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.

Aadhaar is the world’s largest biometric identity programme covering about 16 percent of the world’s population. It also holds immense potential in improving public service deliveries and fostering digital and financial inclusion.

As India's digital identity program,aadhaar has successfully covered more than 1.25 billion people. It is also one of India’s best case studies of scale. In addition to core digital identity systems, India's open digital infrastructure, collectively known as India Stack, also includes electronic payment, digital signature, digital locker, and data empowerment as its core layers.

Pramod Varma, who is the Chief Architect of Aadhaar and India Stack layers will be sharing his experience of building these country scale systems.

In the last five years, Jio has become the top player in a bunch of verticals from telecom to eCommerce. Many people wonder how Jio could strategise and execute so quickly? If you are wondering the same, come to this fireside chat with Anish and Kiran, to take a deeper look at Jio's culture, leadership style, how Jio operates at such massive scale.

As software teams start to grow, some common struggles appear:

• Team members feel like projects go on and on, with no end in sight.
• Product managers can’t find time to think strategically about the product.
• Founders ask themselves: “Why can’t we get features out the door like we used to in the early days?”

We saw these challenges first-hand at Basecamp as we grew from four people to over fifty.

In this talk, Ryan will share how the Basecamp team operates and talk about his new book that will help us Stop Running in Circles and Ship Work that Matters.

Embibe is geared towards offering personalized improvement to every student in India through tailor made journeys powered by millions of variables and content elements encompassing 345 exams and 60,000 odd concepts. 1.5 million questions from 1500 books, 49,000 3D models and thousands of videos make this personalization possible. ~200 million hours of time spent and 2 billion questions attempted power the personalization algorithms with 100% observability implemented for every user interaction. 

At the heart of this lie 20 Octopi - each with 9 brains and 3 hearts - a core team driving execution - frugally at impossible speeds. This is our story.

COVID-19 has accelerated the digital transformation of research and health sciences. The use of genomic information in particular has triggered some of this change, as the unprecedented data volumes requires Big Data and Cloud computing technology. This talk outlines CSIRO developed software solutions, which use the latest in cloud architecture, machine learning and distribution channels to support a wide range of digital health applications; from disease gene detection, to personalized gene therapy, and from pathogen diagnostics to biosecurity applications. Specifically, we developed novel bioinformatics approaches to track viral evolution that has led to the first study on vaccine efficacy for the different COVID-19 virus strains. We also developed a novel machine learning framework capable of processing trillion of genomic datapoints to detect disease genes. The talk concludes by looking into the future of how clinical ontologies (FHIR) in combination with health-specific cloud deployment mechanisms disrupt health care as we know it.

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. 

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!

Every successful User Experience and Visual Designer evolves their style over time. This evolution happens based on changing points-of-view, understanding of human behavior, communication efficacy, and skillset, among other factors. Whether it be a design style, a communication style, giving and receiving constructive feedback,  what works for one person may not necessarily work for another and often it takes years to develop the right style for you. In this session, we'll explore how several successful UX Designers found (or struggled to find) their voices that lead to their ability to succeed in the industry as well as the challenges that new designers face as they being their career journey.

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.

Almost two years back, we took the decision to leave behind our Ansible based configuration management setup for deploying applications on EC2 and move towards containerisation and orchestration of applications using Kubernetes. We have migrated most of our infrastructure to Kubernetes. It was a big undertaking and had its own challenges — from technical challenges of running a hybrid infrastructure until most of the migration was done to organizational challenges such as training the entire team on a completely new paradigm of operations.

This talk is our experience report of adopting Kubernetes and other cloud-native technologies, the challenges that came our way, dealing with complexity of legacy, delivering a great developer platform and the way forward for us.