Every session, keynote, and workshop slot — sorted by day so you can plan your path through the conference.
Everyone wants to be successful in life. Many have found the SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant & time boxed) goal setting framework to be a powerful tool to help clarify and validate their goals. Unfortunately having well defined goals is not enough to obtain them. This is where WINS (write, incentivize, network & share) comes in.
In this session, you will learn how to become more successful by putting goals into action with SMART WINS.
Even if you don’t have change management in your job description, your job involves change.
Change is a given in modern organizations as they respond to market and technology changes, make improvements, evolve new practices to meet new challenges. These are not simple changes on the organizational, group, or even team level. Often, there is no indisputable right answer, and responding will require learning and unlearning, trial and error. Whatever you do, it will interact with existing policies and structures, with unpredictable results. The answer is not more rigorous planning, more pushing, or more persuading. Instead, attraction works, taking an approach that is adaptive, responsive and engages people in learning and owning the new way.
This session presents seven heuristics to guide complex change.
Every organization—whether it is 50, or 50,000 people—faces three broad sets of concerns. How it fits in the market, how it serves customers, how it makes money, what sort of place it wants to be. Leaders in the organization have to figure out what initiatives to invest in, and how to sequence and order work that flows into teams. They have to support teams, so they can do good work. And teams need to figure out the details of their work and how best to collaborate.
Traditionally, organizations have answered these concerns by setting direction at the top, decomposing responsibilities, and cascading objectives down through the hierarchy.The results is often fragmented effort, diminishing initiative, and important work that falls through the cracks.
I'll share a model that provides a way to address these concerns that maximizes the possibility of healthy self-organization, and adaptability.
The SEEM model distinguishes concerns from hierarchy, and allows managers and executives to think about their roles in a way that is more both more responsible and less reliant on narrow job descriptions.
I'll share the model, work through the domains, and then participant will have a chance to work with some scenarios to explore how concerns are met or not met, and the impact that might have on teams.
Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, heroics. Those definitions might have been sufficient in another time. Organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader.
In this talk, we'll explore a different definition of leadership, one from Jerry Weinberg: “The ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problem(s)”
In this talk I'll briefly review traditional definitions and assumptions about leadership. Then, we'll explore what is possible when Weinberg's definition is applied. We'll look at what is necessary to empower leadership though out the organization, and how you can move that direction in your organization.
As a technical leader or software development manager, you're eager to remove impediments so your team can produce continuous results. Instilling a few technical practices can have significant impact on your teams ability to deliver continuous results.
In this presentation we will cover the what, why, and how of essential technical practices that take time and effort but they result in saving significant cost and time in the long run.
Looking at what occupies most of our energy during software development, our domain is primarily a decision making business rather than construction one. As a consequence, we should invest in a systematic discipline to approach making decisions.
Assessment denotes the process of understanding a given situation about a software system to support decision making.
During software development, engineers spend as much as 50% of the overall effort on doing precisely that: they try to understand the current status of the system to know what to do next. In other words, assessing the current system accounts for half of the development budget. These are just the direct costs. The indirect costs can be seen in the quality of the decisions made as a result.
One might think that an activity that has such a large economical impact would be a topic of high debate and improvement. Instead, it is typically treated like the proverbial elephant in the room. In this talk, we argue that we need to:
• Make assessment explicit. Ignoring it won’t make it go away. By acknowledging its existence you have a chance of learning from past experiences and of optimizing your approach.
• Tailor assessment. Currently, developers try to assess the system by reading the source code. This is highly ineffective in many situations, and it simply does not scale to the size of the modern systems. You need tools, but not any tools. Your system is special and your most important problems will be special as well. That is why generic tools that produce nice looking reports won’t make a difference. You need smart tools that are tailored to your needs.
• Educate ourselves. The ability to assess is a skill. Like any skill, it needs to be educated. Enterprises need to understand that they need to allocate the budget for those custom tools, and engineers need to understand that it is within their reach to build them. It’s not rocket science. It just requires a different focus.
