We all know what a product is. We buy and use them all the time. But, what does it mean where you work? Are the things you build or make really products or not? Are you creating a successful product, or just doing a job? We’ll talk about what product thinking really means and why you and your company may not actually be using it. And, if you’d like to be more product-centric, some specific principles for doing that.

Many codebases contain code that is overly complicated, hard to understand, and hence expensive to change and evolve. Prioritizing the technical debt to pay down is a hard problem since there's always a trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features. In this masterclass, you learn how easily accessible development data let us uncover the technical debt with the highest business impact. The techniques cover both technical and organizational decisions around your codebase, and we cover both traditional architectures as well as microservice architectures where you learn to measure non-code properties like team coupling, system mastery, and detect implicit dependencies between services.

• Identify the code that's most expensive to maintain amongst millions of lines of code.
• Put costs on technical debt and assess its delivery impact.
• Detect architectural decay and learn to control it.
• Perform architectural analyses of layers and microservices to uncover team coupling and implicit dependencies.
• Learn refactoring patterns to address technical- and architectural debt.
• Measure how organizational patterns influence code quality and the link to software architecture.
• Uncover the social side of your codebase and use data to mitigate off-boarding risks.

Participants are encouraged to take this opportunity and analyze their own codebases. As part of the workshop, you also get access to CodeScene – a tool that automates the analyses – which we use for the practical exercises. We also look at open-source alternatives, and see how we can use Git itself for data mining; the workshop is not about tools, but rather about the techniques and their applications. This is a new perspective on software development that will change how you view code.

DateTime: This workshop is scheduled on Oct 19th and 20th from 2 PM to 6 PM IST

Too often innovative people in medium to large organizations have the feeling of being in a box - with startling new ideas - and no one really listens. In essence, these innovators are trying to “measure performance upwards.” This upward voice intrinsically measures strategies and customer impact, and applying the concept can significantly improve the overall performance without relying on top down OKRs and KPIs. Moreover, “measuring from above,” tends to measure the output of production rather than the truly important outcome: what is really making a difference for our customers and therefore for our company.

Adding “measurement from below” to a company can create a mindset that empowers everyone to follow their passion and interest and nourish the company’s effectiveness. Implementing a “from below” approach to measurement involves a fundamental shift that asks the company to synthesize a variety of new approaches. One such synthesis is Beyond Budgeting, Open Space, Sociocracy, and Agile (BOSSA nova). This synthesis enables a company to “measure upwards” without jeopardizing the strengths of “leading downwards.” Fortunately, the implementation can be done in small steps that probe and demonstrate new measurement ideas on a small scale such that the proof cascades beyond the demonstration. This session will enable you to get started on your journey to spreading the idea of upwards measurement company-wide.

This workshop asks participants to start where they are, explains what it means to probe, and helps them develop strategies and experiments they can use in their own situation to create an environment for high performance that goes beyond what OKRs and KPIs can offer.

The move away from traditional ways of working and thinking to digitization leads to change in the way we work, learn and measure. It is important to understand how the digital economy has shifted our ways of working in a digital organization from strategy to execution.

Join us in game play where we will explore Digital Product Management and the Critical Success Factors, Events and Skills needed to create value flow to customers. We will look at the skills needed for a company to move from being descriptive to one that can respond to emergent needs. Applying this knowledge will help organisations transform their operating model have a competitive edge in a VUCA economy. Plan to Win!

Any organization’s ability to focus on what matters most to their customers is directly related to their ability to get valuable feedback from them. While more and more organizations embrace agile practices during the development of their services, they often lack in how they collect feedback and therefor don’t get the benefits they are after. After all, what is the upside to investing in being able to pivot, if there is no information available to guide the direction of that pivot?

The fact that many roadmaps leave little room for flexibility significantly contributes to this and building powerful roadmaps is a really hard task. How does one get feedback about a house without building it completely? How does one give feedback about a car without being able to drive it around the city for a couple of hours?

This session will provide you with practical techniques on how to build a powerful roadmap for your product or service, one that allows any organization to get valuable feedback from their customers. The session is based on ideas from the draft book Powerful Roadmaps.

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Are you "doing it" the TDD way? Really? Are you getting the results from TDD as you expected? Yes? Great, check out one of the other exciting sessions at this conference.

No? Then: How come? Isn't TDD supposed to be easy? Just do the red-green-refactor dance and all code's gonna be functional plus clean.

Sorry, but I beg to differ. It's not that simple. And there are many reasons for that as I'll show you in this talk.

My main objection is, that TDD as it's commonly explained and demoed, is ignoring the plain and simple reality of problems being of very, very different difficulty. Or have you ever seen a TDD demo beyond the usual code kata exercises like "Fizz Buzz" or "Game of Life"?

Hence in this talk I want to present a bigger picture. I'll classify programming situations according to the Cynefin framework and put TDD in perspective. It will become clear where TDD might be a good fit and why - but also, where TDD is overtaxed.

And since TDD is only a fit for a small subset of problems, of course alternative approaches to test-first programming will be presented.