In this talk, Antony shares with you what agility means in his eyes in terms of people, product & process. See how these perspectives can help you understand the 'why' behind many of the things you do. Antony also examines how these three lenses can help you see limitations – and opportunities – that you might otherwise miss unless you explore:

• People agility: Are people in fixed, functional roles? Or, can you adapt quickly to take on the role most valuable to the team at that time?

• Product agility: Does it take weeks to release new capabilities in your products? Or, can you have an idea in the morning and have it in production by the afternoon?

• Process agility: Do your teams have mandated and rigid ways of doing things, needing approval to change the process? Or, can you choose what works from one moment to the next?

Article: Gain further insights into this topic by reading the article 3 Perspectives on Agility— People, Product, Process — #Agility3P.

Although this won’t be an academic lecture, it will be based on two case studies where an understanding of neuroscience has been used to inform messages about change and management styles.

Kate will introduce a different approach to communicating what you believe is in the best interest of your customer, your company and your team. She’ll also explore how to better respond to the concerns that your leaders and managers face through adapting your messages to fit their biological reactions to information. You’ll learn ways to evaluate what you say before you say it, and prepare for how people may react to your information. You’ll learn how to adapt what you have to share into a more relevant and meaningful message that people are more likely to understand and will want to support and share with others. Kate's goal is for you to learn a few techniques and immediately apply these to change your situation for the better.

This isn't surprising when the development team works as a black box, with everyone else waiting to see what comes out of it; and when the software itself is a black box that only the development team can understand.

In this session, you'll learn how to open up these black boxes, and how to give more people direct involvement with the product as it grows.

These approaches are not magic formulae. They give you a framework within which to think, but they don’t make thinking unnecessary. The ability to think is your ‘secret sauce’ and you need to start realising that, while experts have valuable things to say, you need to filter their insights through our own experience.

Nancy believes that when it comes to diversity as you know and discuss in today's world, you have only just scratched the surface. The next phase is neurodiversity, which opens up a new world where you will see an increase in the variety of unique strengths.

Being a first time speaker, her motivation behind this talk is to share how you establish modern QA practices in a delivery focused and ever-changing organisations like start-ups; where budgets are tight with loads of technical debt, where failure is almost guaranteed if you don’t break the rules. The key to establishing a successful QA function in such a dynamic environment is not to attempt a big bang change by introducing new advanced QA processes. An iterative approach is required. Understanding what needs to improve in the existing QA function, to begin with, bringing people along and explaining the ‘why’ is important. Solving simple little problems helps in building trust, for example, the developers found it hard to release to production, so an emphasis on the deployment pipeline helped.

What should people expect to take away from this:

• Taking an iterative approach when introducing a change by focussing on a problem and making small wins is critical.
• Building quality assurance, TDD, BDD, ATDD in a dynamic fast pace startup by stabilising the QA function first, by fixing the culture, communication and collaboration, before making changes.
• Automation is fundamental when it comes to quality assurance. How to establish automation in fast paced environments where requirements change frequently.
• It’s all about having that balance what to automate and when to automate. Knowing different levels of testing (unit, integration, component, SIT) and adding tests to these levels will increase the quality coverage across the code.
• Talk about growing with the organisation and addressing new and exciting challenges around establishing a QA function in a squad framework, when you have chosen to accelerate change.
• Validating the changes that you have made while establishing Quality Assurance and improving as you go along.
• If it doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to change it. Learn from your failure and move on.
• How QA can get involved at the beginning of the SDLC and reduce risks, save time and money.

Whether you are working at the enterprise level in an international business as Isha was when she started this journey or at dynamic fast-paced start-up like where she is now, you'll find this talk pertinent, relevant and engaging.

Don’t wait for it to go wrong to introduce metrics! 😀

In this session, Steve Purkis and Adam Scott will explore some of the Lean Kanban metrics they've used with clients over the past 3 years. They'll look at how the metrics evolved over time, what worked and what didn't, and show how the metrics were used to predict and influence delivery. This practical talk is based on a wide range of scenarios from real-world experiences and is aimed at both delivery teams and stakeholders looking for ideas on how to encourage the right behaviours to get the best for their organisations.

This could be the story of how productivity improved by introducing lean ideas across the entire business and how it resulted in the faster delivery of value. And it is that. But more importantly, it's the story of how some experiments in toe-curling honesty has helped the business focus on their goal and removed frustration as all people get to use their own skills in delivering better products more quickly.

