Autonomous and empowered teams are a key building block of agile organisations but require a great deal of trust to work. Management and leadership must trust people and teams to do the right thing, and teams need to trust that management will support them when needed.

Transparency is a low-cost means of building trust. Transparency gained through the open sharing of information, particularly visual information, has played a large part in agile and lean thinking - from lean's visual controls, to XP's "big visible charts" and beyond.

We will explore how transparency, and the radiation of information, can build trust and cultures where "safe to fail" is more than a theoretical concept.

IMPORTANT - As places are limited, please register specifically for this session. Also, please register for day 2 of LAST Conf, if you wish to attend the 2nd day.

You can also read more about the sessions in this blog post. For a beginner friendly version of this session see Agile Dev Immersion - Fundamentals

Get ready to level up at refactoring at LAST Conference's first Refactoring Developer workshop. Inspired by Code Retreat, we have run a similar session, for the basics of agile development, at LAST Conference for the past few years. We have felt that it's Important to support learning in technical disciplines that are extremely important in agile software development.

Too many Agile and DevOps initiatives are stymied by code bases that are hard to change and understand.

While disciplined teams who rigorously practice pair programming, test-driven design (TDD) and other technical Agile practices avoid producing new legacy code in the first place, cleaning up a pre-existing mess is notoriously difficult and dangerous. Without the safety net of excellent automated test coverage, the risk of breaking something else as you refactor is extremely high. Also, code that wasn't designed and written with testability in mind makes it really difficult to get started. So most don't even try ...

In the Refactoring workshop developers learn how to build an initial safety net before applying multiple refactorings, and have lots of fun along the way!

What's it all about?

We will be following a variation of the Legacy Code Retreat format. Working with legacy code (provided!) participants first learn how to build an overarching electronic safety net using the Golden Master Testing technique, before applying a range of refactorings too dangerous to otherwise attempt (but totally worth it).

As with regular code retreat, we will practice pair-programming, rotate pairs, and continue to practice rigorous unit test automation, and share our learnings.

Unlike regular code retreat you do not have to delete your code at the end of each sprint, and the TDD cycle is a bit more relaxed.

Following the opening session, Refactoring workshop will take the remainder of the day, with breaks synchronised with the main conference. You will also be welcome to attend the end of day drinks!

What is Legacy Code?

Legacy code has beed defined "as code without tests" and equivalently "code you are afraid to change". Unfortunately far too much "professional" code is legacy code.

Why should you come?

• We need developers and architects with the skill to continuously refactor and redesign, and managers and leaders who understand the value in doing so
• Come and practice and share some of the fundamental technical skills needed to safely refactor
• Lift developer engagement and work satisfaction by investing in technical quality rather than drowning in technical debt

Scrum is a great framework but there are many ways to do it poorly. The average IT worker is interrupted every 15 minutes, which equates to 2000+ interruptions for a Scrum team every sprint. Unthinkable on a production line, yet too often the norm in offices.

I conducted original research with Scrum teams in Australia last year as part of my Master of Management thesis (and achieved an A), to understand the causes, patterns and impacts of these interruptions on the team's effectiveness and their happiness. And, how mature teams control interruptions rather than let themselves be controlled by interruptions.

Attendees will play a short game to demonstrate how destructive the context switching from handling frequent interruptions is.

My talks are always highly practical and I provide 3 takeaway actions for teams to improve their 'flow' and reduce interruptions.

There are some awesome prioritisation methods out there.

However, which one do you choose and use?

Often they can be so unwieldy and time consuming that at best all you can do is practically just use one.

In this session, we'll explore how you can quickly utilise multiple prioiritisation methods against each other in order to facilitate healthy discussions.

Agile Mindset is highly talked about and prized amongst agilists. Claims for its benefits range from 10x improvement, can’t be agile without it and requires organisational and cultural change to achieve.

Social psychology presnets a different view where mindset is a cognittive toolkit used to understand and taking action in a complex world. This defintion implies everyone posesses an agile mindset.

Is agile mindset a nirvana state which will enable you to levitate and be at peace with the world? Is it what is constraining everyone from achieving life, love and happiness. Or is it something more practical, humanistic and useful.

Looking through the lenses of behavioural and social psychology we will understand what mindset is, how it works and how you can become more aware of how yours and others mindset are operating within the agile domain.

Active listening, as the name suggests, focuses on how we listen as humans in a workplace setting and how we can use these skills to our advantage. Anne-Maree has been facilitating in-house sessions for Xero AU examining how the practice of active listening can help teams and individuals to openly communicate, enhance working relationships and ultimately save time.

Posing the question "can you find your voice, by being a better listener" Anne-Maree has been investigating how the outdated ideas of active listening can be enhanced using techniques from the arts industry to be used as a tool to help strengthen our tech teams. Anne-Maree will share her discoveries from working with over 200 participants over two years at Xero AU - what worked, what failed and where to next and what can you do right now to embrace this technique.

As organisations have become more agile and try to build “high-performing” teams, they have started to hire for cultural and team fit. As a result they search for people who can collaborate and are team players; who are willing to develop a deep trust in each other and in the team’s purpose; who freely express feelings and ideas; who engage in extensive discussion; who are adaptable and embrace change and who are comfortable managing constructive conflict towards a better outcome.

There are however, many people who do not meet that criteria, and for various reasons, may struggle to meet that criteria in the future.

Everyone brain is wired slightly differently and not everyone’s wiring fits the mould described above.

Does the exclusivity of the above criteria result in certain people missing out who could have significant positive value.

Are you a leader? Are you a change agent ? or are you the one who makes the final call?

All of this is somewhat how leadership was defined and introduced to the world. The times are changing and leaders are challenged to be vulnerable and take on roles of facilitation and foster collaboration. How do you transform yourself from being the person who was making the final call to the person who makes the final call possible?

- Demystifying leadership

- Challenges leaders are facing in fast-moving environments.

- How you frame your thoughts and come up with a strategy to help others grow and by doing that be a better leader.

- Some tools to take away.

Visualisation is at the heart of Agile, Lean and many great ways of working.

However, without discipline your visualisation and respective delivery becomes a freakin’ mess!

In this session I share some of my learnings over the years since my presentation on this topic at LAST 2013.

You’ll learn how to take your visuals to the next level and drive higher motivation, fun and delivery performance in the process.

Research into employee engagement asserts that what we want is "autonomy, mastery and purpose" not necessarily a corner office, a ping pong table, or a fancy job title.

Anecdotally though I have seen a different story where particularly those closer to the start of their career are very focused on job titles as evidence of progress.

Super-flat structures such Holacracy (where you perform a collection of roles rather than having a job title) only exacerbate this... there's really no concept of "promotion".

As managers/employers how do we attract, support, grow and retain our staff - is the answer more likely to be a giant skills matrix allowing progress through a level system than flat circles of autonomy?