Business Agility is the ability to deliver value to customers quickly, sustainably, predictably and with high quality. Improving business agility requires identifying what is of the greatest value, having a value management office to allocate funds for these items, a way of organizing people so they can effectively collaborate, and a method of working on these items efficiently. While there are a lot of moving pieces, proper attention to the value stream enables all parts of an organization to align around improving both the way an organization’s clients work as well as how they add value to it.

Attending to how both customers and the development organization can work more effectively is the heart of value stream management. It brings together three disciplines. First, Theory of Constraints to identify the constraints in the system. Then the theories of flow are used to reduce the delays in the workflow which create rework and waste. These two integrate with Lean-Thinking which focuses on creating an environment within which people can work together effectively.

This session provides an overview of why value streams are so critical and how to improve them.

In the wake of the pandemic and the challenges we have seen around us, organisations have realised how inequities can trickle down to many aspects within the sphere on workplaces, teams and practices we follow. It’s time to revisit old practices in more ways than one. 

Aspects like lack of work-life balance, mental well being, asynchronous communication, extended virtual meetings, prolonged virtual pairing etc. impact us all. 

To address this ThoughtWorks introduced the 'Inclusive Teams - Social Contract' an exercise for teams to re-look at their old ways, to arrive at an aspirational set of behaviours and social norms for inclusive ways of working at both the team and individual level. 

It focuses on 4 key aspects -

1. Building a culture of trust and inclusion - Supporting each other, feedback, empathy and cultivation.
2. Schedules and Meetings - Best practices, setting personal boundaries and context.
3. Communication practices - Tools, patterns and inclusive practices.
4. Norms of engagement - Connecting as team, fun that is inclusive, welcoming & respectful.

The inclusive team social contract helps teams understand and empathise with each other, acknowledge differences and personal context thus increasing team connect, productivity and shared accountability. It’s recommended that teams run this irrespective of whether they are working virtual/F2F/distributed/remote etc. 

For the last 18 months the Agile Alliance Agile Coaching Ethics Initiative has been working on a code of ethical conduct for Agile Coaching.  V1.o of the Code was published in May this year.   This workshop will explore the contents of the code and then go deeper into the Ethics Scenarios the volunteer team are working on.  The scenarios present real world situations and  explore how they can be tackled using the Code as a tool to help guide the conversation.

The primary challenge which leaders are facing is to evolve their enterprises to deal with increasing complexity in the external environment. Leaders are constantly having to deal with circumstances which are volatile, ambiguous and uncertain, which are the result of increasing complexity.

In this talk, the speaker will focus on one key characteristic of complexity, viz. how interaction between 'agents' in a complex system produces value. The speaker will present a case study of how leaders in an enterprise leveraged this characteristic to create value, in their Agile Transformation journey..

Is your team battling to focus on what matters? Are team members pulling in different directions because they are not aligned on what they need to do? Do you want to adopt a goal-setting technique that can help your team achieve focus, results, alignment, and transparency?

Teams often battle to make the switch from top-down driven goals to a collaborative process. As a result, outcomes land up being too broad, can’t be measured, or are too abstract for the team to know where to start. Let’s take the guesswork out of goals!

In this session, we will talk about how to help teams focus on what really matters. By asking the right questions and encouraging collaboration, teams can clarify their intended outcome, and identify ways to measure their success. You will have an opportunity to play a board game that helps teams refine their goals by covering three themes:

• “Discuss” the impact a specific measurement will have on the team, organization, and customers
• “Define” the best way to track progress towards the goal
• “Do” or take ownership of the actions needed to achieve the goal

Join us as we play our way to amazing goals!

This paper shares our experience to build DevOps and engineering practices at large scale as part of digital transformation looking for improve our flow efficiency, lead time and products quality and how we made designing and implemeting gamification shifts left through. This papers shares you the framework ( step by step) that we did to make game drive development and engage developers to adopt DevOps and technical agility practices

Are agile organisations really inclusive? Surely, given the fundamental principle of “individuals and interactions over processes and tools” and the fact that almost every agile approach embeds collaborative practices, the answer should be yes. And yet, the lived experience of many people contradicts this. Putting these assumptions and hypotheses to the test, the Business Agility Institute undertook an ambitious, year-long, research project and heard from 500 people globally.

What we found is that there is a lack of understanding about diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I). Many people shared their personal experiences about feeling excluded or knew of others who had been. In most cases, DE&I was not part of the agile transformation designs; for either employees or customers.

In 2021, we have the opportunity to rethink our approach to DE&I in agile organisations and learn from those organizations who, as we discovered in our research, are intentionally designing their new ways of working to be inclusive. As thought leaders and change makers, we want to share ways you can make a difference to people in your team and create an organisation where everyone can belong. Impacting not only your employee experience but your customers' experience and how you serve your community.

Deanna Spowart and Ashay Saxena, lead researchers on the project, will present the findings of their research “Are agile organisations really inclusive?” In the broader context, Deanna will share practical guidance on being an inclusive team member and Ashay will share what the agile organisations need to do embrace inclusion.