These ideas are expounded in this recent Article Geoff wrote for Methods and Tools magazine.

Whilst this can help with business clarity, it pulls you further away from what really matters, the humans using our product. So how do you drive progress, whilst still retaining empathy and engagement with the people we need to keep our products afloat?

Sarah is keen to understand how psychology influences how people behave in team environments.

These areas are starting to be regulated, and some organisations are calling for these technologies to be banned in some high-risk areas. Ultimately and practically it will be up to technologists to verify whether AI is operating legally and fairly. This issue is explored in detail by Adam who discusses approaches to testing for bias throughout the lifecycle.

This session is an attempt to define the role of BDD in CD. What works, what does not? Continuous delivery should mean continuous quality for the delivery team. What kind of quality criteria do we want to target with CD and how is it supported by BDD?

This can be very demoralising. Perhaps we should stop trying so hard to be rounded individuals and work on having rounded teams instead? A strengths based approach to performance development helps us flourish and be happy. In this talk Jenny explores the psychology of flow and how celebrating our differences and individuality brings unity, cooperation and harmony to teams.

Everything is going fine until the day when, during an informal conversation, you understand something deeper about your domain … This is called a ‘refactoring breakthrough’. Suddenly, everything changes, you start dreaming up a new design that would both simplify your life and make you more effective.

Something else has changed: your technical debt. It just doubled overnight! Whereas yesterday you felt productive, today, you feel slow in the light of what this new design would enable. Interestingly, it’s BDD and the discussions with users that put you in this situation. That’s strange, isn’t it?

That a best practice would create technical debt looks like a nonsense! Should we rethink the whole notion of ‘technical debt’? How does BDD unlock these ‘refactoring breakthrough’? How can we benefit from this opportunity? What’s at stake here?

Understanding what makes you tick can have a transformative impact on your life, improving your sense of agency and leading a more fulfilling life. Understanding what makes those around you tick can have a transformative impact on your relationships, enabling you to communicate and collaborate more effectively.

In this workshop, you’ll learn how to map your values and practice communicating them effectively to each other. You’ll examine what happens when your values are compromised, prioritise them, and compare them to your organisation’s values. Finally, you’ll consider how you can increase the chances of fulfilling your values.

Participants may want to bring their notebooks, and something to take pictures with.

A quote for this one: 'There is depth in the questions “How do I do this?” that is worth exploring. The question is a defense against the action. It is a leap past the question of purpose, past the question of intentions, and past the drama of responsibility. The question “How?” – more than any other – looks for the answer outside of us. It is an indirect expression of doubts... From choosing Freedom, Service and Adventure, Peter Block, Stewardship.

In our agile culture we have yielded too easily to what is doable, popular and practical. We find ourselves giving in to our doubts and settling for what we know how to do (or can soon learn how to do) instead of what most matters to us and living with the challenge and anxiety that that requires.

In this workshop, a Concept Café (inspired by Margareth Weathlea’s Worldcafe) we will use Images of Organization (Gareth Morgan) to look how skilled can develop the knack of reading situations with various scenarios in mind and forging appropriate actions without falling into process at the cost of people’s and vision.

We will use stories, metaphors and pictures of our favourite and less favourite “leaders”.

If you do it the other way round it ISPOO

In this highly participative hands-on workshop you’ll work through a case study using specification by example and BDD. You’ll examine the potential pitfalls and challenges of those approaches and then see if the OOPSI approach helps us navigate through them with greater confidence.

Do you ever feel like development work seems to involve a lot of waiting? Waiting for builds to finish. Waiting for your team members to complete the code you need. Waiting for testing to be completed? Waiting for other teams, or for approvals to happen? Sigh. Yawn. The typical approach is to try to make the coding more efficient or start new work. But what if all these wait-states are actually where you should be focusing your improvement efforts first? These invisible piles of unfinished work slow you down far more than you realize, sucking team productivity, and making everything take longer than it should.

Don Reinertsen says, The enemy of flow is the invisible and unmeasured queues that undermine all aspects of product development performance, but how can you fight an invisible enemy? Most development teams remain blissfully unaware of the negative impact of these invisible queues on productivity, or how to deal with them effectively.

