• 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.

Mentorship matters. A lot.

The future is going to be weird: technologies are growing faster than we can teach them, and we need more experts quick. In this talk, we'll discuss the many ways we teach DevOps practices in an organization as analogues of how systems transmit data. We'll talk about the advantages and pitfalls of:

 - Broadcast systems (e.g., Universities)
 - 1:1 Discovery (e.g., Mentorships)
 - Gossip protocols (e.g., Communities and guilds)

We'll unpack each methodology, discuss the information dispersal mechanisms and attributes of each system, and see where they fit. Because really: DevOps isn't about technology choice, or language, or infrastructure. First and foremost, it's about people.

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 ) 

Join Shannon and Tim for a fast paced account of their move from being high-flying consultants to down-to-earth product people.

Where do they now add value? How has their relationship with their team changed? How many timesheets are they doing?

All will be revealed!

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.

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).

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. 

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.