In every product development initiative, product design planning and program management should be at the centre as it is the foundation and driving force to the success of a product. It is even more crucial when entering a new market space with evolving technologies like 5G, for example.

When building products, there are typically multiple teams across the organization and sometimes external vendors involved. If there is no well-defined structured process, there is a high risk of not meeting the desired results for the product's success.

At Cisco, we are building the Internet for the future. We believe in building sustainable, world-class products that enable our customers to grow their revenue, reduce their operating costs, and do so securely. To successfully execute this goal, we must provide products that deliver value to all stakeholders to achieve growth and differentiation. With this in mind, we have built a product program that enables our engineers to innovate at scale.

Today we will be using our recently announced NCS540 Fronthaul Router product as a case study to share the best practices we adopted while building this product/solution. The NCS540 Fronthaul is the first CPRI capable, 5G fronthaul router. This product enables service operators to integrate 5G architecture options and existing technology interfaces seamlessly.

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With the increased adoption of cloud native applications, microservices and distributed deployments the infrastructure failure points are now multifold causing significant business impacts on account of outages. Although these new-age architectures provide increased velocity and flexibility to release application features rapidly, isolating the faults to triage & debug issues have become extremely complex resulting in high MTTR.

Chaos engineering can help assure application resiliency through controlled injection of infrastructure failures there by proactively detecting probable outage hotspots and enable architects to design anti-fragile resilient systems.

Conventional chaos engineering experiments are siloed and do not provide E2E business process visibility on impacted service calls and performance bottlenecks. In this session, we will deep dive into how Chaos Engineering tests can amplify significant value when correlated with Application Business Process that improves application’s performance, observability, and resiliency.

The session with also cover an experience share on transforming and building failure driven culture for a financial Fintech banking customer where the scope of the engagement was to digitize the wealth management platform through resilience principles to achieve 99.99% high availability SLO.

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Configuration bugs, not code bugs, are the most common cause I've seen of really bad outages. -- Dan Luu in Reading postmortems.

Most companies test and stage their code changes through multiple environments, before taking it to the production environment. But what about your config changes? 

Add CaC (Config as Code) in your toolkit and see how it can help avoid a large set of hard-to-find production bugs. In this session, I would share my experience about

• the problems (introduced because of treating configs as text)
• how CaC addresses those challenges
• a short demo using Dhall - the configuration language (a CaC tool)

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Although DevOps practices deliver incredible benefits to organizations looking to improve their software delivery practices, the larger positive impact of DevOps to delivering value is often harder to realize. A set of practices we’ve found to help organizations is something we call the 4 Maps of DevOps. 

Fitting nicely in between the 3 ways and 5 ideals, the 4 maps consist of Outcome Mapping, Value Stream Mapping, Dependency Mapping and Capability Mapping. They help you create a powerful roadmap that is outcomes-focused and targeted at the most important problems.

Through this talk, I’ll walk through the benefits these maps produce, how they relate to one another and the problems you can target with them.  I’ll go through some real-life examples of using these maps to help organizations.

This talk is for anybody who is struggling to work out where to start or where to go next with their adoption of DevOps.

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What is the value of Collaboration in your Organization? Are your teams aligned with the overall purpose & targeted outcomes of an initiative they are working on? How might you facilitate alignment & increase their chance of success?

This talk is targeted at Scrummasters, Product, Agile Coaches and Agile Leaders who are faced with the challenge of successfully kicking off new initiatives within an organization. Facilitating true Collaboration is often understated. Complex collaborative work requires “shared understanding”, high quality discussions, psychological safety & inclusion. As leaders in organizations, we oftentimes miss that it takes intention & design to foster good Collaboration.

Kicking off initiatives is always a challenge in organizations I’ve worked with in the past – it is either too loosely defined or too prescriptive. Inceptions are here to the rescue!! They are an invigorating & meaningful way to bring a team, dependent team(s), product and business stakeholders together to align on the Strategy (Why), The Work (What) and the Team (How). The intentional activities, design and flow of an inception enable a shared understanding which lays a foundation for inclusive collaboration. When done well it can take teams from Good to Great and set them up for success.

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The automotive industry is becoming more softwarized. Users expect their infotainment experiences to be on par with their mobile experiences, and building such connected experiences has become a top priority for auto and software organizations.

But what is infotainment, and what can qualify as a functioning and high-performing infotainment experience? Perhaps even more importantly, what activities and practices can teams employ to create quality, personalized infotainment experiences?

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Agility is the ability to adapt to changing situations.  Resilience is the ability to withstand adversity.  As organizations have discovered, agility alone is not sufficient; resilience is needed as well.  Both are fundamental to the Kanban Method.

Many people think Kanban is just a project tracking board, whether it is stickies on the wall or in a tool like Trello or Jira.  But Kanban is much more. The Kanban Method is a model for evolutionary change that helps organizations continually improve their service delivery.  Those organizations that get good at evolutionary change not only improve agility but also build their resilience.

Such is the path through the Kanban Maturity Model, where we have codified patterns that have been observed over the past 12 years of Kanban implementations.  We have mapped 150 practices against observable business outcomes at 7 levels of organizational maturity, each level of maturity improving in both agility and resilience.

Join Todd as he shares how the Kanban Method can start your evolutionary change towards both agility and resilience.

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Imagine you are playing soccer with well-coordinated team, full of energy  running on the ground and not letting the ball to go to the opponent team. But you don't know where the goal post is? How does that make you feel?....lost / aimless... and now imagine you know where the goal post is but there is only single move that can ensure the goal, what if that move didn't work...I invite you to explore a visual tool to solve  problem and solve it collaboratively.