Software systems should not remain black boxes. In this talk we show how we can complement domain-driven design with tools that match the ubiquitous language with visual representations of the system that are produced automatically. We experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system.
Software appears to be hard to grasp especially for non-technical people, and it often gets treated as a black box, which leads to inefficient decisions. This must and can change.
In this talk we show how by changing our tools we can expose the inner workings of a system with custom visual representations that can be produced automatically. These representations enhance the ubiquitous language and allow non-technical people to engage actively with the running system.
We start from describing experiences of building concrete systems, and, by means of live demos, we exemplify how changing the approach and the nature of the tools allows non-technical people to understand the inner workings of a system. We then take a step back and learn how we should emphasize decision making in software development as an explicit discipline at all layers, including the technical ones. This talk is accompanied is relevant for both technical and non-technical people.
Llewellyn Falco has been traveling the world as a technical coach for over a decade. Along the way he has developed a structured approach for creating lasting change for technologists.
In this session he'll teach us the six most powerful practices from this approach.
Software architecture can be defined as the internal structure of a software system. As such it influences many critical aspects of software systems like maintainability, comprehensibility, changeability and security. One would think that given the importance of a good architecture most systems would be well structured and not suffer from large amounts of structural or architectural erosion. Just the opposite is true. Most non-trivial systems with more than 100,000 lines of code are in bad shape and require enormous efforts to keep them alive. Developers spend most of their time with figuring out complex interdependencies in the code base.
After analyzing the reasons why so many systems end up in bad shape we will focus on strategies to improve the situation.(Spoiler: Micro Services are usually NOT the solution for this problem)
Software metrics can be used effectively to judge the maintainability and architectural quality of a code base. Even more importantly they can be used as “canaries in a coal mine” to warn early about dangerous accumulations of architectural and technical debt. Therefore using the right metrics can improve project governance and outcomes.
The session will introduce some key metrics that every tech leader should understand.
By definition, a tech leader is responsible for leading and guiding development teams. In this session we will take a look at some key leadership practices to make your development teams run like well-oiled machines.
Agenda:
Machine Learning is a key differentiator for modern organizations, but where does it fit into larger IT strategies? What does it do for you? How can it go wrong?
This class will contextualize these technologies and explain the major technologies without much (if any) math.
We will cover:
Everyone knows security is important. Very few organizations have a robust and comprehensive sense of whose responsibility it is, however. The consequence is that they have duct-tapped systems and a Policy of Hope that there will be no issues. (Spoiler: there will be)
We will review the various roles that most organizations need to fill and how they overlap as well as what should and can be expected from each of them.
Great leaders inspire, excite, and empower those in their teams. These leaders help create a team that is more than the sum of it's parts; in short, a great leader can be a force multiplier for the team.
But what makes these force multipliers? Is it simply raw talent? Charisma? How are these leaders different from the bad leaders who become bottlenecks and roadblocks?
In this session, we explore the answer to that question and identify the skills and principles that create force multipliers. Put these skills into action and you can be one too!
Inevitably, talented engineers find themselves in a leadership position (whether it's explicitly part of their title or not). Making that transition from a contributor role to a leadership or management role can be tough.
There are a handful of skills and qualities that make a great leader. This keynote explores those qualities, how to develop and strengthen them, and exercises to continue your personal growth long after the session ends.
Software projects can be difficult to manage. Managing teams of developers can be even difficult. We've created countless processes, methodologies, and practices but the underlying problems remain the same.
This session is full of practical tips and tricks to deal with the reallife situations any tech leader regularly encounters. Put these techniques into practice and create an enviable culture and an outstanding development team. At the same time, you'll avoid common management mistakes and pitfalls.
Participation in dysfunctional teams is virtually a universal experience. We've almost all experienced it, but it can be so nebulous and difficult to articulate what makes it so.
This session identifies several dysfunctions with relatable, real-world examples. From here we explore how to overcome these types of dysfunctional leadership and team dynamics. You'll leave this session with techniques, exercises, and insights on how to effect real change in your teams.
