Almost everyone has had a pivotal moment that, on reflection, you realise was the catalyst for you to change the course of your life.

After working in retail for over 15 years, I had one of these moments that lead me to persue a career as a developer, through the developHER program at MYOB.

I will be sharing my story of successes, failures and many MANY learnings which I hope can help or inspire you or someone you know on their tech journey.

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.

World of work has broken.  According to Gallup in a study conducted worldwide between 2011-2012 - only 13% of employees working for an organisation are involved in, enthusiastic about and committed to their work and workplace. 

I'll explain why our current standard patterns in management are no longer good enough, and what we can do differently and better.  I will showcase a number of modern modern management techniques - popularised by Jurgen Appelo and Management 3.0 - that are fundamentally aligned with lean and agile principles.  These will help you get better engagement, better teamwork and make management an easier job.

You will walk away with a number of simple techniques you can use to help initiate teams or projects; change the level of conversation that you will with your peers and team members; and give you a way to build happier teams.

• Assess your situation and prioritize your needs;
• Surviving techniques for the hiring process;
• Assemble your own custom emergency kit with essentials tools;
• Manage extreme work conditions and overtime;
• Survive corporate parties and drinks;
• Build trust network and create allies; 
• Identify your enemies and their habits.

Which way is right? They all are. This talk untangles what these movements, mindsets, and approaches mean, and helps teams and leaders to choose the right bits at the right times, and bring it all together into one big happy collaboration.

The way we do product development constantly evolves and every few years, there’s a new wave of thinking that promises to be the secret key to doing it better. The 90’s saw the rise of the Agile movement for building software better. A bit later, the lean mindset shifted the focus to value creation for the entire organisation. More recently, Design Thinking has democratised design and brought it to the boardroom.That’s awesome! But it leaves leaders bamboozled by an unprecedented array of frameworks, methods and approaches – paralysing meaningful progress. Boots-on-ground practitioners are also confused about how to work with their colleagues from other camps too.

Can these approaches work together? How do we know if we’re doing it right? How does it all fit together? Could this work in my organisation?

This talk will help you find answers to your questions, bringing clarity to the topic, and some practical guidelines to help you find a way that works for you.

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.

As they say, nothing is more dangerous than using yesterday’s logic for today’s problems, yet we are still working in our organisations with mental models that were inspired by manufacturing. You can see artefacts of it even in the language we use: people are resources and they work in development factories. If we are surprised why our transformations are not progressing as fast as we hoped when Agile took the stage, then looking to these old mental models provides part of the answer.

In this talk I will explain from practical experience in my work, how the old models still influence us every day and how we can break away from them and learn new models. I will give positive and negative examples from real projects to show that it is normal to experience failures and how to course correct from the lessons such failures teach us.

I will also provide pragmatic steps that everyone can take in their own organisations that don’t rely on buying new tools or following specific methods. Charting your own course starts with understanding where the problem is and understanding where our mental models let us down is part of that journey.

One of the principles of the Agile manifesto is build projects around motivated individuals. “Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.”.

However, individuals have different strengths and weaknesses. Our focus shifts quite often on how to improve their performance and how we can “develop” their weaknesses. Science and my personal experience shows that building on the strengths rather than improving our weaknesses will get better results, and not only when we want to build projects around motivated individuals.

We have been lucky enough to work with a not-for-profit organization called EPIC Recruit Assist to offer software testing training to a group of young adults on the autism spectrum, through a new initiative known as the “EPIC TestAbility Academy”.

In this talk, we will describe:

• What is the autism spectrum and why it aligns with software testing
• How this relationship came about
• Why it is important to seek opportunities that drive diversity
• Key relationships, shared goals and building the vision
• The importance of communication
• Building a balanced programme
• Preparation that was required to get the programme off the ground
• Lessons learned in finding participants
• Lessons learned delivering the training
• The outcomes for the candidates on completion of the programme.

Everyone has faced this issue before when working in an agency, you got a customer which desperately needs a fixed budget and time to deliver an urgent project. Two corners of the iron triangle are fixed but you still have to deliver on your high-quality standards. You are left behind with the question how will I deliver this project in an agile way? 

Many customers of digital agencies have not heard or adapted their processes, their organisation or management for this kind of delivery.

Recent experience with a delivery model that seems to be waterfall to the customer but is still agile following a scrum approach shows the benefits of a hybrid model for both clients and agency.

I will walk through the process of adapting an agile approach for a digital agency that transitions from a waterfall environment into the agile world.

What makes a team successful? What makes the work that they do so valuable, useful and delightful?

In this talk, we'll look at some of the research that's analysed successful projects and teams, as well as draw on some of my own experiences in running delivery teams. While targeted towards product delivery teams, most of the concepts can be applied to just about any team.

When we're done, your team will be happier, healthier, more efficient, and your customers will love you for it.

A common problem for software development teams is that of career progression for technical people. Experienced programmers stagnate at Senior Developer or move into management roles for which they are not trained or they are sometimes simply ill suited.

This presentation discusses the work underway at MYOB to address this issue.

Games are fun! We use them from childhood through to corporate events; and we often don’t realise that we’re learning at the time. We cover how games continue in that vein; in helping individuals and teams in so many ways. Games can help solve team problems, re-engage teams, build trust and understanding, and much more.

We work through scenarios where games have been employed to achieve varying outcomes; including why games make sense (at the right time); and how games help people get the point, while laughing!

In short, playing games costs little, adds significant value and can have amazing results!