Are your retros boring, non-productive, and a waste of time? Come learn about 2 case studies of extraordinary retrospectives.

Retrospectives are the heart of the feedback loop that exists within an agile framework that fosters self-improvement.

Retrospectives lose value due to 2 reasons - they get boring or they have no value in terms of actionable items.

The first case will describe a team's experience organized at the Australian War Memorial in Canberra, Australia. A custom tour was developed that focused on "mateship".

The second case will describe a team's experience at the National Portrait Gallery in Canberra, Australia. A prototype team training based on Visual Thinking Strategies, VTS, usually reserved for 11-12 year old school children.

I will describe how you can partner with a variety of resources, including government programs, that will enable you to do the same thing.

The communication tools of Liberating Structures will teach you how to facilitate the discussions your org needs. I am going to demonstrate how to use these techniques in the workshop. And all the attendees are going to be fully immersed and ready to wield their new knowledge the very next day at work.

Come learn how to help your team(s), org(s), and company(ies)!!!

For more information, watch my video at http://youtu.be/UNOjqMUv8h0

A version of this workshop that was presented at Agile Tour Sydney 2016 is at http://bit.ly/2f4Bie8

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.

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.

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).

Water-scrum-fall just wasn't working for me. Something was fundamentally wrong. I couldn't quite figure out what - or how to fix it - until I found Value Stream Mapping. This was only the beginning.

Explore the seven wastes of software development and how to apply Value Stream Mapping to software development. Learn where I went wrong, and tips for running your own mapping workshops.

If you are a people manager, project manager, scrum master or product owner this session will help you see where the bottlenecks REALLY are. 

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.