topics

Software for Humanity

Software is one of the most important tools we have to innovate for the human race. As a mixture of art and engineering, there are skills from developing software that can be transferred to other disciplines. There are synergies between the Open Source Software world and the Agile world. Imagine if OpenMRS, a medical record system designed for the most resource-constrained areas of the world (some argue the most successful non-technical domain package) was able to serve 100 million patients, not just the current 5 million, because 500 IT professionals in Australia supported this project? How do we take the huge intellectual capabilities represented by the Agile community and redirect a portion of it towards the social sector in new and creative ways?

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Empowering Teams

As captain and coach of winning AFL teams, Mark Thompson knows all about team success! He will share his insights into how you create, manage and lead a team to achieve their best when it counts.

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When the stakes are high

When your job is saving lives, specific demands are placed on you. How do you lead effectively when the stakes are so high? Dr Fiona Wood will give us an insight into how she empowers teams to work together and still be individually responsible when time is of the essence, critical information may not always be at hand, actions have irretrievable consequences and every situation is different from the last.

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Safe to Fail

As Agile scales throughout the organisation begins to be seen as a way of working rather than a methodology, how are Agile values, principle and practices tailored and used to develop and execute organisational strategy? How can we hold people accountable in a 'safe' environment? This session will bust the myth that Agile is a way of working with little or no accountability and where one can get away with anything, and lay out a succinct pathway for strategy development and execution using Agile tenants.

Learning:
» How to apply Agile to strategy development and strategy execution
» What pitfalls to watch out for in this space
» How to bring the business on the journey
» How to create a safe to fail environment while holding people accountable for success

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
SEEK's approach to product innovation

SEEK has the unique challenge of balancing three customer sets - jobseekers, recruiters, and advertisers. How did they deliver business value to all three customer sets? Learn about SEEK's overall approach to product innovation and how Agile is helping SEEK get ahead of their development pipeline.

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Design Eye for a Dev Guy

Users today expect a great experience. And they're demanding more. The expected level of fit-and-finish in user interfaces has increased rapidly over the last five years. Small, Agile teams can no longer make do with "just enough" UI skills. While not all teams today have a dedicated full-time designer, elements of good design are skills that can be taught. People have different strengths and not everyone will be a fantastic designer, but by understanding some basic visual science, everyone can start to improve the software they're working on. The presentation is refined from internal training we developed so developers could take more ownership for creating great UIs.

You will:
» Be able to critically assess UI designs and identify concrete areas for improvement
» Walk through prioritised steps for improving any UI
» Share with other team members the material
» Know enough to be dangerous and hassle your tame UxD gal

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Continuous Risk Management

If a project has no risk, then don't do it. In this session we take a positive look at risk and management risk in an Agile manner. We discuss what risk is and the dysfunctions that prevent adequate risk management, we then look at how Agile teams can perform Continuous Risk Management in a collaborative manner, proposing a new Continuous Risk Management Manifesto and tools and practices for Agile teams to successfully manage risk.
» What is Risk?
» Why is risk and opportunity
» Why manage risk
» Traditional Risk Management
» Continuous Risk Management
   - Values and Principles
   - Practices and Tools

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Hiring for agility: How to build a high performing Agile team

In this presentation we'll discuss how to identify Agile talent, what to look for, what to avoid and what traits make a good team member. We'll explore how we build and structure teams to give them the best opportunity to succeed. We'll also look at how we create a sustainable culture of high performance. Culture is a driving force behind performance, and people = culture. I will show how building a strong culture with strong people will contribute significantly (though not exclusively) to high performance.

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Design as a Business Practice

The world's best products are expressed through their design. And today's best product owners create the conditions for good design to flourish.

The creative genius associated with great products isn't voodoo - it's the application of a humanistic approach that deals remarkably well with complex problems. This talk focusses on the application of design thinking to product leadership, drawing on over a decade of design experience, over half of that in Agile teams.

We'll talk about how to make the most of curiosity, intuition, trust and failure, and expose some of the pitfalls of product development by rational analysis (aka 'the normal way'). You'll to walk away with new perspectives on your team, product and a clear insight into the role of design thinking in making something great.

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Using Agile to deliver smarter business outcomes, not projects!

This presentation details how IAG DI has adopted Agile to create a more commercially-centric organisation whose focus is on delivering business benefits and smarter business outcomes rather than delivering 'projects' in the waterfall sense. We will apply this philosophy to the eBusiness area where we have produced a 350% increase in online sales as a result of working collaboratively with the business with a focus on delivering tangible business benefits regularly.

