Special registration for Coderetreat here

If you are at Coderetreat, you don't need a regular LAST Conference Day 2 registration. However, if you wish to come to LAST on Thursday 29, please register for Day 1.

Coderetreat is a day-long, intensive practice event, focusing on the fundamentals of software development and design. By providing developers the opportunity to take part in focused practice, away from the pressures of 'getting things done', the coderetreat format has proven itself to be a highly effective means of skill improvement. Practicing the basic principles of modular and object-oriented design, developers can improve their ability to write code that minimizes the cost of change over time.

For an in-depth understanding of the philosophy behind a day of coderetreat, please watch this introduction video.

https://vimeo.com/18955165

Also every year global day of codretreat is organised towards the end of the year. Global Day of Coderetreat is a world-wide event celebrating passion and software craftsmanship. Last year, over 2000 passionate software developers in 150 cities around the world spent the day practicing the craft of software development using the coderetreat format.

Arrive at 8.30 for registration and briefing for a 9am start.

Improvement projects seek to improve tangible aspects of organisations. The ability to be successful in doing this is largely based on the intangible perspectives of various stakeholders – what is important to them, how they see their organisation, and how they respond to change.

 This session introduces three frames of understanding and how they may be used as lenses of analysis by project leaders or change managers in managing their projects.

Almost everyone seems to be busy. Yet we lack clarity when we’re overwhelmed by too many tasks. Learn how to get greater clarity and be more effective by reducing the number of tasks on your task list.

In workshops I’ve run over the last year, I’ve learned that agile, as a word, can mean different things to project and change people, at times also confusing them.

Defining agile as a capability demystifies the word and helps us understand what it actually means for organisations, teams and individuals. Agility, or agile, is not a methodology; it’s a mindset, along with set of behaviours and practices.

To be agile is a mindset and a skill set.

For an organisation to become agile, it needs people who are agile in their thinking, their actions and in their practices.  

It’s time to make sense of what agile/Agile really means, and identify what change leaders and practitioners can do to create and support an agile environment. This talk will provide a snapshot of what this means.

In this talk I will make an introduction to Property Based testing concept, as a tool which does comprehensive quality exploration faster. By using PBT at one of my projects we were able to eliminate all the possible user interactions which could have caused unwanted results: production incidents and damages of data.
Property based testing is a popular concept in the world of functional programming. QuickCheck in Haskell is an iconic framework supporting this testing approach. Today we can find PBT libraries any main-stream languages, including Scala, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, Java, C# etc.
User interactions with your application are obviously constrained by the type of parameters accepted as an input of a program. However the range and the variety of these interactions can create large amount of use cases. Some of them you didn't even know existed in your application. With PBT you can generate all the variations of an input for your application and assess an expected outcome by running the tests. Discovering these cases on early stages of your development process brings quite a big support for 'building quality in' instead of ensuring the quality after an application has been created.

Human beings share 60% of our DNA with bananas.

Let's discuss something about the other 40% that makes us special: The "T" in LAST, Thinking.

We have been developing this ability over millions of years as we have learned and adapted as a species.

But, mother nature, the ultimate lean agile systems thinker, has built up some tech debt along the way.

In this session we will explore three of the cognitive biases that are likely to impact you in your working life and explore strategies to help you think more clearly

Want to build highly collaborative and cohesive teams? Looking to be energise your team and bring out the best in people?

Drawing on positive leadership research and how best to apply it, you’ll discover:

• The value of connecting well with colleagues, clients, and stakeholders to be more engaged, energised and perform better as a team.
• The four pathways Professor Jane Dutton has found you can take to rapidly build high-quality connections during micro moments of your busy day.
• How to deal with jerks at work who corrode your energy, effort and crush your soul.
• Ways to help others connect well and build positive relationships at work.

Some of the typical situations that people may experience  include - disagreement and heated conversations during workshops- resistance from senior stakeholders - inward facing team refusing conversation with the outside teams/programs

If any of there sound familiar, come and experience navigating conflict - the integral facilitation way.