Impact mapping – a simple yet incredibly effective method for collaborative strategic planning that helps organizations make an impact with software. It helps to create better plans and roadmaps that ensure alignment of business and delivery, and are easily adaptable to change

Impact map is a visual layout of  WHY, WHO, HOW, WHAT of the problem we are confronting.

Like highway maps that shows towns and cities and the roads connecting them, impact maps layout what we will build and how these are connected to ways we assist the people who will use the solution. The primary purpose of the roadmap is not to provide detailed information about the towns and the cities but rather to make explicit the connections among them; their secondary purpose is to help us identify alternate routes too.

Its like original map

You have one starting point and end point and you have different options to reach there, if something fails, you can opt for other path

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Structured around the principles of “Less Is More”, learning focus, impediment busting at speed, and early failures being stepping stones to success, the Dojo way enhances not only delivery processes, but also coaching, transformation and problem solving in Agile and DevOps, removing anti-patterns, minimizing variability, and realizing true value for investments. It takes collaboration and focus to the next level with hyper-sprint enabled faster feedback loops, stake-holder interactions and multiple trials for the optimal solution.

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Financial forecasts (Business Case) for startups and corporate innovation initiatives are notoriously unreliable. But instead of throwing them away entirely, it is possible to create a model, able to quantify the most likely outcome as well as uncertainty. Innovation accounting bridges the gap between innovation teams and finance and can track progress in a meaningful way. 

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Today, top performing agile teams exist in organizations worldwide. However, in many of these same organizations, those very same teams are hamstrung by legacy bureaucratic management - the remnants of a waterfall “license raj.”  Issues with delivery across multiple silios, non-value adding process red tape, and antiquated PMOs persist.  So, we continue to struggle with reaping the full benefits of agile methods, and fall short of business agility.

True end-to-end, business agility requires a bimodal approach: continued care and feeding of agile teams done in parallel with a systematic middle-management transformation away from the license raj. The Agile Value Management Office (VMO) is rapidly gaining traction as the preferred way to accomplish this through:

• A team of teams organizational construct and approach for light-touch governance
• Adaptive planning and experimentation with small-batch Minimal Marketable Products (MMPs) for end-to-end flow 
• Up-front and continuous integration of legal, audit and other business-critical functions for true risk management

Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore how these have liberated managers, unshackled agile teams and resulted in positive customer outcomes. Through key case studies, we’ll see how these have also ensured critical management, oversight, and governance. 

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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. 

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The June 2017 NIST special publication 800-63B, covering Digital Identity, turned what had previously been the gold standard for passwords on its head. For the first time, NIST recommended removing complexity rules and password cycles, supporting longer passwords, no restriction, or requirements  on special characters and preventing the use of  common passwords and those already exposed in a known breach. Why these changes? Because with the best will in the world, the human element in our security measures is always going to be the weakest link. Forcing individuals, particularly those whose primary role has nothing to do with Information Technology, to remember hundreds of unique complex passwords is hard. They don’t want to and when we make them, they get it wrong or look for an answer with as little friction as possible. NIST’s new guidelines are intended to remove some of that friction. When combined with the use of a password management system and multi factor authentication, we might hope that our corporate assets are no longer protected by the same password someone used on their favourite shopping site. 

Unfortunately, things are never that simple. For non-technical users, even working with a password manager can present challenges. Not all systems play nicely with password managers, and they also do not stop a user from using the same credential for more than one product. 

Passwordless authentication is one exciting way forward. This in itself, is not new technology, having been around in various forms for a while - think magic email links for example - but the approach still relies upon shared secrets. However, the release of the WebAuthN standard by the W3C and FIDO, supported by many key vendors, allows us to take advantage of public key cryptography.

At ThoughtWorks we have embarked on a journey to introduce passwordless login to our employees, particularly those with high value accounts and who may be less technical than many. The goal of this session is to share what we have learned throughout this process. We will share our goals, challenges and their resolutions. We hope attendees will be inspired to evaluate this technology, which delivers the rarest of things, better security and a fantastic user experience.     

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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.

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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.

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Modern businesses have disrupted traditional industries by leveraging technology and have created new standards of excellence. They’ve paved the way for new business models to deliver better value to customers and to a larger scale of customers than ever before. Netflix killed the cable TV business. Amazon transformed our shopping experience. Fitbit brought personal health to the forefront. They've created products that are in the hands of millions of people across the world.

Disruption of this magnitude is possible only by intersecting a strong engineering culture with a product strategy that is driven by customer insights. Today, stand-alone products are passè - platforms form a crucial foundation for an ecosystem of consumers, merchants and service providers. They enable businesses to reach a larger customer base, and shake up the industry. 

We relate the story of a true digital disruptor - an organization that chose to focus on turning the insurance industry on its head and changing how people think about their personal health. This is a story of ups and downs, of experiments and learning, of technical excellence and user-centric focus. Follow along with us, from once-upon-a-time-an-idea-was-born all the way through to the-users-lived-healthily-ever-after, in this story of how technology overhauled a traditional industry forever.

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I am obsessed with the idea of personal growth, self-reflection, and self-learning. I constantly read about mindset changes, goal setting, productivity, and improving decision making and this has led me to build a few systems for myself. In this talk, we will be discussing how to set better goals for personal growth, goal-specific decision making, and also forming better habits that support your personal growth journey. It will also include some specific decision-making techniques and patterns, like, Comparison Analysis, Herd Mentality, Sunken Cost, and Action Bias. 