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
How Lonely Planet Used Agile With SAP and Delighted Customers

Using Agile, Lonely Planet raised customer satisfaction of SAP users from the most disliked IT service in the organization (NPS -37) to the most liked (NPS +75) in two-and-a-half years.

We'll share the revolutionary yet simple Agile tricks we've used and the mistakes we've learnt to turn this team into one of the most successful and highly regarded SAP teams within Australia.

Learn:
» Tried, tested and iterated Agile methodology to manage multiple, often conservative, stakeholders of an mission critical ERP system.
» The irrefutable evidence of steady increase in the score from our 6 monthly customer satisfaction surveys
» The mistakes we made and strategies we used to overcome them.
» How stakeholders attempted to game the system
» It is possible to run an ERP system such as SAP in Agile way and the enormous benefits this brings

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Value and Culture OVER Practices and Processes - Driving Agility at Bankwest

Bankwest is into the beginning of their 3rd year of its Agile adoption and bringing Agile into the organisation has involved so much more than delivering Agile projects. Drawing on our experiences over the past two years, we will demonstrate how a cultural shift in mindset and behaviour change with a balance of top down support, an 'on the ground' drive and enthusiasm and a right-fit Agile coaching model is vital to making the success of Agile in an organisation.

We will share our key learnings, approaches and strategies that have supported our continued success and journey into agility.

Learn:
» Thinkings, approaches and strategies used in leading a large complex organisation through their Agile journey with a key focus on
   - Agile adoption is not just about Agile project delivery
   - You don't have to be on a project team to be Agile
   - It's the people that lead the change - not the practice to make it happen.
» pains and pitfalls faced and how these were overcome

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Adaptive Leadership for Turbulent Times

Organisations are starting to apply Agile thinking beyond software development. These include strategy, product development, marketing, customer relations, finance and HR. Leading management theorists are also exploring what has been called "Management 2.0" and advancing ideas that draw inspiration from many of the premises that fuelled Agile in technology. This talk draws on a number of streams to bring together some of the latest thinking from a variety of disciplines on modern organisational leadership. In a context of global economic turbulence and increasingly rapid business change, Adaptive Leadership is not optional.

Discover:
» Why 20th century management techniques won't work in the 21st century.
» What makes Agile leaders and what characteristics effective Adaptive Leadership has
» Practical models and concrete steps on how you can become a more effective and adaptive leader of your team, your organisation and the people beyond those that you influence
» Practical tips on how you can get started on becoming an more adaptive leader today

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Building a mobile team and getting a product to market

Mobile applications are becoming part of your core business, and you need to build internal capability. Hear about REA's journey to build one of Australia's most popular iPhone, iPad and Android applications with over 750,000 downloads. We look at how to build a high performing, cross-functional team encompassing UX and UI as well as mobile platform and API experts. We fought to apply the development style we wanted using Apple's development tools, which were not designed with automated testing, builds and continuous delivery in mind. Some approaches worked, some didn't and Agile principles triggered a number of corrections along the way, including a major pivot early on.

Learn:
» How to integrate experience design as part of the core native app team
» How to apply Agile practices in Apple's development environment
» What worked and what didn't when building mobile development capability
» Testing approaches for experiential and UI based iOS and Android apps

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Agile Infrastructure: Not an Oxymoron - Using infrastructure web services to support continuous integration & deployment

As organisations consider the adoption of Agile methodologies, and seek to integrate continuous integration/continuous deployment into their development 'DNA', it quickly becomes apparent that infrastructure flexibility has the potential to make or break this development approach.

The traditional "long lead time" approach to infrastructure is not compatible, and the ability to rapidly create, test, and destroy environments at low cost changes the development dynamic - providing more useful and realistic development and testing environments. Further, by using the elastic properties of the cloud, projects can test their applications at full scale without major investment or setup overhead in a fully automated fashion.

Learning Outcomes:
» This session will introduce delegates to the concept of using dynamic and fungible Infrastructure Web Services as the underlying component to their continuous integration/continuous deployment efforts. It will outline key deployment patterns and use cases, as well as highlight opportunities for automation, cost management and development velocity.
» The session will also share market insight as to how companies around the globe are using this new kind of compute resource to support their Agile efforts.

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Changing methods is easy - changing culture is hard

An Agile culture is underpinned by the values of courage, accountability and trust. However, most large and complex organisations have been built on the foundations of the industrial age. But things are changing. We are in the knowledge era, a global world linked more than ever and enabled through technology. Consequently, change is constant and relentless.