About the presenter: Marc-Andre Langlais is Certified Integral Facilitator and Executive Coach who specialises in dealing with conflict. 

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.

A large part of our professional lives revolves around the question "When will it be done?".
We are either asking it of our teams, or answering it for our stakeholders.

If we are defined by the questions we ask, what does that say about us?
If meeting deadlines is the most important thing in our work we are basically working in a Feature Factory.

Let's go back the absolute first principle of the Agile Manifesto:
"Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software."

What matters is not a deadline or a schedule, but a) what is valuable to our customers and b) how can we deliver that early.
Is the "When will we be done" question still relevant? I don't think so.

A few years ago Liberty Financial radically changed the way we were thinking about delivery. And we changed the questions we were asking at every level in the organisation. All the way up to the CEO. In this talk I will share some of the more important things we learned along the way so you can draw insight on how to get started changing the conversations in your own organisation.

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.

Sign in to the conference in the foyer of the ATC building

There exists a meetup community in Melbourne and worldwide called FuckUp Nights, where storytellers their personal and business failure stories with hundreds of people attending each event around the world. Each month speakers talk about their FuckUp stories, with attendees sharing their biggest mistakes, what they learned, how they moved on- all whilst sharing invaluable advice along the way about the wisdom and resilience of what these failures mean for us as the humans we are.

We are often reminded to take ownership of our own career development. We are often told “your career is your responsibility”.

Sound familiar?

Unfortunately…aside from maybe a 30min Careers talk from the school Careers Counsellor at high school, we have not been schooled, coached or mentored in personal and career development. Most of us follow our intuition and if we are lucky we find ourselves in the roles we enjoy. Sometimes we do not even realise it when we are in that role !

What if we approached it a little more structured and planned our development and our careers?

What is the role of our managers and leaders?

What does the literature say? What is your experience?

Take control and Unlock your Potential. Join Michael as he shares his international case study experiences.

It doesn’t matter where and how you work. Right? Wrong!

Colour, texture, light, ambience, layout and furniture choice can help or hinder your innovative and agile thinking.  These symbolically represent the traditions, tales and values of your business.  If you were a visitor to your business what would it tell you about who you are?

In this session you will understand that colour, furniture and symbols not only help critical and creative thinking, but also help you to tell the story of your organisation.

Examples will be used from the educational setting where critical ad creative thinking matters.

Scaling is an anti-pattern. Big meetings, long loops, slow cadence, tight coupling, and deep hierarchies represent bottlenecks no matter how Agile your individual teams may be. But de-scaling refactors an organisation into self-directing streams of self-organizing teams working together like pods of dolphins.

How do human organizations de-scale? How can we balance autonomy of teams against alignment to business realities? This session presents principles, metrics and practice patterns for de-scaling based on a long running historical precedent, the Iroquois Confederacy, which sustained a de-scaled society of hundreds of thousands for over five centuries. And the Spotify tribal model. And Steve Jobs' NeXT/Apple culture.

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.

The world is changing and the for-cause and non-profit sector are striving to learn from the massive growth and innovation that has been seen in the startup, corporate and enterprise world.

We show how Lean, Agile and Systems Thinking can be adopted by those who dedicate their lives to helping others and making the world a better place.

Come and learn how technology, data and AI can enable the non-profit & social sector to engage ALL stakeholders, consistently deliver greater impact and achieve LASTing positive social change.

A complete working simulation of an Agile Organization - in clay. No pre-made backlogs, no command and control, pure self-organization across multiple teams and streams driven directly by business constraints and numeric metrics.

Teal? Business Agility? Holarchy? Iroquois Treaties? Spotify Chapters? Sure, we got 'em all. Also dragons, walkers, a working small council and the greatest castle in Westeros - built entirely by Wildlings! 

Check out a detailed description here and the slides here. Also there's a description of learnings from the Game we ran at the 2016 CukeUp conference here.