverage this platform to integrate our Continuous Integration system.

We have spent the last six months working with around 30 different teams who are using Kubernetes. This session will be a summary of our learnings, the problems we solved our success and struggles. Each team came from a different technical background, different size of the application, a different industry. We realized that what works for one is not ok with the other. The majority of questions were around:

1. How to setup continuous integration and continuous deployment for containerised microservices?
2. How do I secure my cluster and share it with multiple other teams at the same time?
3. How to compare the performance of canary workloads with stable workloads?
4. What changed in my cluster when I deployed an app? How to trace back the changes made?

Customers want to use Kuberentes so that they can deploy to public clouds like Azure, AWS, Google or on their on-premise cluster. That emphasizes the change Kubernetes has introduced in the industry, how it is forcing everyone to embrace open standards. The learnings we will share are applicable to Kubernetes and containers irrespective of the cloud platform used and these learnings can be used with multiple competing tools as well.

They say that design is a team sport, and if your team operates in an agile/lean environment, strength and flexibility are more crucial than ever.

An effective design team requires a multitude of perse skills, and it's impossible for any one individual to possess them all.

So, how do you go about putting together a team that’s balanced, powerful and can work effectively with other teams? What is the right mixture of junior and senior practitioners?

What skills, soft and hard, do you need to design and deliver outstanding products and services that support meaningful outcomes?

In this workshop, we’ll take a look at (work through) how to assess the skills of our colleagues (as well as our own) to best shape and, inspire and lead a design team that works together (and stays together). A team where more experienced practitioners thrive and more junior ones are supported, mentored and enabled to grow, and where complementarity and teamwork are the foundations of success.

Finally, we will look at how to use the knowledge and techniques we’ve collected over the years to hire, motivate and keep design teams happy.

Bonus round: if you’re looking for work, what does a good team look like from the outside?

While Agile organization started to appear in last 20 years, the key principles for how we organize is nothing new and have been with us for thousands of years. In this session, I am taking a martial art "Aikido" (Japanese: 合気道) as example and going through the key principles in leadership, learning and transformation approaches. In these principles, learning Aikido are very similar to build Agile organization. Leaders are practitioners and teachers. Learning is via practices and peer learning. Changes are done in people body and mindset. We need to learn the rules, break away from the rules and ultimately create our own rules fitting ourselves and organization (Shu-Ha-Ri). Aikido is a way of life, so Agile is.

Writing and maintaining a suite of acceptance tests that can give you a high level of confidence in the behaviour and configuration of your system is a complex task. In this session, Dave will describe approaches to acceptance testing that allow teams to:

• work quickly and effectively
• build excellent functional coverage for complex enterprise-scale systems
• manage and maintain those tests in the face of change, and of evolution in both the codebase and the understanding of the business problem.

This workshop will answer the following questions, and more:

• How do you fail fast?
• How do you make your testing scalable?
• How do you isolate test cases from one-another?
• How do you maintain a working body of tests when you radically change the interface to your system?

21st century problems cannot be solved with 20th century software architectures. So why is the starting point for so many projects built on the assumption of a simplistic monolithic, three-layer architecture sat on top of a RDBMS? Hardware has progressed. It has changed many of the assumptions that such architectures were built upon. Modern systems are distributed, deal with massive throughput of data and transactions. Users expect 24/7 service.

The Reactive Manifesto describes what it takes to build systems that meet these demands. Such systems are Responsive, Resilient, Elastic and Message Driven. What does this mean in terms of software architecture and design? This presentation will introduce these ideas and describe how systems built on these principles work.