In speaking about better ways of thinking and problem-solving, Linda has introduced Jonathan Haidt's model for the brain. He proposes that the rational, conscious mind is like the rider of an elephant (the emotional, unconscious mind) who directs the animal to follow a path. In Fearless Change, the pattern Easier Path recommends making life easier to encourage reluctant individuals to adopt a new idea. Linda suggests that in conversations with others who see the world differently, we "talk to the elephant" instead of the "rider." That is, don't use logic or facts, but appeal to the emotional brain of the listener as well as making the path more attractive. There is always the question: What's the best way to talk to the elephant? This presentation will provide some answers. Linda will present the best elephant-speak and outline suggestions for providing an Easier Path.

Organisms small and large learn by building a model of the world around them then testing that model against what they see and adjusting accordingly. We'll call this a learning loop. We identify three era in computing based on the nature of this loop and the kind of feedback learning that they support.

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.

Users' minds take shortcuts to get through the day. Usually, they’re harmless. Even helpful. But what happens when they’re not? In this talk, I’ll use real-world examples to identify some particularly harmful biases that frequently lead users to make bad decisions. I'll then talk about some content strategies and design choices we can use in our apps, designs, and platforms to redirect or eliminate the impact of those biases. Finally, I'll explore our own biases as designers and some methods to prevent our own blind spots from hurting users.

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..

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.

Data technical debt refers to quality challenges associated with legacy data sources, including both mission-critical sources of record as well as “big data” sources of insight. Data technical debt impedes the ability of your organization to leverage information effectively for better decision making, increases operational costs, and impedes your ability to react to changes in your environment. Bad data is estimated to cost the United States $3 trillion annually alone, yet few organizations have a realistic strategy in place to address data technical debt.

This presentation defines data technical debt is and why it is often a greater issue than classic code-based technical debt. We describe the types of data technical debt, why each is important, and how to measure them.  Most importantly, this presentation works through

Disciplined Agile (DA) strategies for avoiding, removing, and accepting data technical debt. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, we need to ensure that it is clean if we’re to remain healthy.

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.

During the current lockdown, I happened to watch the 2019 movie "The Lion King" . This movie was an eye opener to me and what I learnt in those 120 minutes truly amazed me. The movie has all the learnings & Trappings of What  Servant Leadership is all about.

In the proposed talk, I try to bring this learning to all of you. This talk delves into the reason why Servant Leadership is the need of the hour in this crisis time. I draw inferences & inspiration from the movie "The Lion King" to drive home the relevance of Servant Leadership in our work life.

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.

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.

Have you ever coached one to one or in a team and felt confused afterwards about the session results?

Life/executive or leadership coaches usually take these topics to coaching supervision either in a group or one to one. Supervision can conjure up images of an authority figure leaning over your shoulder and telling you what to do, which it is not. I prefer Super-Vision which is a collaborative reflective learning partnership. You might like to see it as similar to pair programming for the agility mindset.

Coaching super-vision is a way to improve your relational skills, explore ethical, boundary, management, interpersonal and systemic issues. Many of these themes have been highlighted in the Agile Alliance’s development of an ethical code of conduct. It provides a safe and non-judgemental space to explore these themes.

In this interactive group super-vision online session we will explore what live issues the participants of the group bring and get perspective on them as well provide supported emotional support where needed. It is based on models from the coaching supervision world, interpersonal mindfulness and reflective inquiry to improve both personally and professionally, in how we coach and support agile professionals.

About Amaranatho

Amaranatho started his working life as a technical support manager and this took him on a transformational journey from getting a degree in AI, to world explorer and spending 15 years as a Buddhist monk. He has facilitated large residential events based on serious games and self-organising principles.

Amaranatho coaches at the senior practitioner level of the EMCC and is a coaching supervisor. He works with executives/leaders and coaches to improve their agile mindset, interpersonal mindfulness and their ability to self-reflect, so they can stay calm and connected in complex situation. He is a scrum master and developed the PlayfulMonk approach to awaken people and organization to their true potential.

You can find one minute about me and what I have done at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ImvuQizaMsE

That’s right the points are just like t-shirt sizes, only useful if you’re buying clothes. The #NoEstimates movement would tell us we shouldn’t waste time estimating as it alone adds no value to the process or product. It is true that we utterly suck at estimating thanks to planning fallacy mired in a cognitive bias known as the optimism bias. 

There are still places where estimating makes sense. In this session, I’ll share my transition of thinking from “always estimate” to “no estimate needed”. We’ll talk about how to recognize when a team needs estimating and when a team can avoid estimating. As well as reviewing the pitfalls and traps of estimating in an Agile world. Attendees can expect to walk away with an understanding of how to coach and mentor teams through this transition if #NoEstimates is actually the right way for their teams.

Does your team have to deal with performance issues very late in their development cycle? Does this lead to a lot of unplanned work in your sprints? What if I told you, that your team can validate various performance-related hypotheses right within your sprints? Yes, this is what we have been practising on various teams. Participate in this workshop where I will share our experience and to learn the techniques involved through hands-on exercises.

Problem Statement: Performance Testing has traditionally been an activity that is done in a staging or prod environment (for the brave) by a team of expert performance testers. In my experience, this approach has several issues.

• Typically high cycle time (time taken between code changes and these changes being deployed and tested in Perf Test Env) between test runs. This means Developers cannot experiment quickly.
• The test design may be disconnected from the system design because the people who test it may not have a deep understanding of the application architecture.
• Performance benchmarking and tuning becomes an afterthought, instead of being baked into our design and constantly validated during the development process

Solution: Apply "Shift left" to your Performance Testing

• Enable Developers to run Performance Tests on their machines so that they can get immediate feedback as they make code changes.
• Identify issues early and iterate over solutions quickly.
• Only defer a small subset of special scenarios to the expert team or higher environments.