The paradox for organisations' changing culture is that it takes time, but the environment is ruthless, relentless and needs change now. To change culture successfully, organisations must respect the existing morality and allow people to experience the journey of culture change.

More than a methodology, the Agile culture should become 'the way we do things around here'.

Attendees will learn:
» The attributes of leaders that support and develop an Agile culture
» How to successfully help people manage the inevitable anxiety associated with change and recognize team dynamics that may occur
» How to take a whole of system approach to build and sustain an Agile culture

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Inroads in Outsourcing: Ebay's (mis)adventures with offshoring

Agile requires a deep understanding between team members, but how do you accomplish this while outsourcing to India or China? It's easy to end up at an impasse of cultural misunderstandings, sterile processes and shabby products from a disinterested development team. This is the story of how a small group of eBay pioneers shattered company conventions, ignored naysayers and focused on the relationship with our outsourced teams. We created an atmosphere of trust, safety and playfulness to discover a passionate team able to take ownership of a key piece of the world's online marketplace.

Learn about:
» Overcoming fear in disempowered teams
» Conventional organisational patterns contributing to the success and failure of outsourced teams
» Building cultural bridges through playful activities
» Communication and relationships across the miles
» Respecting and defying traditions: when to encourage them and when to break them down
» Overcoming well-meaning but misguided management policies
» Walking away from things you can't control

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Practical Kanban for software development

Much of the material on Kanban is quite high-level and theoretical. It sounds good and sensible, but how do you actually get started applying the ideas to software development? What are some practical techniques you can apply today? How would they fit with Agile approaches like XP and Scrum? What are some things to watch out for?

Learn how to start using Kanban on your Agile project tomorrow.

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Continuous Design

Continuous Design represents a holistic and evolutionary, all-of-business approach to reducing the disconnects between business strategy at one end of the pipeline, and software delivery at the other. Reducing the cycle time between concept to production code is key to leveraging the considerable business benefits that technical Continuous Delivery promises. We will argue that Design Thinking methods and Collaborative Design Facilitation are essential ingredients in the glue that turns disparate multidisciplinary teams into cohesive high performing units, providing a common language and clear rallying point across the organisation. We will present a framework for discussing organisational design maturity, and present case studies demonstrating the impact that a design-led approach has had at Australia's No.1 real estate site (www.realestate.com.au).

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Agile UX - Marriage made in heaven or just staying together for the kids

In this debate, six live and kicking humans from the design and development tribes bring their own unique experiences and outrageous opinions to bear in a debate that will expose the good, the bad and the downright funny.

In theory the user/customer focussed, iterative nature of Agile software development should be a natural fit for User Experience practice. However sometimes this real life union is not always made in heaven. For some it seems to work, for others less so and sometimes the neighbours are left wondering whether those strange noises they hear at night are pleasure or pain.

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Agile Attitudes & Abilities: The ScrumMaster role and how its core principles can be applied to any form of Agile leadership

As a ScrumMaster, Iteration Manager (or any other type of servant-leader) you form part of a new generation of enlightened professionals. This role is deep and complex, yet judging by the numerous discussion groups and job classifieds, there is a lack of emphasis on what really matters when identifying worthy representatives. There is significant discussion surrounding the prospective roles and responsibilities whereas the real focus should be directed towards understanding what the innate abilities and attitudes need to be for those stepping up to the plate.

Learn:
» The underlying ethos of this role
» What abilities and attitudes a real-deal ScrumMaster should possess
» Why a ScrumMaster should not simply be defined by a list of functions
» An appreciation for the complex depth of this role
» Find out the origins of the ScrumMaster title and why it can be problematic

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Distributed Agile: Operating Agile delivery centres at scale

Hear two perspectives (onshore and offshore) of our success with distributed Agile delivery. REA in partnership with ThoughtWorks have established dual Agile delivery centres across China and Australia. We'll discuss the phases of our journey, what works, what breaks and how to fix it. We'll draw on real world examples to describe how we work, including team structure, working practices, communication, culture, technology and tools.

Learn
» Why do distributed Agile
» How to get started and scale
» What breaks and how to fix it, including practical ways to bridge the communication gap
» About the role of leadership in distributed teams

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
The trouble with time machine

Many UX practitioners own their own TARDIS - it's the pattern many have adopted to be able to work with development teams using Agile methods by designing up-front and then working behind to iterate UI designs. While some suggest that this pattern is best practice, does it actually reap the benefits that Agile has to offer? What are its pitfalls, what are the advantages and disadvantages compared to just doing up-front design, and are there any smarter ways of becoming agile, whether working solo, in design teams, or working on end-to-end projects? This presentation will answer these questions.