In tech teams it's a constant firefight. We react. Then we react to the reaction… the cycle continues. In all this noise, in all this chaos, how do we move forward. How do we remain proactive?
A great leader must be an enabler for the team. At times this means insulating the team from the noise. At other times it means improving the environment for the team. At all times, however, it requires setting clear priorities and conditions for success.
This session is focused on the art of moving forward in even the noisiest environments.
Our technical world is governed by facts. In this world Excel files and technical diagrams are everywhere, and too often this way of looking at the world makes us forget that the goal of our job is to produce value, not to fulfill specifications.
Feedback is the central source of agile value. The most effective way to obtain feedback from stakeholders is a demo. Good demos engage. They materialize your ideas and put energies in motion. They spark the imagination and uncover hidden assumptions. They make feedback flow.
But, if a demo is the means to value, shouldn’t preparing the demo be a significant concern? Should it not be part of the definition of done?
That is not even all. A good demo tells a story about the system. This means that you have to make the system tell that story. Not a user story full of facts. A story that makes users want to use the system. That tiny concern can change the way you build your system. Many things go well when demos come out right.
Demoing is a skill, and like any skill, it can be trained. Regardless of the subject, there always is an exciting demo lurking underneath. It just takes you to find it. And to do it.
In this session we will get to exercise that skill.
Millennials are now the largest demographic in the workforce, so being able to work with and motivate them is a critical responsibility of a leader. Unfortunately, millennials often get a bad rap for being lazy, entitled and shallow. This session will explore some of the myths and realities as well as provide some historical context all while providing tips for leading and working with this generation of future leaders.
In this session, you will learn proven practical tips to help lead millennials.
The cloud promises highly scalable infrastructure, economies of scale, lower costs and a more secure platform. When moving to the cloud, how do you take advantage of these new capabilities? How do you optimize your organization to make the best use of the resiliency and elasticity offered by the cloud?
Closely associated with cloud computing is Continuous Delivery, the automated process to get changes to your customers quickly, safely and in a sustainable way. Continuous Delivery was born in the cloud and is a great way to get ideas to your customers. There’s one catch, if you want to adopt a Continuous Delivery strategy, you need to build applications differently, your team structure needs to change and how you test and validate systems needs to adapt to these changes.
This presentation will look at how to transform your organization to take advantage of all the cloud has to offer. We’ll look at strategies for initiating your transition to the cloud, how to adopt a continuous delivery strategy, and how to manage cross-functional teams (sometimes called two-pizza teams) and projects when every team can deploy to production multiple times a day.
Managing teams in chaos will provide you the information needed to implement the two-pizza rule for your organization, enable your teams to work independently while still focusing on a common goal, and how to beat your competition to market.
“What you value is what you get” looks at the unexpected results of emphasizing traditional software deliverables and organizational structures. In this presentation, we will focus on undifferentiated work, how to recognize it and how to motivate your organization to focus instead on differentiated work. No one knows your customers better than you, why have your teams build custom infrastructure or software frameworks instead of adding business value?
It turns out, what executive leadership values and more importantly what you reward and recognize, may encourage your teams to focus on undifferentiated work. During this presentation we’ll talk about how to spot undifferentiated work, questions to ask your teams to get to the heart of what they are doing and how to value, encourage and reward work that will truly set you apart from your competition.
As leaders we want our teams to pursue great ideas and change directions to realize the goals. However, often we find it hard to implement changes. At times there seems to be resistance or at least reluctance to change. Why can't the team see the benefits of where we're headed and move fast to realize the goals?
Let's step back to look at the challenges of effecting change and how we can lead teams towards successful transition.
Executing a software project has many challenges. For a team to function smoothly and deliver working solution we have to constantly look for impediments and find ways to resolve them.
In this presentation we will discuss how to proactively engage the team in identifying impediments, recognize what's going well, and understand what needs improvement. Then discuss ways to implement and measure the progress the team makes.
