Agile transformation is gaining momentum more than ever as the world is geared up towards embracing the digital world. It’s a great opportunity for agile practitioners to help their organisations with transformation initiatives.

You have been selected to lead the transformation initiatives. It’s good news but at the same time, you will be anxious with so many questions.  How do I get started with it? Being in the organisation for so long, knowing the pros and cons of my management, how can I manage their expectations? How can I get my supporters and detractors to align with the goal?

The above questions are the tip of the iceberg and there will be a lot more along the way. Having led several transformations, I will share my both good and bad experiences in leading agile transformation both objectively and humanistically.

The agile software approach is becoming a de facto way of software development.  Agile Principle #10 states, “Continuous attention to technical excellence and good design enhances agility”. 
In the fast-changing technology landscape, What Continuous attention are we providing to technical excellence and good design? How is that resulting in agility?

Some of the key concepts that are already in practice are
•    Loosely coupled components to help improve adapting to change
•    Automate steps that might slow down in build & deployment process through CI/CD
•    Improve agility through inverted design leveraging Test-Driven Development
•    Improving development efficiency and quality through Pair Programming

What other problem statement that we face in today’s environment is hindering agility and what more can we do to help improve engineering agility? 

•    Is there something we can do to improve flexibility in system collaboration, especially on API development?
•    How can we improve agility to bring data together faster and help data scientists to analyse the decision-making models faster?
•     How can we bring agility in environments preparation and infrastructure provisioning?
•    Changes to user interfaces are quite common and anything to be done on improving agility?

We will discuss the possible problems impacting agility in two of the key areas API development and Data Science. 
Also, will be discussing some of the ways and means to address these problems from real-world examples.

Product backlog is a living artifact.. it grows, it changes, and it smells. The health of the backlog is crucial for the health of the Scrum team. Its hygiene can be sensed from how it smells. Oh wait! Do you know how to smell the backlog? Let's discover at this talk

This talk will highlight the different types of potential problems that can be found in the product backlog. Such issues remain largely invisible but their presence has an impact on the product delivery of the Agile teams. Most often, this may result in UNDONE software every sprint. Deteriorating quality can be attributed to the backlog smells. Myself and Ritesh Mehrotra will uncover different backlog smells, consequences and how to address them.