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Agile was born in the house of software development. As it grew and matured, it was welcomed everywhere. Adopting Agile outside technology teams goes much deeper than imitating rituals like stand-up meetings and retrospectives. For example, as the world keeps changing ever faster, the agile principle of adapting to change over following a plan becomes essential to success. Similarly, the original agile principle of aiming for working software over comprehensive documentation can be understood more broadly as aiming for outcomes and impact over activities and output. This talk describes a domain-neutral set of agile approaches for obtaining better and faster outcomes in complex or unpredictable contexts.

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The world is getting more complex, and few competitive advantages remain for companies who want to survive and flourish. One such competitive advantage is to learn faster than the competition to be innovative and creative and invent and produce products and services that customers want and need. But it requires a totally different leadership mindset that lets people make mistakes and learn from them. Agile People Coaches see organizations as social systems, not machines. They recognize that people and relationships build organizations, and if their motivation is high enough, they will find ways to innovate and provide value together. Of course, we still need structures, but just enough to provide cohesion instead of restriction. We need to foster great business cultures to guide behaviors and incentivize people to do things that will help them perform in a common direction. In this scenario, the future career path for leaders and HR professionals is to adopt an Agile People Coach’s competencies, which aims to create the right conditions for individuals, teams, and the whole organization to grow and develop and change as needed to survive.

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Service design places users squarely at the center of its practice, and fulfilling customer needs is the focus of organizations large and small. What happens though, to the people inside the organization, especially at times when efforts are mostly focused on efficiency, simplification and cost reduction?

How do organizations change effectively, and organize their people and the work to support change that isn’t merely cosmetic and that results in tangible outcomes, both internal and external? 

Vision, willingness to depart from management models that are still firmly rooted in the industrial revolution era, and understanding of that culture cannot be superimposed, but is the direct result of the conditions of the system in which it develops, are among the elements that contribute to the solution.

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In the last decade, the movement towards CI/CD has been transformational for getting value out to customers quickly. But in recent years, there has been new processes and tooling towards using configuration post-deployment, in the form of feature flags, operational config, or other runtime configuration. Continually adjusting the configuration to update and tune your code in production is a powerful, fast, and safe way to deploy value to customers. Join us in a discussion about how Amazon uses Continuous Configuration tools at scale to move fast and ensure maximum availability of our services.

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The scrum guide says that "A scrum team is self-managing, meaning they internally decide who does what, when, and how." One of the most important responsibilities of a scrum master (or a coach or even a leader) towards a scrum team is coaching them in self-management. Self-managed teams are empowered to inspect the way they work and outcomes achieved and adapt themselves to be better. These teams are autonomous in several aspects of managing themselves. Autonomy is also an important pillar of intrinsic motivation as per Daniel Pink’s book “Drive”

As part of coaching agile teams, we experimented with establishing various dimensions of autonomy within a team based on work done by various thought leaders. It helped the teams to understand where they stand on various aspects of autonomy, what can be taken up as an improvement backlog as well as what help do they need from the environment or ecosystem.

This session lays down these important dimensions along with the format of the workshop for teams and a toolkit that will help the teams to understand autonomy details, identify where they are and what they can do to be more autonomous.

The session will help agile team coaches, scrum masters or leaders to discuss team autonomy in an interactive way with their teams and identify improvement areas.

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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..

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• Do you know your business goals?  and is IT aligned?
• How are you addressing data challenges (source, quality etc) for measuring Key Results?
• What experiments you can run to make data as a first-class citizen?
• How do you use this data (Key Results) to enhance the collaboration among teams, solve interdependencies and unify competing approaches?

With the increased demand of organizations striving for business agility & disciplined investment management, the traditional way of alignment is becoming less relevant. Hence organizations are exploring different approaches for goal setting to track the extent to which the investment is achieving the value intended and improve the business outcomes.

In this session, we will take you through our journey and experiences by explaining the essence of OKR framework ,our lessons learnt while addressing data challenges, the experiments to get the right quality data for obtaining the Key Results and how it helped to achieve clear alignment between IT and business teams.

Come and join our session to learn from our experiences and pitfalls.

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Anti-Patterns are like patterns, only more informative. With anti-patterns, you will first see what patterns recur in “bad” retrospectives and then you will see how to avoid, or remedy, the situation. Based on her experience with facilitating retrospectives, join Aino for an entertaining and informative presentation on the challenges she has seen and how to overcome them. This talk will be interesting for everyone facilitating meetings in general, and retrospectives in particular. Her latest book “Retrospective Anti-Patterns” will give you more info that she is able to convey in this talk.

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Gone are the days of throwing software builds over the proverbial wall to a team of testers that sit and click pages all day. The agile way of working has shown that maybe a small revolution has started to happen in the world of software developers. The rising of software developers writing e2e functional tests that check their front-end using real browsers. Challenges of having success in this way of doing test automation are real. Let’s be sincere! Software Developers don’t like to write tests much, but the right TA framework can help. In this talk I will describe what we did to make this dream come true.

This is a real life story of how our product team made possible to succeed in delivering quality and speed in every sprint.

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We all have heard about (Scaled) Agile transformations and it various flavors. What's next and how do we sustain the momentum and drive continuous improvements.

After a successful Scaled agile transformation in the Organization, we are sustaining the momentum and driving the the 2nd wave of transformation, namely SW Excellence projects. One of the flag ship programs in the SW Excellence Projects is .tune - elimination of waste removal in SW development by deep observtaions

The waste challenge:

We all enjoy being productive and effective in software development but how do we really find and remove the things that slow us down?