The world we live in today is changing rapidly, both in terms of hardware and in business demands.
In this presentation we will look at technologies that will have significant impact in the next three to ten years. Some of these are poised to fundamentally change the way and the type of applications we will be building.
Do you feel inspired by conference talks but overwhelmed by all of the take aways to remember when you get back to work? This session will provide an opportunity to identify and practice key leadership skills immediately!
Leading a team requires a certain level of self-awareness and is often an overlooked requirement of the role. Therefore, understanding your own personal motivations is important to effectively lead and influence your team.
This one hour session will lead you through a few powerful activities to discover your own motivational style and understand how it drives your daily actions and decisions.
Time management + prioritization - everyone needs it! We all seem to face a never-ending list of demands coupled with a finite amount of time to get it all done.
You will leave this 60 minute session armed with new tips and tools to effectively balance your time between meetings, writing code, putting out fires, and clarifying your role to ensure you are spending time on the things that actually matter!
Giving feedback, discussing career goals, and facilitating (non-awkward) 1:1s are quite often dreaded tasks as a leader.
Starting with an activity to learn more about the way you communicate, this session will provide tools and tips to demystify these esoteric responsibilities of an Engineering Lead or Manager!
Great leaders put people first. We must never devalue people in the process of delivering a technical solution.
This session will involve a wide range of topics including: the importance of diversity & inclusion in our dev teams, the importance of an effective developer onboarding experience, recruiting for the right things, and becoming an authentic, inspiring leader.
In this session we will look at some of the main takeaways from these the books, 'The Phoenix Project' and 'The Goal'. Having read them will be helpful, but not necessary.
This session is aimed at the higher level decisions made by management and the downstream effects those have on productivity and profitability.
Whether you want to effect culture change in your organization, lead the transition toward a new technology, or simply get more out of your team; you must first understand that having a “good idea” is simply the beginning. An idea must be communicated; a case must be made. Communicating that case well is as important, if not more so, than the strength of the idea itself.
You will learn 6 principles to make an optimal case and dramatically increase the odds that the other person will say “Yes” to your requests and suggestions, along with several strategies to build consensus within your teams. As a professional mentalist, Michael has been a student of psychology, human behavior and the principles of influence for nearly two decades. There are universal principles of influence that are necessary to both understand and leverage if you want to be more effective leader of change in your organization.
There is pain inherent in development - monoliths, confusing deployment processes, conflict between dev/ops/business.
IT is hard and the pace of change now makes it even more difficult. Join Josh and Laine as they talk about how focusing on solving this pain can help in a lot of surprising ways - kickstarting DevOps, speeding up product delivery, and even enabling the business as a whole.
It may seem paradoxical that something small leads to something big. Yet this is the case. Big changes can feel like an existential threat and cause major disruption. Tiny changes, working obliquely, evolving towards a more desirable pattern may lack drama, but get you where you need to go.
So how does this work? The same way agile does, iteratively, incrementally, with learning as you go. I’ll share some small ideas that will add up to a big change in how you go about changing your team or organization.
“Software is eating the world” means all innovations in the company must be channeled through software. As Architects, we create the choices, trade-offs and conditions for software-based innovation to occur successfully. Those choices also affect how software is built and tested and vice versa. For example proper modularization does not just improve maintainability and separation of concerns, but can also dramatically impact the time it takes to build and test software. , Mapping micro-services to source repositories is often influenced by build and test time constraints, with often suboptimal results.
Good architecture and developer productivity engineering should work hand-in-hand.
The paradox of a successful software team is that as the codebase and team sizes grow - it becomes harder to maintain the automation, fast feedback cycles, and reliable feedback that enables the software development team to execute at their full potential including sticking to the architectural roadmap. Compared to other industries, the software development process is in the dark ages, with little data to observe and optimize the process itself.
Join Hans Dockter, founder and CEO of Gradle for a discussion of how to measure the impact, and apply data and acceleration technologies to speed up and improve the essential software development processes from builds to testing to CI and how this will benefit and enable better architecture.