Agile is loopy. Nature is loopy. It has no straight lines. Even the whole universe can be explained through quantum loop gravity. Many of us used to work within linear end-to-end processes but now work in loops. But what does working in loops really mean?

Come and learn why agile is loopy. Come and look beyond Scrum to learning and user engagement loops and hear why Product Management and Design Thinking must be at the heart of an agile mindset if we're truly to *be* agile.

There is much discussion about the changing roles of Development and Operations staff when organisations undergo agile/digital/devops transformations. But what about the changing role of the Team Leader?

In pre-agile environments, as a Team Lead, your role is one of structure and co-ordination, it is through you that work routes. You know the skills and capacity of your team and are regularly making decisions about what can and can’t be done.

But as your team starts to work in agile teams, the need for you to keep them busy is reduced, as this is now a responsibility of the product owner and agile team itself.

You might find yourself asking “Do we need Team Lead’s in an agile/devops culture?”, and if so “What value can I provide?

This sessions looks at the opportunities existing Team Leaders have to support and drive digital transformation through the discussion of focus' they can bring to the team.

Docker is an awesome container platform. As part of this talk , I would like to show and discuss , how it can help solve some of the common and annoying issues faced while testing . Namely :

• "It worked on my machine" problem
• Testing different configurations, with the same codebase
• Efficiently testing on your / dev's machine.
• Setting up the Continuous Integration Environment
• Scaling  / Parallelising Test Runs ( via Selenium Grid  & Docker Compose ) 

In this interactive session, Rob and Many from REA Group will go through an exercise designed to explore the agile testing mindset.  Together with the rest of the room we will build up a mindmap of a test plan for a simple application.  

Testing is an often mis-understood, under-estimated role.  We hope to challenge people into thinking outside the box and give people a better understanding of what a "QA" role brings to a high performing agile team.

In post-industrial western society we live in a culture dominated by symbolic language (words). But it wasn't always the case and a lot of how we communicate is lost or overlooked by ignoring the totality of our social interactions.

In this session you'll be introduced to some very basic concepts of how we are perceived by others through non-verbal communication, and learn how to influence others.

This session is a case study of how to apply Scrum and Systems thinking to a small development and support group working on multiple products at the same time. Scrum explains how to organise a single team working on a single product. Scaling frameworks such as Safe, LeSS, Nexus & DAD provide ways for multiple teams to work on a single product, but what do you do when you have multiple products and one siloed team?

From the outside Spotify is a company who has solved the riddle of scaling agile, but the insiders perspective might surprise you, with our structure more closely resembling a collection of startups sharing a wifi connection.

What's in a story? Perhaps more applicable to agilists today, what's in a user story?

Let's get real about user stories and what they are trying to achieve. Perhaps the user story is not the story format we should be using!

Let's examine the user story format that we all know and love today. We will dive a little deeper into how a story and personas can create synergy. We will discuss how a user story can be presented on a ticket and how stories can be supplemented with information like acceptance criteria.

Of course something so widely used will have anti-patterns. Let's look at a few and have a few laughs as well.

Let's go even further and talk about user story alternatives, I will propose two. But wait! Are there even other user story alternatives? I will introduce two more.

Finally, let's sum up the purpose of the user story and conclude with the central idea that's really important - your story can be anything you want it to be!

The web is increasingly becoming the standard way in which we conduct our business, but despite the use of ever improving technologies many websites are frustratingly slow and getting slower. It is becoming more difficult to compete for and retain users attention, and If you operate in the online space you can no longer afford to ignore the performance of your website or platform.

This talk will provide an introduction to and the benefits of web-performance optimisation, explain why it matters now more than ever and why it's so commonly overlooked during the development process. It will also show how you can identify and fix the most common performance pitfalls, resulting in reduced costs, and increased user engagement and satisfaction.

During this talk there will be an opportunity to follow along on your own laptop and learn how to use some of the tools firsthand.

Amazon ECS is a widely-used Docker container scheduling and orchestration platform, but some of the constraints it applies makes for ... interesting ... workarounds. Chief among the challenges are connecting containers to each other, across services, clusters, and even regions. Working in hybrid cloud environments is also a problem.

This talk will show you one way to address these challenges: by using the "weave" Docker overlay network, a self-discovering and self-configuring mesh network that permits configuration simplicity and out-of-the-box parity with the popular docker-compose structure.

Over the last 2 years Niall has coached teams of agile teams through the launch of two Agile Release Trains (SAFe). Niall helped leaders, managers and teams through the process of adopting SAFe.

Using his real experience as the basis for the presentation, Niall will make the case for moving past SAFe and going to the heart of scaled Agile using Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS).

Continuous Integration has been a buzz word among development teams for several years. What is your branching strategy for Continuous Integration, and can it be improved?

Stephanie BySouth | Director, Authentika

We often expect ourselves to lead people like mythical legends with the mystical abilities to influence others. Expectations and judgements are thrown at leaders without consideration that they are also people. We aren’t afforded the same learning courtesy as Agile teams expect for themselves. That’s OK, because we know; no matter how safe, it’s not nice or easy to fail people. Especially those we are accountable for.

With this level of accountability and the need to support senior management to cross ‘the Agile team to Agile leadership chasm’ with clients, it was time for a leadership agility framework that serves us, the business and our teams simply and sustainably.

Data driven decision making culture. It sounds great in theory, but how do you really get there in practice?

In this talk I will share insights, stories and examples of data visualisations from my quest to create a data driven decision making culture. I'll show you where to start in building a data driven culture, how to overcome common data resistance patterns and how to create an environment where people use data by default as an input to making decisions around product delivery.

But data is confronting and it often doesn’t support decisions that have already been made or visions that have already been imagined so a big part of this story is about how we conquer issues around data resistance, sharing data with others and how to build robustness needed to stand up to data undermining attempts.

And why is data so essential to me? As Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking become more mainstream, it appears the amount of misinformation and misuse is growing and the lack of tangible business outcomes is putting our industry at risk.  We have an obligation to protect the integrity of these practices by showing the relationship between cause and effect. Showing how we have affected business performance, aiming to understand when we have improved it and when we have gone backwards. Having the evidence as well as the great stories about our transformations.

Do you conduct agile team retrospectives only to discover that the same problems keep coming up and nothing seems to change? Do you want to develop MVPs and apply lean startup principles to deliver customer value? Do you want to accelerate DevOps adoption and master The Three Ways? Are you trying to start a movement for lean, agile or systems thinking to transform where you work? Or are you just looking for a scientific systematic way of continual learning and improvement?

The Toyota Kata is a structured and focused approach to create a culture of continuous learning and improvement. The use of experiments and coaching practices help create the safe environment needed for innovative solutions, and can be applied at any level in any organization in any industry.

"The Third Way shows us how to create a culture that simultaneously fosters experimentation, learning from failure, and understanding that repetition and practice are the prerequisites to mastery." The Phoenix Project (2013)

Come and learn how the Toyota Kata can help you lead the continuous improvement pattern at scale across your organization.