Stakeholder engagement is critical in agile projects. Agile project managers, business analysts, product owners, Scrum masters as well as agile teams must plan their approach to collaborate well with stakeholders and build productive working relationships.

While there are many tools and techniques to perform stakeholder analysis, we need to analyse the mindset of our stakeholders – a deeper level of analysis – to understand how they might view various situations, and how we can best respond to them.

We must also be willing to look within ourselves to understand how our behaviour, words and actions may be perceived to identify how to build rapport while avoiding conflict and misunderstanding. This is where mindfulness is needed.

This workshop will explore the ‘Stakeholder Engagement Canvas’, a new tool that helps us perform a more thoughtful and insightful level of stakeholder analysis. The canvas allows us to examine the stakeholder’s needs and attitudes in depth to enable us to better plan and monitor the engagement process, along with how we can be more mindful working with them. Kathy will present how to use this canvas to cultivate effective stakeholder engagement.

Moving to predominately remote ways of working has increased the challenges we face in reaching shared understandings of complex problems. And we need to be able to see the big picture together in order to really work effectively towards a common goal, especially when working as distributed teams. It’s hard enough to get people on the same page when we’re sitting together in the same room — achieving this when we are limited to communicating through online collaboration tools can be exhausting.

But even when we are not together, we can make use of simple visualization techniques to help share what we know and to better appreciate others points of view. And we don't need fancy tools to do this – a marker, a piece of paper, and a webcam are sufficient to allow us to harness the power of visualization to improve understanding. In this interactive session, you’ll experience a simple exercise that you can use to help any group use visualization, mental models, and systems thinking to increase comprehension of complex interactions, even when working remotely. Please bring a sheet of paper and a marker — this will be hands-on!

Very often we work on a code-base that has been written by others, and some time ago. This code-base could be for the product code, or Test Automation code. 

As the product life increases, evolution of the code-base is a natural process. However, there are various catalysts to speed up this evolution process:

• More features / tests to be added, including increased complexity
• People writing the code evolve - their learning, skillset
• Delivery pressure means it is quite possible that correct decisions for implementation may not be taken. In other words, it is possible that short-cuts were taken in the implementation leading to spaghetti code / architecture

People move on to different roles, new people join the team. Each has different opinions, perspectives and experiences.

Am sure there are more reasons you can think of.

Regardless, the challenge for a new person who starts working on such a complex code-base is enormous - as the person needs to start delivering "value".

In this session, I will share various examples and experiences and as a result of being in such situations, the factors I looked at when enhancing the code-base to decide - should I refactor or rewrite the code-under-consideration to be able to move forward faster, while moving towards the long-term vision.

Though I will focus on various examples of Test Automation, this session is applicable for any role that writes / maintains code of any nature.

How do you know if you’re really agile? Like predicting the weather, complex human systems need data analytics and statistical models over simple reporting, to understand what creates business agility from human behaviour. This is the world of psychology, statistics, human behaviour models. It’s how medicine predicts if you have factors that predict heart attacks or if children are likely to have developmental delay. It’s time to apply this to agile teams to growing a true agile mindset.

This talk looks at the psychology of human behaviour and data analytics to provide a playbook for measuring and improve an agile mindset in teams to underpin true business agility. It looks at 10 years of longitudinal data, both from software and non-software agile teams, and large scale agile transformation initiatives, and the model that’s now been produced to help coaches and the enterprise become more agile.

Leading-edge applications are dynamic and adaptive in capabilities that require people to use increasingly dexterous tools and supporting infrastructure, including microservices.

Microservices break traditionally structured applications into manageable pieces that can be developed and maintained independently. Microservices are often decoupled, allowing for updates with little to no downtime, as the other components can continue running. Container orchestration, Securing service-to-service communication, and decoupling authentication and authorization from microservices emerge as a new trend and also a challenge for many. 

Kubernetes being a container orchestrator of choice and Service Mesh comes in handy for secure service-to-service communication, service discovery, resilient service building, canary deployments, etc. It’s required to validate the manifests of k8s and configurations of service mesh much earlier in the development life cycle to provide faster feedback.

Are you a frustrated developer who feels like they know enough? However, the success you thought you would have is out of reach. You see others who make better strides but why? Is it a skills gap? Come learn how to set yourself apart as a developer and learn the skills of influence and collaboration.

Session details

Nowadays, the Support model is in the most advanced demand, and the Clients prefer to sign the Support and Maintenance contract after site development. In the Support contract, We like to manage the Drupal Security updates, Downtime/Uptime monitoring, Monthly consumption reports, AM support for escalations, etc. 

In this session, I will explain how the support & Maintenance model works with the Kanban model. How is it beneficial for the clients?