Learn:
» Pros and cons for using up-front design in Agile environments
» Actions to take when there's not enough time to design, including accounting for design debt
» How to incorporate user-centred design artefacts like Lean Personas into sprint planning to improve the team's understanding of value
» Why BDD and the BA are a designer's best-friend
» How to apply the Time Machine pattern successfully

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
The Lean/Agile PMO vs The Traditional PMO

Even though traditional models and assumptions represent thinking that originated in the 1890s with Taylor (fixation on efficiency and utilisation) and Gantt (of Gantt chart fame) they seem remarkably impervious to change. Our problem is that we need to change otherwise we can never achieve true business agility. In this talk I will contrast the differences between a traditional PMO and a Lean/Agile PMO and outline the value a Lean/Agile PMO can bring.

Learn:
» What is a traditional PMO?
» Traditional Mindsets
» What is a Lean/Agile PMO?
» But, Why Do We Need to Change?
» From Educated "Guesses" to Decisions Based on Knowledge and Learning
» From Detailed Business Cases & Plans to Lightweight Business Cases
» From Annual to Incremental Funding
» From "Too Many Projects" to Controlling Work In Process
» From "Projects" to Continuous Delivery
» From Hidden Progress to Radical Visibility
» From Managing Congestion to Managing Flow
» From All At Once to the Vital Few
» From Event Driven Risk to Planned vs Actual Outcomes
» From Negotiation to Collaboration
» From Managers Numbers to Management Numbers
» From Project Completion to Validated Learning

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Agile and Portfolio / Program Management

Over the last couple of years I have noticed organisations trying to understand the role of management, governance and steering committees in an Agile context. How does my role change as a result of running Agile at scale from a program perspective? Learn the key components of tackling this complex area, while considering the responsibility of Scrum / Agile teams to provide information up through an organisation.

Learn:
» How to return to your organisations and identify the current state of control structures around your Agile implementation
» The types of information required at a program / product level to make an Agile steering group effective
» How to customise the report samples presented to your environment
» What are "leading indicators" and how they can benefit an Agile implementation

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
AgileTrek - The Next Frontier

Do you have to deliver software to be Agile? The success of Agile in software development has led to the expansion of Agile into non-software areas. We have heard stories of people powering their homes on Scrum, and Personal Kanban has made us think about how we manage our own work. Legal teams, real estate, HR and sales are also embracing Agile concepts. No, we haven't drunk the Kool-aid, but have been involved with a growing trend of teams who don't do software engaging in Agile. We'll share what we have observed in these Agile transformations. Does it make sense? How have these teams adapted Agile to fit their needs?

Learn about:
» Why you should let non-software teams experiment with Agile
» Looking into the toolbox: Which tools and techniques can work for these teams? How can you adapt them to fit with particular environments?
» Which Flavour is best? Is it a blend?
» The real value of visual planning, work and capacity
» Does the Agile Manifesto make sense to these teams?
» How can you help these teams
» A strawman framework based on what teams felt worked and added value

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Building high-performing teams to deliver awesome business outcomes

Agile, Lean, Kanban, DevOps, Continuous Delivery! Fundamentally, all these methodologies are predicated on effective system and culture change. They require people and teams to work together to negotiate outcomes, remove inefficiencies, and deliver great business outcomes.

This talk focusses on the practicalities of building a high-performing team that can execute within a chosen methodology, and deliver awesome business outcomes. It includes practical tips on motivation, hiring, and team building across distributed teams, and gives real life examples of successes (and failures).

Discover:
» A clear context for why this is a precursor for the successful adoption of Agile
» A clear framework for building high performing teams
» Practical tips for what to do when things go wrong
» How to lead high performing Distributed teams
» Real life examples of what worked and what doesn't

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Articulating Vision and Need: Collaborative Analysis and Design

Experience Design and Business Analysis are neither separate nor sequential. Look at them as an intertwined, collaborative whole and you'll get more buy-in from stakeholders, less re-work by the team and a more successful end product. During this session we'll use case studies from our current and previous work to demonstrate why we've come to these conclusions and how we've changed the way we work.

Learn:
» What exactly 'Analysis & Design' covers and how to identify what skill sets you need for your project
» How to accommodate Analysis & Design people's need to work both at the concept level and at the story level
» How to kick off projects and gather requirements with a combined Analysis & Design approach
» How to structure and manage your wall to optimise for collaborative Analysis & Design
» How to write stories and how it reflects an integrated approach

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Leadership Secrets for Agile Adoption

This talk will take a leadership lens on the Agile adoption journey from humble beginnings to pushing boundaries. We will explore the challenges of scaling Agile adoption to large teams with many people that come from non-Agile backgrounds. We'll include some experiments with Agile for less traditional areas like strategy, change management and BAU teams. Examples of recent experiences will highlight lessons that others can leverage.