To achieve this we need to know

How much waste we have?

Is it going up or down?

What actions can we take to reduce it?

The goal 

Stimulate a culture of zero waste. Discover, quantify and eliminate waste

Improve productivity, predictability and quality

The Big opportunity - is out there to reduce micro and macro wastes in development! Via Deep observations @ developer desk and enabling productivity aspects, we are able to identify and eliminate greater than 20% in development waste

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An introduction and explanation of 8 guiding principles design by the Agile Coaching team for Spotify Ads R&D and how they might help you with your own change efforts

1. We are more impactful with both team-level insight AND leadership relationships;
2. We should not become operational (or at least be careful about becoming operational);
3. Focusing too much on short-term tactical wins limits the ability to have sustained impact;
4. Coach (aka change agent) collaboration is more effective than silos;
5. Results are for the short-term; systems and habits are for the long-term;
6. Involving leaders (both formal and informal) in both brainstorming and implementation makes improvement faster;
7. Coaching structure should follow coaching strategy; coaching strategy should follow product/business strategy;
8. Sharing work and successes should be intentional, not just organic.

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How do you know if your customers are happy with what you are building ?

How often do you measure the impact on your customers?

Many times teams focus too much on the factor that ‘Scrum helps us reduce our time to market’ and forget about the truth that ‘Scrum helps us to focus on Customer’. Teams focuses on optimising those numbers such as velocity, defect rate, cycle time etc and forget to understand the big picture of what value they are creating for the customers.

In my session I will be talking about the topic Outcome centric teams, Why is it important and how can your team come out of ‘feature development trap’ .

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What if we narrate 3 anecdotes about unconventional means to create happy engineers?

Story #1 - How a product owner made the engineers happy by articulating their customers' extra sleep due to the team's work?

Story #2 - How did a 'rewards committee'  come up with a reward for a winner of an in-house contest, with a budget of 0 INR?

Story #3 - How did a 'product team' take on the adventure of killing the mutant invaders using JavaScript while saving money for the organization?

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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.

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Getting great user feedback can be tough. What’s worse is that you don’t even know what you’re not discovering! Are you getting the most value out of these interactions? Are you learning everything you could?

This is a rapid crash course in some of the subtle nuances in effective user interviewing. I’ve compiled 13 of the most critical hacks that will dramatically change how you talk to your users. Learn how to ask questions in a way that will get the most insightful answers. Learn tricks to keep them talking so you learn everything they have to teach you. Learn some of the common pitfalls that can cause people to clam up or to give you false or misleading info.

Many of these techniques are counter-intuitive and do not follow the norms for how we have been conditioned to have conversations! In this session, you will get to practice them in a safe environment, get feedback on how you’re doing, and experience how it feels to be on the other side of the conversation.

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2021 marks the 20 anniversary of the Agile Manifesto. Yet many organizations are still struggling to clearly improve value delivery for their customers. In this talk Scott Ambler and Mark Lines explain why agile has struggled in the past and what we can do about it.  Go beyond agile rhetoric, agile methods and frameworks and learn how to optimize agility for your situation, not others. We can do better, and it is not difficult. Disciplined Agile can help. The journey starts with an investment in learning, optimizing for your situation, and then removing obstacles to accelerate delivery and delight your customers.

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Business success is directly proportional to the customer value you deliver through your solutions (product, service, process). Yet, very few organisations accurately measure customer value throughout the creation process because of a limited understanding of how customers derive value, flawed metrics &/or lack of a holistic view of the customer. Start by determining how customers define success - why they choose you over competitive solutions. Work those metrics into your organisations' operating mechanisms, share them widely throughout your organisation. All while being extra careful to not let 'vanity metrics' creep in i.e. those metrics that make the organisation feel good about the solution but not valuable to the customer.

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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!

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The Test Automation Pyramid is not a new concept.

The top of the pyramid is our UI / end-2-end functional tests - which simulate end-user behavior and interactions with the product-under test.

While Automation helps validate functionality of your product, aspects of UX validations can only be seen and captured by the human eye and is hence mostly a manual activity. This is an area where AI & ML can truly help.

With everyone wanting to be Agile, make quick releases, the look & feel / UX validation, which is typically a a manual, slow, and error-prone activity, quickly becomes a huge bottleneck.

In addition, with any UX related issues propping up cause huge brand-value and revenue loss, may lead to social-trolling and worse - dilute your user-base.

In this hands-on workshop, using numerous examples, we will explore:

• Why Automated Visual Validation is essential to be part of your Test Strategy
• How Visual AI increases the coverage of your functional testing, while reducing the code, and increasing stability of your automated tests
• Potential solutions / options for Automated Visual Testing, with pros & cons of each
• How an AI-powered tool, Applitools Eyes, can solve this problem
• Hands-on look at Applitools Visual AI and how to get started using it

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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.

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Join this workshop to discover an alternative to feedback - feedforward!
Feedback is the concept that helps us improve our products, teams, organisations and ourselves. As agilists, we believe we need feedback to inspect and adapt. We give and receive feedback every day. And it doesn’t always go well. As we give and receive feedback, people get defensive. Feelings get hurt. Often, the improvements don’t happen, because the feedback isn’t given in a way that the receiver can embrace.

It turns out there’s a different approach to giving feedback that works a lot better, a way of turning its focus from the past to the future. It’s an idea called “feedforward".

