How can new tools and technologies shorten our feedback cycles, and reduce pain and frustration of deployment and maintenance of systems? How do you scale your continuous deployment system to support more developers? This hands-on technical session demonstrates how new containerization technologies like Docker and Concourse CI can be used to build deployment pipelines. Sean and Chris will show how to build a deployment pipeline, configuration-manage it, and deploy software through it. 

No previous technical knowledge of Docker or Containers is needed. 

This will be a 2 part. The first 45 minutes will go into the basics of docker. The second 45 minutes will show how to setup a Concourse.CI continuous delivery pipeline.

"The higher you go in an organization, the more your suggestions become interpreted as orders." - Marshall Goldsmith

An Architect garners a high level of authority by being an expert. People will follow their lead. But what if the Architect is wrong? They will follow right off a cliff.

How do we get people to think like the Architect? Use the principles of Intent-Based Leadership to decouple the success of your project from the personality of the architect. By creating clarity around architectural goals and by engaging people in problem solving rather than defining rules and standards we can divest control and create an organization of leaders.

Collaboration, collaboration, collaboration. This is probably the most used word you'll hear from agilists. It sits right at the core of agile principles. How do we reconcile this with the fact that 30% of the population is introverted?

There has been extensive research around introversion that can help us understand this apparent contradiction better. This talk will explore the complexities of introversion, from the distinction between shyness and introversion to the complexities of pseudo-extroverts and "high active" babies. 

Finally, what can we learn from companies like Menlo Innovations and Hunter Industries, where they have high collaborative environments with introverts that say they would not work any other way.

Collaboration is the foundation of Agile teams. Then why do we focus so much on the performance of individuals? Want better collaboration? Get rid of your high performer. Chris and Sean will demonstrate through a series of skits how strong personalities can get in the way of team performance, and how collaboration skills can help overcome this.

The role of “Architect” is sometimes frowned upon in the Agile community as a central command-and-control authority who bottlenecks decisions and limits team empowerment. Or at least, that is what we thought. Follow the real-life journey of our teams as we discovered how the role of an architect is compatible with Agile principles. We will explore our failures, and how we learned that an Architect can bring immense value to the organization through a focus on transformational leadership. In this presentation you can see how an Architect as Leader can help a project scale and can help create a truly self-sustaining organization.

The #NoEstmates twitter hashtag was intended by Woody Zuill "..for the topic of exploring alternatives to estimates [of time, effort, cost] for making decisions in software development. That is, ways to make decisions with ‘No Estimates’."  Based on twitter traffic it has been successful at generating activity.  It's a bit debatable as to whether it has really spawned much exploration.  In this talk Todd will actually do some exploration using real data from over 50 projects at companies ranging from startups to large enterprises.  In addition to the analysis of the data, Todd was able to build a simulation model of the software development process to both replicate the data to and explore the conditions under which estimates add value and when they do not.  Based on the findings from the data and the simulations, along with an analysis of the types of business decisions that organizations need to make, Todd will provide some pragmatic advice for estimators and #NoEstimators alike.

This is about agile “anti-patterns”: “something that looks like a good idea, but which backfires badly when applied” (Coplien). Todd has been around agile development from before it was called agile.  In that time, he’s seen teams fall into the trap of many of these anti-patterns, becoming stuck without ever realizing it. Frequently, this is due to a dogmatic understanding of what is right and wrong about Scrum and agile development. The first step to getting unstuck is to be able to detect these “sins.” The presentation aims to expose teams to these common pitfalls and then also provide a vision for a virtuous path to take them to the Promised Land.

In this highly engaging workshop attendees will experience estimating, planning and delivering a new product and product features. The uncertainty in value and costs will be resolved through rolling dice based on the stories that the team selects and prioritizes.   The teams will run through 3 iterations of story cost, value estimation, and product feature delivery. Points will be scored for delivering product features and meeting release and iteration commitments.

Dealing with uncertainty is one of the largest challenges that teams face. The simulation aims to have levels of uncertainty in value and delivery that are commensurate with those found in software development. Some of the key tools for dealing with uncertainty are integrated into the simulation.

Attendees will come away with a better understanding of the challenges of working with uncertainty in software projects, and will learn some of the tools that are at their disposal for managing this uncertainty.