What does a leader need to do if the team is empowered, self-managing and making all the right decisions? What about the warm fuzzy people and culture stuff, where does that fit and how important is it anyway? How do measurement, metrics and carrot/stick approaches change and how do they affect motivation? Plus politics, heirarchy, lipstick on a pig and how to deal with it.

Learn:
» How to scale good small team practices to large multi-million dollar delivery with 100+ people and keep the team approach
» What the key components are of an Agile adoption journey
» How to bring your people along for the ride, the importance of culture and leadership
» Some things that work, and some that don't

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Now for the hard part - the Agile Enterprise

You're on the way to mastering agile development, continuous design, and continuous deployment. Your teams are operating well and feeling creative. And things are getting shipped faster than ever before. Congratulations! You've scored a perfect 10... out of 20. So, where's the real payoff? And how do you get it?

Learn:
» How fast you can expect to 'go Agile' with IT.
» How Agile will break your business model.
» Where the big business payoffs really are.
» Tips to help you maximise your business payoffs.

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Easy ways to break up!

Breaking up user stories can sometimes be as painful as a relationship break up - but it does not have to be like that! the key to getting the full benefits of introducing Agile is in how the project work is broken up. When it gets difficult to write small enough user stories, teams often resort to technical story cards. While this can give the team visibility of the work that is being done, the business is not seeing potentially implementable product, or early delivery of business value.

This talk will expose the real reasons for splitting up user stories and not just talk about doing it as a good practice - we must BE Agile not just DO Agile! Using real-world examples, this talk will also offer a set of guidelines and some unconventional ways for breaking up larger chunks of work into valuable user stories that can help teams become more successful.

You will learn:
» Making stories smaller may be the least important part of splitting up stories
» Anti-patterns to look out for when trying to break up user stories
» A set of guidelines and a framework for breaking up larger features / epics into valuable user stories.
» How to convert the three most common excuses into opportunities to break up user stories.

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Agile Practices Proven in Highly Regulated Environments

Traditionally, Agile methods have not been applied to high assurance and regulated environments, industries where the economic or human cost of errors is unacceptably high. These enterprises have relied primarily on sequential, stage-gated, waterfall methods, meeting verification and validation requirements via burdensome documentation and labour intensive, and potentially error- prone, manual processes. However, many such enterprises have concluded that in order to achieve the next level of product quality and safety improvements, not to mention enhanced competitiveness, adoption of a more Agile approach is required. Find out how to address many of the challenges found in these environments.

Learn:
» What changes in the Agile Lifecycle Model to make it the Agile High Assurance Lifecycle Model. Examples of how to roll-out Agile within a High Assurance (ie Healthcare) domain
» Examples of practices that can be used individually or collectively in this domain
» Iterating and Continuous Verification - understand how the basic construct of the Iteration supports continuous verification
» The define-build-verify Team - describe who will be on the Agile Team in a high assurance environment
» The value of Acceptance Test Driven Development as a means for automating valuable governance documentation in this domain
» Documentation - explain when teams spend time on documentation, how to automate documentation, and who creates documentation for audits
» User Story Model for Software Requirements Specification - detail how the traditional requirements model evolves into a user story model that will satisfy auditors
» How does this scale? Most medical devices and complicated systems require multiple teams to work together. We will show how this scales in a pragmatic sense that continues to satisfy auditors

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Bottleneck!

"Design Bottleneck Syndrome" is a condition in an Agile practice where Lean becomes shuddery, jiggling Fat. Maintaining balance between design and technical efforts is a difficult juggling act, and imbalances will drop you right into churn and rework.

Can you really capture the nuances of a significantly interactive product on index cards? When the design pleases no one, is it the designer's fault? When you don't have a design specialist, how do you keep the "design vision" from being a game of slow-motion hacky-sack? What are the quickest ways to get user feedback into short iterations?

This talk will help you identify killer design bottlenecks that are hurting you today, and leave you with a kit of tools that will help your team deliver "kick ass" experiences - integrated with your Agile development practices.

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Why nothing you ever do might make the slightest difference: A crash course in the Theory of Constraints

The Theory of Constraints (TOC) is a large body of knowledge that has a lot in common with Agile and Lean, but for some reason is not well known in Agile circles. TOC brings good news and bad news - the good news is that you can learn how to focus on process improvements that provide the biggest bang for buck and they're easier than you think. The bad news is that nothing you are currently doing might be making the slightest difference, despite all your positive change metrics. Find out how that can possibly be, and discover a whole new perspective on Agile.