In this workshop, we will learn and practice the concept of feedforward. Join us to explore how feedforward is different from feedback, how it helps us focus on the future, and let go of the past. Learn how to be a better coach, leader and colleague.

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Event storming started as a method to model domains more effectively. However, it is now emerging as an effective method for a variety of use cases ranging from product discovery to business model planning.

In this workshop, you will get a chance to experience remote event storming on a simple, but interesting business case. You will learn the foundational concepts of event storming and gain first hand experience in its practical application in a remote context.

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If the last year has taught us anything, it’s that the way we think about, well… everything has to change, including the way we think about work and leadership.

In this session, we will present the results of a research study conducted among global leaders, and explore how the pandemic has impacted the way we look after our teams, the differences between remote and in-person leadership, challenges and opportunities created by physical distance, and how to prevent it from also becoming emotional and intellectual distance.

We start from a set of questions we’ve asked ourselves both in the past and more recently:

• How do you create and maintain connection and trust when you cannot look someone in the eye or walk by their desk?
• How do you oversee work, advice, mentor and help people grow at a distance?
• How does a team that can’t get together, stay together?
• What kind of additional or different support does your team (and you) need?
• And more…

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Traditional software delivery teams are layered with roles like user experience, project management, business analysts, developers, QAs, DevOps, etc. With the translation of business problems at multiple steps, each role induces a fitment drift in the devised solution. As part of this talk, we would like to present our experience from the last 7 years building products for clients delivered by teams with ZERO roles (No PM, BA, QA, DevOps). It presents the argument and evidence of why the notion of needed depth in every skill, every single time is an overkill, and how a small team of people who dabble with code and product thinking both can deliver solutions that are faster and better with minimum fitment drift. We outline the practices and rituals required to establish, operationalise and sustain skill-based teams. We also intend to discuss delivery objectives for software teams and how teams that organise themselves around business objectives deliver better products compared to one's setup with superfluous roles for analysis, testing, and management, etc. 

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Does your technical debt backlog look endless? Are you thinking about pausing feature development to resolve tech-debt? Stop. What if I told you that a good chunk of your backlog can simply wait? Tech-Debt can seem overwhelming when we look at it as a loosely organised list. This can lead to several anti-patterns in how we deal with them. Attend this session where I will be sharing strategies we have been leveraging to identify high priority tech-debt items to make sure we are able to continue feature development while improving code health.

Problem Statement: Tech-Debt often accumulates until productivity takes a serious hit and then as a knee jerk reaction we try to clean it up all at once. At this point there is just one large list of issues with a loose sense of priority. Net net it gives an impression that we have a huge backlog. This can lead to several anti-patterns.

• Chicken and Egg Problem - Too much Tech-Debt, so feature development is slow. Since feature development is slow, we cannot set aside time to fix issues.
• Fixing the wrong issues - In the larger scheme of things, it may be counter-productive to fix low priority issues just because they are easy.
• Pausing Feature Development - Approaches such as "Technical Debt Sprints" where we pause features to resolve tech-debt are not be sustainable even if they offer some short term benefits.
• Local Optima - Patchy cleanups which lead to uneven code health across the code base.
• And many more

Solution: Understand the impact of each Technical Debt at Block, Category and Item level to narrow your backlog to those issues which matter. While there are several tools that help us identify tech-debt it is up to us to map our context on those issues. Attend this talk where I will be going over how to VISUALISE, TRIAGE, PRIORITISE and STRATEGISE in order to get a realistic view on your tech-debt. Also I will be sharing my experience about how we have been leveraging time boxes and capacity constraints as a tool to make sure we are only working on the most important tech-debt issues.

Topics that will be covered:

• Tech-debt resolutions strategies - Anti-Patterns
• Tech Debt - Understanding Size vs Impact
• Tech-Debt Manifestations - Matrix view of areas of code and types of problems.
• Visualise - Triage - Prioritise - Strategise
  • Visual techniques to understand your tech-debt backlog with code analysis tools - Examples with popular tools
    • Bubble Charts - Coverage vs LOC, Maintainability vs LOC etc.
    • Git History - Multiple ways of looking at changes to a piece of code
    • Active Code Paths - Mapping usage to issues
    • Mapping Project Management Data - Bugs, Stories that touch a piece of code
  • Triaging the backlog to quickly eliminate tasks that can wait
    • Block level - Leveraging Logical Architecture
    • Category vice - Example: Front-End, Backend, API etc.
    • Item vice elimination
    • Refactor vs Rewrite
  • Prioritising tech-debt with layers of detail such as - Churn, LOC, Coverage, Bugs etc. Hotspot Identification.
  • Strategise - Approach to resolving each tech debt item based on Tech-Debt Manifestation Matrix
• Tech-Debt resolution - Hypothesis based, Data Driven approach
  • A template to capture your hypotheses, experiments and learnings
  • Visual confirmation that the issue is resolved
  • Just-Enough resolution - The uncomfortably short time-box - Imposing constraints to avoid runaway clean-ups
  • Guard rails to avoid a repeat of the same issue
• Incorporating tech-debt resolution into your Iterations, Weeks, Sprints, etc.
  • Identifying the right cadence on how often you fix debt - Hours per Day, Days per Week etc.
  • Tech-Debt back log Grooming
  • Cycling through categories of tech-debt
• Measuring Progress
  • Short-term - Measuring immediate impact on the code
  • Medium-term - Productivity improvements (Readability, Issue resolution time, etc)
  • Long-term - Team Health - Knowledge Silos, New Team Member Onboarding Time

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One billion people are estimated by the World Health Organisation to have a disability. W3C's Web Content Accessibility(A11y) Guidelines (WCAG) are becoming increasingly mandated by governments. They are being used by many industries to make websites more accessible for people with disabilities. The product development team is often told to make their websites accessible like it is an easy light switch you turn on or off, but, it is not easy.