Talk is cheap, show me code
I will be sharing the learnings that I gained in the process of applying Shift Left principle to "API Performance Testing" and how we codified the approach into a re-usable open-source framework called Perfiz so any team can take advantage of it.

Topics that will be covered

• Challenges running performance tests early in the development cycle
• Few examples to see Shift Left in action
  • Hypothesis Invalidation Strategy. A scientific approach to reducing dependence on higher environments
  • Avoiding premature performance optimisations and moving to data driven architecture decisions with rapid local performance testing
• What makes a good API Performance Testing framework? - In the context of Shift Left
  • It is containerised, runs well on local laptop and in higher environments or in hybrid mode
  • Leverages existing API test instead of duplicate load test scripts
  • Helps Developer express load as a configuration DSL without having to learn yet another tool
  • Not just a load generator, it collects data, has pre-set dashboards with basic metrics
  • It is code and not documentation
• What makes a good performance test report? - In the context of Shift Left
  • To begin with it should be a live monitoring dashboard and not an after the fact report
  • It is visual (graphs and plots) rather than tabulation
  • Merges Load Data and Application performance metrics in a single visual representation over a shared time series based x-axis so that the correlation is clear
• Perfiz Demo - An open source tool that embodies the above thought process
  • API test to Perfomance Test Suite in less than a minute with just YAML Config
  • Pre-built Grafana Dashboards to get you started
  • Containerised setup to get you going without any local setup with Docker
  • Prometheus and other monitoring tool hooks to monitor app performance
  • Perfiz in Higher Environments
  • Perfiz Architecture Overview and how you can extend, adapt and contribute back to the community
• "Shift Left" limitations - Repeatability, My machine vs your machine, etc.

Right approach is a key factor in any Organization Transformation. There are many techniques to arrive at approach like – Vision, Roadmap and Plan, however, these artifacts or techniques are different in formats and scattered all over – making it difficult to see in a wholistic manner.

One of the challenges in transformation is creating a wholistic approach where information is gathered in different forms and places.  Many a time, connecting the dots is a great challenge.

We should bring in the systems thinking aspect of seeing how all these interconnected components of Transformation approach play a crucial role in succeeding the plan. The answer lies in – Transformation Canvas.

This canvas built from own experience based on the challenges faced and helped to monitor and adapt quickly during the large scale transformations.  Based on learnings from Lean Canvas, keeping the view of various components of organization change management approach into an integrated tool. Transformation Canvas acts as a compass to help us with a  “Galaxy View” of the organization change management approach, and enable us to plan and govern in a better way, working with multiple stakeholders.

This experience sharing workshop is to provide Transformation Specialists and Coaches design  and manage the transformation effectively and adapt to  the changes quickly and mindfully.  Manjunath MS Rao and Viji Menon – who are experienced Enterprise Transformation Coaches and ICAgile Instructors will provide the Insights and experience and how to effectively use the Canvas to succeed effectively in transforming organization from good to great

Organizations, teams, society and individuals encounter many problems on a day-to-day basis. Entrepreneurs turn many of these problems in to opportunities and find products, services and solutions to solve them.

There are many ways to tackle and arrive at solutions for these problems. There are plenty of tools, techniques, frameworks available which can be applied in any industry. Many times, problem with problem solving is that we don’t know:

• “What is the real Problem?”
• “Is this the right problem to Solve?”
• “Are we solving problem, right?”

This workshop will help participants to

• Confirm what is the exact problem we need to solve
• Learn few key problem-solving techniques

This case study describes how transformation is performed in a business with over 300+ plus people spread across 3 countries. This transformation filled with lot of experiments right from defining the structure, strategy, role identification, people identification to the role via case studies, complete transparency with weekly open doors, agile team formation via marketplace concept and preparing the people for the new roles via workshops and trainings.

The results of transformation have enabled 4X improvement in releases, 2x improvement in Quality/Code quality, agile maturity improvement to advanced level from basic and 3x improvement in employee engagement

One of the very important aspect of any agile transformation is all about people. The changes in the form of structure, role, policies, and practices impact people who are part of the organization. It must be an empathetic approach engaging people and enabling feedback cycle to change/modify transformation strategy to achieve optimum results.

Design thinking less of a design and more of a thinking. its purpose has moved beyond creating new objects. Thinking and working like designers can enable all of us to generate important insights and take a low-risk path to innovating in the face of uncertainty. Applying design principles to the transformation itself can offer a competitive advantage for organizations in their agile transformation.

This presentation focus on how design thinking method and principles can be leveraged for crafting and implementing agile transformation strategy

Competition is  inevitable in this fast pacing world. Individuals and teams face sheer competition in multiple aspects. Many people consider comparison across teams is unhealthy and not a good way to motivate to get better outcome. As part of continual improvement and sustenance of agility health in agile teams, we experimented using power of visualization to as a means to trigger competition across teams which resulted in deeper coaching conversations . This lead to inspect and adapt in teams to identify what can be done to better to stay ahead in the game with other teams.

An agile transformation is not a destination, it is a journey. We often hear that an organisation has started its agile transformation journey. Have you ever heard anyone saying - We are done with the Agile transformation at my company? Does this journey ever get to see the finishing line?

During an agile transformation journey, often we rush to measure the tools and frameworks that we are using along the journey. Rarely as an organisation, we get aligned to identify the need. We also forget to align our values, principles, and practices that are crucial on this journey.

In this workshop, we would facilitate a scenario where people will be able to explore the "need" to be agile. People will also explore why the values and the principles of the whole organisation are game-changers on this journey.