This talk focuses on demonstrating the presence and the negative impact of these invisible queues in the work of real teams. Task boards are great for helping teams visualize and coordinate their work, but they don't show the full picture. In this session, you’ll see a live demo of visualizing and troubleshooting team development queues as timelines with Flow. Paul can’t get you out of boring meetings, but he can help you reduce waste so you can spend more time doing the coding you love.

Is your current development process helpful or harmful to your delivery team? How do you know your process is a good fit for your team or your organization? How do you know if you have too much process or not enough? What are the risks if you get it wrong?

Janet explores the interaction between the development process and different types of quality measures that organizations use. She shares ideas about how a “good enough” process can make your product more valuable to customers -- since that is your customers (internal or external) care about.

Today, because of science and psychology, we can answer those ‘what if’ questions with confidence.

This talk will share the seven most important insights we’ve gleaned in the last 15 years from social psychology, informatics, neuroscience, nudge theory and positive psychology into what makes a team truly thrive and why so many teams struggle with low engagement and motivation.

So, if you lead a team, or if you’re a team member wondering how you could make things better for everyone, this talk is for you. Our time together will be focused on practical, actionable tactics, rather than scientific chest beating.

You will walk away with at least two simple interventions that are proven to significantly impact you, or your team in a short space of time. They will improve collaboration, morale, quality of productivity and more.

Intrigued? See you at the talk.

Still, over time it is possible to extract a growing set of techniques and heuristics that can boost the effectiveness of the interviews with domain experts, to learn faster and converge quickly to better models.

There are techniques and heuristics for asking better questions, listening carefully to words and other signals, and for managing credibility as a developer facing business experts.

If you think all the above is important, then these interviewing techniques will improve your skills, step up the quality of your collaboration with your domain experts, and will provide benefits for better domain models. And if you find all that boring, then perhaps you could focus your career on Java EE instead.

You will then evolve a product to meet those people's purpose and at the same time evolve a process that helps you discover and learn about all of these things.

You'll look at measurement, feedback, inclusion and enabling constraints. You'll explore how different people value different things and how that shapes our process. It will be a hands on session with audience participation, beeps and blinkenlights.

BDD is a conversation enabler, allowing business people, developers and testers to strive for a shared understanding of business rules and objectives. Even without the conversation, common language, such as “Given… When… Then” is often used to describe business scenarios, acceptance criteria and tests, facilitating fluency between the three.

However, scenarios, criteria and tests each serve a different purpose, and sometimes framing each as “Given, when, then” constructs is not intuitive. Avoiding a prescribed definitive approach to story writing, yet effectively using a common language to satisfy each objective is challenging.

This talk will borrow from causal theory to illustrate the fundamental real-world principle underlying a “Given, When, Then” assertion. The premise of dispositional causality is that in order to see an Effect (then), there must be combination of Disposition (given), and Trigger (when). An understanding of simple causal concepts will help translate natural language into effective scenarios, criteria and tests. It will also help to clarify the difference between the three, so that business scenarios are fully explored, while acceptance criteria are succinctly expressed and test coverage is thorough.

Given the miscommunications and misunderstandings between the development and the business, several questions arise: how can you learn to communicate and closely cooperate with the business, or even better be part of the same team? Also, how can you help the business to deliver a clear vision?

In this session, João will show you how to engage the development team and the business using DDD tools and techniques, using Behaviour Driven Development as the central piece to bring everyone closer. If you have a similar experience, or you want to emerge into DDD & BDD, the session is for you!

She will go through how continuous feedback has evolved as a response to the frequency and complexity of challenges faced in the tech world and take a look at how a startup mindset helped me navigate an ever-changing and highly demanding environment.

By doing EventStorming and using techniques from BDD, such as Example Mapping or Feature Mapping, you can create more insights. You can simultaneously create a model and executable specifications for your user needs. This way, you can write software and tests which matches the shared understanding of the user, creating a ubiquitous language. Value will be shipped at a faster pace.

In this session, Kenny will explain how to do Process EventStorming. He will use Example Mapping, or Feature Mapping to get more insights into his process. The outcome can drive your Software Modelling EventStorming and create Executable Specifications

This talk is based on such a project and aims at sharing the lessons learnt and give some tips for successfully managing such transition, highlighting both benefits and pain points.

Most people in Agile and Lean are involved in change somehow. Whether it is a big transition or an evolvement of an existing organisation, it is still a matter of change.

You explain the change, sometimes you even explain the vision and the why behind the change. And then it is supposed to happen.

But change is not simple.