Digital transformation is now the holy grail of IT organisations. However, most companies are striving towards engineering excellence with processes like the Continuous Delivery process and often forget about the usability and Accessibility factor, which has to be given utmost importance early in the cycle. Because the applications/ products that we build should be accessible by all.

"Accessibility is everyone's responsibility" - We all need to understand that Accessibility isn’t “someone else’s job”. In this talk, Manoj intends to share some practical examples of baking Accessibility during your agile software development cycle and advocates striving for engineering excellence with empathy. This talk will include basics like, need for Accessibility, followed by some practical, simple ways to find Accessibility flaws and, this will enrich the level of confidence to have some meaningful conversation about pushing for Accessibility mindset at their workplace and how to take it forward by baking in the accessibility at part of your Agile process from planning stages to production stages.

This talk will share practical insights on how to bring in the Accessibility mindset within teams and highlight tools and processes in the Accessibility ecosystem to implement during product development, 

• Where to start with Accessibility?
• Can we add Accessibility into the Definition of Done?
• What audit tools to use in the software dev lifecycle
• How organizational transformation on Accessibility initiative can be done to promote the Accessibility thought process.

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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

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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.

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Want an easy tool to help you start building the best team of your life?

That’s exactly what the Team Transformation Canvas is: a practical worksheet to help you and your teammates discover the best in each other and put it into action.

For attendees, the canvas facilitates individual self-awareness of their current emotional state and their desired personal outcomes. They develop a deepened understanding of what drives their behaviors and actions. By identifying and owning these intrinsic motivations, participants align their future actions with their most inherent needs—creating their own unique pathway to professional and personal self-actualization. Finally, the canvas facilitates deep emotional and supportive connections with each other—the building blocks of a high-performance team.

The canvas can be used as a solitary contemplative exercise for self-improvement, or as a tool for bootstrapping a team toward intentional greatness.

Attendees leave with actionable next steps to improve themselves and their teams. And they’ll know how to use the canvas with their own teams, to help other individuals and teams gain deeper insight into themselves, so they can pursue their greatness.

For those familiar with the Core Protocols, the canvas facilitates a super-fast individual and team boot-up. 

To prepare yourself for this session, get your own electronic copy of the canvas at https://kasperowski.com/your-remote-team-actually-can-be-awesome/#team-transformation-canvas.

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We often find ourselves in complex situations without recognizing what makes them complex. Fortunately, understanding the context can help us to benefit from the situation by reducing or even increasing the complexity.

In this workshop, we will introduce a simple tool for understanding the context of complexity (thedifference matrix ofHuman Systems Dynamics, HSD in short). HSD helps us see the differences and exchanges that make a situation complex and as well as providing hints for changing the level of the complexity. Using a case study, participants will experience in small groups (using breakout rooms) an example of how they can use the HSD difference matrix.

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BAPO stands for Business Architecture Process Organisation. It is Jan Bosch's more fleshed out expression of "structure should follow strategy". I recently experimented with applying this framework within Spotify Ads R&D and would like to share what worked and what didn't. Concepts expanded beyond BAPO to include product capabilities versus architecture services; overlapping product lifecycle s-curves; Simon Wardley's Pioneers, Settlers, Town Planners; and a reframing of the teaching people how to fish metaphor. Beyond sharing my successes and failures, this session will also encourage attendees to sketch how they might try this framework in their own context and anticipate what issues may appear.

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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.

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Keeping Development teams motivated and productive has always been a challenge even in a pre-pandemic office work environment. In the new Remote-first work reality, these challenges bring new tradeoffs between Developer joy and releasing new features quickly and maintaining a high bar on quality. Add to this the hurdles in communication and this presents a potential obstacle for most businesses and their bottom line. But using gamification exercises, quality gating, guardrails and modified KPIs combined with a reward/objective-based system for distributed development teams can bring in a new way to drive developer effectiveness in teams. Combining learnings from running remote distributed teams for over a decade (as well as through the pandemic) this talk will focus on the wins/learnings/opportunities that can be a blueprint for enabling happy dev teams that deliver consistent quality at high velocity

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Microservices are not easy. We start with hopes of independent scaling, better resource utilisation, independent teams working on individual services. But if not carefully handled, we often end up (sometimes not even realising) with a complex distributed monolith that requires complex and error prone orchestration everyday, eventually slowing us down like an elephant.

This talk is about our journey of infrequent painful deployments of our distributed monolith to almost 10 deployments everyday, our CI/CD strategy that enabled us to get to that state and where we are now in our journey of rearchitecting our microservices.

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The Paris Agreement signed in 2016 looks at climate change mitigation, adaptation, and
finance. Several organizations have since come forward to crack the climate crisis and solve
the challenges of decarbonizing the economy. We do hear regularly about organizations
disclosing their reduction in carbon footprint, or their plans to achieve net zero
emissions.

There is also a shift that was accelerated due to the pandemic around digitalization of
businesses. IDC has predicted digital transformation investments to reach USD 6.8 trillion by
2023. Technology enabled by software is the foundation stone for this digitalization.
Software needs storage, compute, networks to run and function. All of this consumes
energy. There is hence an urgent need for the software engineering community to
understand the impact of software on the carbon footprint.

This talk will explore the impact and what steps do the industry community need to take to
minimize it.