Learn:
» How TOC relates to Agile and Lean
» That eliminating some waste is a complete waste of time
» The five steps from the TOC process of ongoing improvement
» How the TOC Thinking Processes can help you communicate, collaborate and plan more successfully

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
Agile Board Hacks - get the best out of your wall

Agile teams use big visual indicators a lot, and often invent little hacks to make what's really going on in the team more visible, or to solve a problem. They're not static - typically these hacks exist for a while then fade away as other problems become more pressing to the team. Learn how to apply these hacks to your own Agile board.

Learn:
» How to diagnose common Agile delivery problems through simple visual indicators
» How visual feedback can influence team behaviour and improve performance
» Simple indicator styles your team can apply straight away

To read more, visit www.agileboardhacks.com.

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Agile: Looking Back, Looking Forward: Adapt, Innovate, Collaborate & Deliver

Agile adoption in Australia and across the world is now becoming more mainstream and, as a community, we are struggling to address the issue of how to take experienced Agile practitioners to the next level, while still supporting those who are beginning their journey. With the "agile" word getting so overloaded, the challenge is to continually innovate without assigning labels or losing focus on our prime objective - to deliver!

Join Craig Smith with Nigel Dalton, Simon Bristow and David Joyce (on the couch) as they explore different viewpoints on all things Agile - then, now and future!

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Implementing Continuous Delivery

Continuous Delivery is a concept that is making waves across the industry. More and more companies are looking to adopt Continuous Delivery to achieve faster time to market or to simply scale their practices to meet the potential of the cloud. However, many of these companies get bogged down by overly burdensome processes and organisational inertia. In this talk we present a number of approaches that have worked well and some that have worked not so well in implementing Continuous Delivery.

Learn:
» What continuous delivery is and why it is not the same as "DevOps"
» How to structure a change program to implement Continuous Delivery across the enterprise, for greenfield and brownfield applications and teams
» An understanding of some of the anti-patterns that organisations make
» Exploration of the Continuous Delivery maturity model, as developed in the Continuous Delivery book and further expanded upon through client engagements across ThoughtWorks globally
» An understanding of the various roles that software can play in implementing Continuous Delivery and what to stay away from

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Building the right thing through collaboration and continual discovery

Exceptional software is built from a deep understanding of the problem at hand and the constraints involved. Such an understanding can only be built through extensive collaboration and continual learning, something that many teams find hard to achieve. This talk will help product managers, business analysts, developers and testers collaborate more effectively by highlighting common collaboration anti-patterns and presenting simple but effective ways of avoiding them.

I will present a number of anti-patterns that relate to discovery, capture and verification of behaviour then describe techniques that can be used to avoid them.

Learn to
» Identify anti-patterns with the discovery, capture and verification of software behaviour and therefore avoid them
» Apply a model of software development as a learning process to feed new learning back into the development cycle on a continual basis
» Apply some simple, low-fidelity techniques to improve collaboration and communication between everyone involved (product managers, business analysts, developers and testers)

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Agile Sales! Is that a thing?

Agile and Lean methods are not just for developers! This case study will show the how an IBM Sales team is using Agile and Lean methods and tools to manage their workflow, work load, and work prioritisation; while making reporting and real-time dashboards a reality for sales management. Included in this case study will be the movement to self-organising teams and team prioritisation sessions.

Learn:
» What scrum boards and planning looks like without development tasks
» How to structure non-development tasks into Backlogs (Team, Release, and Sprints)
» How an electronic planning board bridges the gaps for distributed teams
» How epics and stories are applied in a non-development environment
» How data from an Agile planning tool can cleanly flow real-time status reports for sales management

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Failure: A love story

Like many other walks of life, the software industry doesn't like failure. Yet there's plenty of it about. Why? And why do we deal with it so badly?

This session uses examples of high-profile failures in our industry (and some from Tom Sulston's own career) to determine common root causes. From these, a discussion on how fear of failure exacerbated the issues and caused the whole project to fail.

You'll learn tips on how to embrace failure, so that we can use it to prevent future high-profile, expensive project disasters.

Learn how to:
» Recognise behaviours that exhibit fear of failure
» Address those behaviours to encourage productive failure
» Differentiate between failure as a method of learning and failure as a project outcome

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Mainframe Test Automation within SCRUM - How did we at the BNZ get it to work?