If the goal is to get teams to perform and to work better together, you need to provide the teams with the tools to do so. You have people who are educated in engineering, programming, computer science, etc. – how are they supposed to have the tools to build good relations and to collaborate if we do not provide them?

You all know how demoralising and off-putting rejection can be. What if they told you "No" marks the start of a negotiation that can lead to a meaningful conversation and create a WIN-WIN situation?

With a wealth of experience in Agile coaching and consulting, A.C.E negotiators (short for Agile, Chilled & Empathetic) Tom Roden and Portia Tung will share their adventures in applying a range of tools and techniques, inspired by the work of Chris Voss, former Chief Hostage Negotiator for the FBI.

They will explore what it takes to get you started on your own mission impossible so you can negotiate for better outcomes.

In this talk Konstantin will share his experience in refocusing one product delivery team from a traditional Scrum to a custom-made process focused on extremely short feedback loops. What happens when you throw away more traditional Agile process and replace it with something more agile and lean. This talk will explore experiences of a team that done just that.

These meetings go like this...

• "I have a solution"
• "Let's do it!"
• "That's a terrible idea"
• "No, let me explain..."
• "I have another solution"
• "Ooh I like that one"
• "I like the first one"

...

As humans you are wired to debate in this frustrating cycle of solution - critique - solution that usually ends either once everyone has had their say, everyone is exhausted or the next group of victims arrive for their next meeting.

Brainstorms and unstructured processes for anybody who's experienced them clearly don't work. Yet in the desire to emulate the "innovation" and success of the Apple, Google, & Facebook's of the world, you see this type of activity coupled usually to a lengthy drawn out design process entirely removed from the notion of agile, iterative development.

There is though a new design thinking 'process' that can work for every team or organisation and enable 'design thinking' ideas to be applied to any problem, product or process that can fit with agile teams and ways of working.

In this talk, Paul will look at the 'Design Sprint' process popularised by a New York Times bestseller authored by Jake Knapp of Google Ventures. You'll see how it's changing the way many companies (including Apple, Google & Facebook) are working and how it can be used by any organisation to solve almost any problem.

You'll see how it works and the secret weapons it deploys to reduce and compress the ideas of 'Design Thinking' into an actionable and repeatable process that any team can follow.

In addition, you'll walk through the "Lightning Decision Jam" - a relative that any team can get started with at their next meeting or retro. This technique takes the same principles, reduces it again making it a powerful tool for running almost any meeting.

About Design Sprints:

“The sprint is a five-day process for answering critical business questions through design, prototyping, and testing ideas with customers”

-Jake Knapp, Author of SPRINT and one of the inventors of the Design Sprint

About Design Thinking:

“Design thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that draws from the designer's toolkit to integrate the needs of people, the possibilities of technology, and the requirements for business success.”

• Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO

It is time for you to discover, explore and develop the power and potential of your breath. The workshop is divided into two parts.

In part one you will learn the science of how correct breathing improves both your physical and mental health. You will also be given simple and quick hacks on how to change your mental state instantly using only your breath.

In part two Richie will lead you through a series of breathing flows that will strip away any mind clutter and distraction and bring you back in full connection with yourself. You'll leave on a natural high with a sense of grace, focus, energy and calmness that's needed to thrive in everyday life.

This energising, introductory LEGO SERIOUS PLAY® (LSP) session offers a rare moment of personal introspection to help you reflect on yourself, your strengths and values - beyond your job title and your organisation.

We will follow the 'Real Time Identity for YOU' method to explore your core, external and aspirational identity. It will help you understand yourself better, and be better understood, beyond the context of the position you currently hold.

The LSP method is a facilitated thinking, communication and problem solving technique for organisations, teams and individuals. It draws on extensive research from the fields of business, organisational development, psychology and learning. It is based on the power of ‘hand knowledge’.

Using our hands to build helps us think and tap into our imaginations. Our hands are connected to between 70 and 80% of our brain cells, so when we use them to help us think we actually enhance our working memory. This allows us to uncover things we didn’t think we knew and achieve deep insights. Thoughts and ideas that are built with our hands tend to be expressed in greater detail and they are also more easily understood and remembered.

Join us in this workshop to experience what being a coach means and discover where you are on your personal journey of continuous improvement.

Come and learn how to sort the wheat from the chaff, the effective from the dogmatic, of scaling delivery, and find out why Dan is Scaling Without A Religious Methodology.