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The future of work is the future of leadership and that is hybrid.

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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.

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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.

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Experience centricity is essential to drive business outcomes and has become the top priority of many CXOs. The COVID-19 crisis has made experience-centricity and IT agility paramount to nearly every business. In the post-COVID world, businesses need superior digital enablement and acceleration to ensure continuity, customer satisfaction and competitive edge.

Experience centricity, however, is not limited to creating new digital products and channels. It encompasses every aspect of software that can enhance an organization’s ability to solve business challenges and harness opportunities through digital solutions that are meaningful and delight end users – both inside and outside the enterprise.

The ongoing digital revolution and related opportunities, challenges and risks pose several questions in the minds of IT executives. What makes digital products go viral? What are some of the key success factors?  How can we make digital initiatives thrive? How can organizations succeed in transforming monoliths into digital products or platforms?

Improving usability through the right mix of user interface and interaction design, application of design thinking, and focusing on functional and non-functional requirements are the foundations. Usability is essential. Usability ensures effectiveness, efficiency and satisfaction. However, beyond usability, understanding the power of desirability and enhancing it is a prime factor. Desirability provides a meaningful, enjoyable and memorable experience.  Desirability is what makes the users bond with the product with the ongoing delightful experience it creates resulting in a worthy engagement. Whether you create and deliver new products and applications or modernize existing applications to deliver an outstanding digital experience, enhancing desirability is essential.

This session is to present five considerations for enhancing desirability with real-world examples that reveal how any heritage organization can create experiences that help the business achieve its strategic aspirations and objectives.

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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.

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The transition into more complex systems is accelerating, and chaos engineering has proved to be a great-to-have option in our toolbox to handle this complexity. But the speed at which we're developing and deploying makes it hard to keep up through manual chaos experiments, so we turn to automation. In this session, we'll look at how automated chaos experiments help us cover a more extensive set of experiments than we can cover manually and how it allows us to verify our assumptions over time as unknown parts of the system change.

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Resilience and Reliability, alongside Observability and Security, are hot topics as DevOps adoption matures and teams become aware of the advantages of shortening even more feedback loops by shifting more of these sociotechnical challenges left.

In this talk Russ Miles will share how he helps high performing organisations develop a culture of reliability, some of the pitfalls and common mistakes that can be made, and how to build your own roadmap towards developing key reliability and resilience capabilities in your own team and organisation.

Drawing from practices and tools such as Chaos Engineering and Site Reliability Engineering, Russ will share how you can collaborate, observe, explore, fix, verify and continuously learn and improve your complex system's reliability. In creating this technical and social mix a Culture of Reliability and Resilience emerges and Russ will then show how this leads to your organisation being better prepared to anticipate, adapt, respond and learn from inevitable production surprises.

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We live in a complex world, there are no silver bullets to solve problems in this complex world. There has been done a lot of research on what makes teams successful, or what identifies a good team. The five dysfunctions of a team, the Rocket model, project Aristotle. I believe all those models have good components, but what would happen if you get the best of all those models, and also back them up with academic research?

In this talk, I would like to share six components that will help teams to create value. Six components based on research, existing models, best practices, and my experience as a manager. This talk will explain that successful teams: have trust, are reliable, have conflicts, understand their impact, care about results and have clarity. You will learn why these six components are important but also have some practical take-aways. For example, having conflicts is easy said. However, how do have conflicts, and help teams with conflicts?

The talk is connected to my latest book The Art of Teams.

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As we face increased demands or speed, change and technical excellence, the pressure, and the need, for tool support for testing increases. Organizations want to automate aspects of testing. Is this possible? What effect does it have on the work and on the people doing the work? Success is not just about selecting and implementing tools and technical infrastructure. People ensure the success or failure of testing and of tool use; they must drive the project. 

Isabel is midway through a research project to explore testers’ experiences with tools and automation. So far, she’s uncovered some illusions about tool usability, some attempts at magic, and many new questions.

Interviews, workshops, and survey responses from nearly 200 testers revealed people found tools and automation to be problematic in many ways, leading to people expressing high levels of emotion, stress and distress. Over 30% of the respondents to the anonymous survey answered questions about their experiences with test tools in a way that indicated emotional responses. People talked about tools leaving them “stuck in limbo” and unable to do their work, expressed their frustration that tools are treated as “magical solutions for all of the test problems” and expressed their fears, and the demotivation they felt: “I think I should leave my job.”

Part of the problem was the usability of the tools. This was the attribute most often discussed by testers when describing both their aspirations for tool, and their frustrations with tools. It is not just that some tools have been built without usability in mind, but that where usability had been part of the design criteria, it merely offered an illusion of usability, with a superficial veneer to the UI that didn’t address workflow, differing needs among testers, and their changing requirements. 

In this reflection on her research and industry experiences, Isabel talks about learning new ways of working after decades in the industry, her findings so far, what she’s discovered that will help your testing now, and her plans for the rest of the research. She’ll be asking you to contribute to a survey to discover who is doing testing, and how they are doing it. This will feed into a model for designing test tools that support people, and make test tool design a people-centred activity.

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Self-Healing Tests is an approach in which machine learning helps with the maintenance of automated tests. Self-Healing, the automation of test automation, recognizes changes in the "system under test" and automatically adapts the test execution so that the tests remain functional. Commercial tools like TestIM and Tricentis Neo Engine are promising and focused on this area in good time. But there are also promising open source alternatives such as Healenium. This talk explains the pros and cons of self-healing tests and shows the implementation with the open source library Healenium using a concrete example.