Mainframe Test Automation within Scrum - How did we get it to work at the BNZ?

There are a lot of BLOGs, web docs and Agile books on how to get test automation going for a Scrum team, but the problem is they predominantly focus on front-end systems. As a bank, we have a mainframe legacy system which all other systems connect to. When we had a project that was mainly mainframe development, we found there wasn't a lot of information on how to get Mainframe Test Automation to work within a Scrum team.

This case study is on how using Scrum methodologies we got test automation to work on this big old mainframe system.

Learn:
» What worked well and what didn't
» What tools we used to get the automation to work
» The blend of skills we needed on the tools chosen
» What learnings the team took away from implementing this
» The value automated mainframe testing added to the success of the project, bearing in mind it's quite an effort to build these tests
» What good practices were applied

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
From shaky beginnings: The evolution of the earthquake reinstatement programme

How Agile are we outside of the PMO office? Was Agile really ingrained as much as we thought throughout the organisation? Vero was put to the test recently with the spate of earthquakes in Christchurch. The ensuing programme of work was largely non-technical, leader dominant, and our reinstatement construction partners were about as far from Agile as Waterfall and traditional methods allow.

This presentation discusses the "gotcha's" learned over the past 18 months in terms of the importance of strong Agile leadership; initiating governance quickly with a culturally different but vitally important partner; and often having to run before we could walk. This is a case study of a partnership that more than embraced the need to adapt, innovate, collaborate and deliver.

Learn:
» What makes a good Agile Leader
» Being prepared to (and comfortable with) change
» Stakeholder engagement: agile communication methods are key
» Being flexible over the method
» Building trust and partnerships quickly with non-Agilites

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
What happened to people over process?

When the Agile Manifesto was written, it was decided that there were only four simple statements at the heart of Agile. So it is with great sadness that when we scrutinise most teams, we discover the first and arguably most important of these statements is disregarded. Teams focus on Processes and Tools, rather than Individuals and Interactions. This talk will bring the focus back onto Individuals and Interactions by giving an introduction to how the mind works. We will discuss the psychoanalytical fields of Transactional Analysis, Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Mental Models and Cognitive Biases.

Learn techniques to including:
» Transactional Analysis
» NLP
» Cognitive Bais
» Mental Models

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PROJECT MANAGEMENT
PANEL: Agile Governance - The new disinfectant

Governance will help purify things and help start the healing, but first it's going to sting like hell. Four panellists across varying industries in medium to large scale enterprises will provide quick overviews of their differing governance models and how their governance implementation was like disinfectant, then the floor will be opened up to the audience's questions.

Learn:
» What are potential approaches to implementing an Agile Governance model
» The pitfalls and perks to Agile Governance
» The importance of having a framework that is adaptable, measured and fit for purpose

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Guild Leadership in Agile environments - How your role as a manager changes and what you need to do to adapt

Your organisation has decided to go Agile. Maybe you even advised them on it. You lead a group of Business Analysts, Developers or Testers that now will have to survive in the Agile world.

Your team members are now part of an Agile team:
» Are they still part of your team as well?
» How has your role changed with the adoption of Agile methods?
» How do you coach your team in their work?
» What are the professional development options that you can offer now?
» What skills do you look for during job interviews?

In this presentation Erik will discuss how to take your team or department on the journey to become a Guild whose members work in Agile teams. Erik will explore the above questions and solutions to common problems that you may encounter along the way, based on his experience with the transition to Agile.

Learn how:
» Your role as a practice lead or manager changes to Guild leader in an Agile environment
» To coach your Guild in an Agile environment
» To select the people with the right skills and what skills to develop in your existing Guild
» To work with product owners to claim time for professional development of your guild, instead of fighting them for it

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DESIGN AND BUILD
Emerging Paradigms in Software Testing

Does your organisation view testing as the final hurdle to be overcome before an application goes live? Is your approach limited to detecting errors, fixing bugs and checking for known weaknesses? Is the majority of your testing practice keyboard driven? Are you spending more and more money on testing with diminishing results? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, this presentation will illustrate a very different perspective on testing; one that boosts productivity and turbo-charges performance while improving quality.

Learn an inside-out approach to testing on all projects - instead of testing at the end of the development process, integrate testing thoroughly into software development and systems management. Our own experience shows that when supported with the right processes, tools and training, integrated testing significantly speeds up the overall delivery of software. Repositioning testing at the heart of your software development approach not only builds in quality, but also creates value by striving to prevent defects before they occur, enabling developers to get feedback in minutes and regression test results in hours, and enabling businesses to adopt testing activities which are highly aligned with their goals. We are at an important juncture in the history of software development. Those who embrace this change will survive.