Learning Objectives

1. What is the Support & Maintenance model?
2. Support Primary survey
3. How is the Support model beneficial to the clients?
4. How does estimation work in Support projects?
5. How to manage Uptime/Downtime issues under the Support Model?
6. How to manage Drupal Security updates for Multiple Projects under the Support Model?
7. How Kanban plays a Vital role to manage Support projects?
8. How to manage the Support Bandwidth?

Target Audience

• Project / Product / Scrum Master / Account Managers
• Executive Sponsors / Executive Leadership
• Interested Contributors (developers, designers, etc.)

While we see disruption happening everywhere and the world is experiencing unforeseen crisis, many organizations are not able to respond quickly to these situations. One of the primary reason is their current workforce is not ready for it.
In this session, I will share my experiences of how some of the organizations we have worked with,  have built the digital workforce and nurturing such talent to take on these challenges, embrace change and move fast.
The areas that I will cover in this session are around building digital talent portfolio, hiring for culture, building the learning organization and scaling the workforce in a non linear way.

Have you heard of “flaky tests”?

There are a lot of articles, blog posts, podcasts, conference talks about what are “Flaky tests” and how to avoid them.

Some of the ideas proposed are:

• Automatically rerun failed tests a couple of times, and hope they pass
• Automatically retry certain operations in the test (ex: retry click / checking for visibility of elements, etc.) and hope the test can proceed

Unfortunately, I do not agree with the above ideas, and I would term these as anti-patterns for fixing flaky / intermittent tests.

We need to understand the reasons for flaky / intermittent tests. Some of these reasons could be because of issues like: 

• timing issues (i.e. page loading taking time)
• network issues
• browser-timing issues (different for different browsers / devices)
• data related (dynamic, changing, validity, etc.)
• poor locator strategy (ex: weird & hard-wired xpaths / locators)
• environment issue
• actual issue in the product-under-test

In this session, with the help of demos, we will look at the following techniques you can use to reduce / eliminate the flakiness of your test execution:

• Reduce number of UI tests
• Use Visual Assertions instead of Functional Assertions
• Remove external dependencies via Intelligent Virtualization

Demo will be done using the following and sample code will be shared with the participants

• Specmatic
• teswiz
• Applitools Eyes

Fancy playing the CTO of a product startup? Join us in this role-play-based workshop where you can learn how you can lead your product team towards excellence by focusing on what you measure.

What can you expect to experience in this workshop?

• An executive report presented by the team, which touches all areas of product development including engineering, quality, etc.
• Group activity to critique the report
• Presentation of 'good' alternative reports by facilitator based on their experience
• Design of the new metrics strategy for the startup

If this interests you, join this workshop and walk away with actionable knowledge about metrics for product teams.

Mindset and Culture change is at the core of agile and DevOps adoption. While we all know it’s importance, there is no single approach or process to make this change happen.

We have embarked on a mindset transformation Journey at our workplace.

In my session I will cover pragmatic approach of bringing in mindset and culture change. An approach which we are adopting in our workplace and seeing the change resulting in multifold benefits. You will learn Echo system of Mindset, Culture and Behaviors and leave the session with multiple ideas and an insights on how to make cultural and mindset shift in your organization.

Self Organising Teams Vs Self feeding in toddlers ?

Isnt it just easy to give a command and top down align the teams ?

Isnt it easy to just switch on the tv or just force feed a toddler with the menu prepared by you ?

Drawing a parallel on messy toddler - THE POWER OF SELF ORGANIZING!

Face-to-face discussion around a sketching space has been considered as most effective communication strategy. This kind of set up requires members to be in the same room together. Co-located Agile teams rely on intensive member to member communication, both within the team and with the customer. This allows them to deviate from deliverable driven process—like writing detailed requirement document—usually associated with plan driven approach. Informal discussions within the room, in breakout areas, and other shared physical spaces radiate the information thus contributing towards teams collective understanding without having the need formal communications. While every organization will have its own business reasons for setting distributed Agile teams, distribution demand formal ways of conducting the communication lacking which contribute to knowledge gaps among members. Advancements in communication strategies has helped distributed teams to maintain the communication but it has still left a gap in the form of "Presence disparity".

Face-to-face discussion around a sketching space has been considered as most effective communication strategy. This kind of set up requires members to be in the same room together. Co-located Agile teams rely on intensive member to member communication, both within the team and with the customer. This allows them to deviate from deliverable driven process—like writing detailed requirement document—usually associated with plan driven approach. Informal discussions within the room, in breakout areas, and other shared physical spaces radiate the information thus contributing towards teams collective understanding without having the need formal communications. While every organization will have its own business reasons for setting distributed Agile teams, distribution demand formal ways of conducting the communication lacking which contribute to knowledge gaps among members. Advancements in communication strategies has helped distributed teams to maintain the communication but it has still left a gap in the form of "Presence disparity".

In this suggested talk, we share our experience around exploration of Extended Reality (XR) as new communication strategy and its deployment within distributed Agile teams to reduce presence disparity gap, challenges faced & lessons learnt.