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Sprint retrospectives were designed to make the process of software development empirical. An approach where you can make mistakes but also reflect and learn from those mistakes.

They possibly are the ‘A’ in the Deming’s Wheel (Plan-Do-Check-Adjust) that served as the origin of iterative development methods. Unfortunately, that is not how modern retrospectives work. They are rife with boredom, failure to admit mistakes, and lack of follow up if somehow two or three action items were identified.

My interest in organizational behaviour and keen research links each of these problems to a cognitive bias.

In this talk, I will list all of the biases that make retrospectives ineffective and ways in which we can mitigate them.

For example, Recency bias is the tendency to focus on the most recent time period instead of the entire time period. Having retrospectives at the end of a sprint or maybe once a month makes people forget most of the problems they faced or the mistakes they made early in the sprint.

But how do we fix this?

Radical idea but how about a custom field called “Lessons learned” on every ticket you work on. Everybody keeps filling their observations per ticket during the sprint instead of waiting for the final retrospective.

We can call them micro-retrospectives spread across the entire cycle that can be the fodder for the actual retro meeting.

There are also other biases like sunk cost fallacy and halo effect that I am going to discuss in this session.

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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.

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Businesses are building digital platforms with modern architecture principles like domain driven design,  microservice based, and event-driven. These platforms are getting ever so modular, flexible and complex.

While they are built with architecture principles like - loose coupling, individually scaling, plug-and-play components; regulations and security considerations on data - complexity leads to many unknown and grey areas in the entire architecture. Details on how the different components of this complex architecture interact with each other are lost. Generating insights becomes multi-teams, multi-staged activity and hence multi-days activity. 

Multiple users and stakeholders of the platform want different and timely insights to take both corrective and preventive actions.Business teams want to know how business is doing in every corner of the country near real time at a zipcode granularity. Tech teams want to correlate flow changes with system health including that of downstream stability as it happens.Knowing these details also helps in providing the feedback to the platform itself, to make it more efficient and also to the underlying business process.

In this talk we intend to share how we made all the business and technical insights of a complicated platform available in realtime with limited incremental effort and constant validation of the ideas and slices with business teams. Since the client was a Banking client, we will also touch base handling of financial data in a secure way and still enabling insights for a large group of stakeholders.

We kept the self-service aspect at the center of our solution - to accommodate increasing components in the source platform, evolving requirements, even to support new platforms altogether. Configurability and Scalability were key here, it was important that all the data that was collected from the source platform was discoverable and presentable. This also led to evolving the solution in lines of domain data products, where the data is generated and consumed by those who understand it the best.

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Whenever we talk about automation we generally limit ourselves to tests (Be them Unit, Integration, or End to End).

Yet, We spend a considerable amount of time on Test Data Creation (Unknowingly and Unwillingly) during many other Day to Day activities.

In this talk, I will demonstrate different tools along with one open-source tool "Corr" (that I made) to write test data as code. One can parameterize, randomize, correlate data creation steps in this code and each code snippet can be directly run from the IDE plugin that supports this data creation code language.

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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!

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In today’s Agile world, quality needs to be owned by the whole team, not just the software testers, in order to release quality software quickly.  In this presentation, I’ll discuss the key attributes of quality, the specific behaviors that are needed for those attributes, how software developers can get involved, and how the team can measure progress.

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Recent stories of Agile application in the regulated medical industry show how first principles (from Agile, from Lean, and from systems thinking) led to solutions that served the individual company exquisitely well, and were compliant with regulatory needs (whether in Europe, the U.S., or elsewhere in the world).

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What is the hardest part of applying Agile methods to Medical development?

Brian and I were asked this question in connection with our new book “Agile Methods for Safety-Critical Systems: Case Studies of Medical Product Companies”. I give two answers to that question…
 
There are “twin” hardest problems - first the misconception that Agile must be taking unacceptable shortcuts to be so effective. Second, once they’ve decided that’s not the case there is a strong misconception that Agile can be ‘installed’ by tick-box actions like buying a tool or a methodology. That second misconception is what our new book addresses, and will be the topic of our talk at Agile India 2021.

We wrote the book to help more people see positive, creative, successful implementations of Agile principles in the demanding environment of medical device development. Why successes and not failures? Attractors are stronger than repellers. People naturally want to emulate what they see working well for others, especially when those others are in similar roles to their own. 
 
But emulate is not the same as “copy” especially where complexity is involved. “In complexity you don’t copy an outcome, you replicate the starting conditions.” said Dave Snowden in a recent blog post https://www.cognitive-edge.com/siphonophorae-not-hybrid-2-of-2/   This point needs some explanation - and that is what our new book attempts to do. People in our case studies worked from their understanding of the key principles underlying Agile, Lean and systems thinking to take a fresh look at their situation. By starting from first principles and their own deep knowledge of their products, people, and markets they achieved results any consultant would be proud to match.
 
Did you know that if your software is designed and built without using a Quality Management System correctly, then the regulators can refuse to give permission to market it? That happened to one company and they ended up having an Agile company re-develop their software.
 
Did you know that your SOPs (standard operating procedures) should not be overly prescriptive. If they are they impede the flexibility that your Agile teams need. There is a sweet spot that you can achieve using BDD!
 
Did you know that an Agile company can move into doing medical device work without first getting certifications such as IEC62304 and ISO13485? It’s true. Simply by having a well-disciplined Agile Quality Management System, they attracted contracts to develop software for large medical device companies.
 
Want to know more? Come to our session!

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