Learn:
» Seven Principles of Agile Software Testing that you can incorporate into your current work environment.
» Practices that you can apply to improve testing in your organisation.
» Case studies giving a real world example of how the principle was successfully implemented
» References to further reading material to support people implementing the principles

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LEADERSHIP AND TEAMS
Agile Executive: The Naked Truth!

Gaining the business value that comes from delivering transformational change at magnitude requires courageous leadership. Drawing on the IPC Media case study, you will learn:
» How to drive Agile adoption on an enterprise wide basis as part of an over-arching organisational transformation
» To get the full potential benefits of Agile, executives need the courage to take a holistic view and tackle some big challenges
» This will mean being bold enough to take on the cultural and structural challenges as well as implementing Agile practices within individual teams
» Agile doesn't solve your problems, it highlights them! So executives better be ready for that! It means seeing and being prepared to hear hard truths. But it highlights problems early enough that you can potentially do something about them
» It's not just the teams that need to change. Executives need to change too. In Agile, a different style of leadership is required

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Agility@Scale: IBMs Journey of Agile Transformation

Many large organisations desire to adopt Agile development methodologies as a means of delivering software to customers and internal stakeholders more quickly and efficiently in bite-sized increments. However, large projects can pose significant challenges to agility. IBM Software Group, with almost 30,000 engineers in 84 locations, started its Agile transformation in 2006. While this journey continues today, extensive improvements in quality, time-to-market, and customer satisfaction show that the rewards of Agile adoption far outweigh the obstacles. IBM learned that a haphazard implementation of Agile may result in more frequent development turns, but can also fail to deliver true business benefits. In effect, the wrong Agile implementation may just mean that bad code is being released to market faster than before.

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
The Yin and Yang of Agile - Adventures in Chinese Agile

The AIA Group is a leading pan-Asian life insurance organisation that traces its roots in the Asia Pacific region back more than 90 years. This session looks at their experience of the Agile journey and some of the opposing forces they have encountered, including working with distributed teams in China. Distributed vs Co-located? Project vs BAU? Big bang vs Slow Burn? Suits vs Casual?

Learn about:
» The driving forces for Agile transformation
» Agile journey management
» Working with distributed teams in China
» Cultural differences between Asia and Australia

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PRODUCT MANAGEMENT
Using Lean Product Engineering to achieve business objectives

There is no bigger waste in product development than building the wrong product. In this session, we will take you on REA Group's journey in delivering a new generation of products for 10,000+ real estate agents that facilitate their marketing and business needs.

With this in mind we began to change our delivery process, transitioning from big bang releases to iterative releases. We integrated early with Experience Designers to ensure our customers and the end users have great experiences using the products. Most importantly, as a development team we changed our mindset that together with the business we are working together towards a common goal. "We are all the business!".

Learn about:
» Waterfall vs Big Upfront Design vs Iterative Delivery
» The benefits of 'Build - Measure - Learn' cycle for the company, the team and the customer.
» Working with traditional business units within a corporate environment
» How UX & Continuously Delivery can be used to help validate learnings quickly
» How crucial it is for the development team and the product team to be working towards the same business goal

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Agile Development on Large Legacy Architecture

A presentation of adoption ideas and lessons learnt, based on a case study of how Integrated Research adopted Agile practices across 60 developers in multiple teams, all working on a single product architecture with a single 20+ year legacy cross-platform, multi-million LOC code-base.

We look at the speed and quality improvements that Agile provided, and the impact that had on managing and maintaining our legacy architecture, and the resulting impact on the rest of the organisation.

Learn:
» Issues we faced in our roll-out that may be common for other legacy implementations
» How we addressed, or are addressing, those issues
» How we hold our architecture together across many teams
» The role of an Architect in Agile
» Ideas on using Agile in departments other than R&D

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ADOPTION AND APPROACHES
Definition of Agile at NAB - Adapting Agile to the constraints of a large organisation

As recently as two years ago, Agile had a very poor reputation with organisational leaders at NAB. Yet today, several projects have been successfully delivered using our Agile Delivery Methodology, and adoption across NAB has started to spread. What's changed? The factor that has made the biggest difference to changing our leaders' mindsets, and ensured that projects using Agile deliver to expectations, is our simple definition of what it means to be Agile at NAB. Our case study will cover; what it is, how it fits within and delivers to the requirements of our current organisational constraints but remains true to Agile principles, and how it continues to deliver transparency and control to our Project Sponsors and tangible financial outcomes for the organisation.

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