Every session, keynote, and workshop slot — sorted by day so you can plan your path through the conference.
Some aim for leadership positions, team lead, manager, director, VP, and so on whereas others slide into that position due to the opportunities that arise. Many grow into those positions from a strong technical background as opposed to formal training to be a manager. Join Venkat and learn how you can be a more effective technical manager?
We will look at some characteristics that can help us to better meet the needs of the organizations and help the team perform at its peak, to deliver good results.
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.
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.
Among the many lessons the pandemic has taught us, one is that it is possible for many of us to collaborate as a remote or distributed team without jeopardizing the quality of our work. Every day, new tools are emerging in an attempt to address the unique challenges of being remote.
In this session, we will take a look at some of the best tools and strategies for improving communications with your remote team to ensure that you are keeping projects on schedule and maintaining healthy boundaries for work and life.
It has been said that everything rises and falls on leadership and that there are no bad teams, only bad leaders. As you serve your team as their manager and leader, one of the most critical decisions for you to make is what kind of leader you will be.
In this session, we will focus on one of the keys to good leadership; how you manage yourself. From cultivating healthy personal routines to developing a culture of feedback, during this session we will explore some best practices in self-leadership that will help you bring your very best to the team you serve.
Do you ever wonder where the time goes? The team thinks they can finish features faster, but the features often take longer than they expected. Or the team spends the last 80% of the time finishing the last 20% of the features. Then, they all learn no one uses those features. Or the management team wants everyone to create innovative products and services in a too-short time. Why? Because they want to go to the next project in the project portfolio.
A real culture of innovation means shortening the learning time, in the team, for the product strategy, and with the corporate strategy. The faster we can learn, the faster we learn what does work for whom—and what doesn’t work for whom. We can use shorter feedback loops to focus on delivering what our ideal customers want and need. We can avoid doing work they don’t need.
If you’ve ever been surprised by how long the work takes, the value of that work to the customers, or how to make time to innovate, learn to see and measure your feedback loops.
You will learn:
Do your managers think “agile” is something teams do? If so, they might buy and “install” an agile framework or tools. However, those frameworks or tools don’t create an agile culture. Instead, we can change how we reward managers. Instead of personal deliverables, we can reward managers for reducing their decision time, being servant leaders, and clarifying the purpose of the work. When we do, we create a culture where agility can thrive.
We'll discuss:
In our industry, there is a lot of pressure to deliver high quality, tested, fast, scalable, innovative software. We focus on deadlines, product requests, and metrics to ensure quality. But what of the people actually doing the work?
Join this session to learn how, as a manager, one can support your resources to deliver their best work. As an individual contributor, this session will guide you through pinpointing your needs, advocating to have them met, and how to handle self-care so you can be your very best.
Code reviews are essential to improve the quality of code and reduce defects. Yet, everyone, from the developers to managers, dreads that activity. However, when done right it can be one of the most effective ways to not only improve the quality of the application but also promote learning among the team members.
In this presentation, Venkat will discuss the issues with conventional code reviews and look at ways to turn this into an effective practice that the team will relish.
Do you ever feel caught between what your manager wants and what your team needs? Too much of what passes for management or leadership pushes people away instead of creating an engaging environment.
You can create an environment that frees people to do their best work with your leadership:
Have you ever thought, “If I could just avoid all this bureaucracy, I could get things done?” You’re right. Too many organizations think they’re helping the teams when those very practices make work more difficult to accomplish. Sometimes, all you need to do is stop demotivating people from doing the work. Innovative organizations don’t just innovate their products—they innovate their processes.
You might not be able to influence all of these ideas, but you can start the conversation:
As a technical leader, you’d rather spend time delivering software than excuses.
In this presentation we will discuss seven practices for your team to embrace. These will take time and effort, but will reduce the cost and improve the chances of success in the long term.
You may be working in an organization where pairing and/or mobbing is encouraged or even expected. Collaboration has many benefits but it is not easy. What are some of the ways in which we can get effective in collaborative development?
In this presentation we will discuss several practices that you, as an individual, and your team collectively can practice to make the collaborative development sessions fruitful, less contentious, and help to achieve the goals for the benefit of the teams and the enrichment of the individuals.
As many organizations are embracing hybrid work, remote communication is here to stay. Communication is highly essential for any team to succeed. Being remote introduces many challenges to communication.
In this presentation we will discuss the dos and don'ts—thing that we should deliberately do and consciously avoid in order to remove the impediments and make the communication more effective.
Giving presentations is a necessity for anyone in a leadership position. Whether it is a presentation to the leadership team, a talk to a potential client, or a speech at a conference, we want to be effective in communicating the message.
We’ll talk about how to optimize your speaking ability in this presentation.
This session will dive deep into the way that our mindset affects our peers, direct reports, supervisors, and customers.
We’ll talk about the “collusions” we collectively create in our organization that demolishes communication, progress, relationships, and results. We’ll discuss what being “in the box” means, how we carry those boxes into our relationships, and how that can create a biased view of corporate problems and our roles in them. Lastly, we’ll discuss a proven strategy to rebuild our relationships while simultaneously breaking down our corporate silos. Come ready to think about how you think!
Have you ever worked for a leader that withholds important information far too long? What about a leader that seems to change their mind from day to day? Perhaps you know leaders that are fully aware of corporate problems but do nothing about them. Then again, you may know a leader that is engaged, energetic, and empowering. Leadership styles differ but can be categorized into six different types.
This session will teach you how to identify those types of leaders and recognize the kind of followers they produce. We’ll discuss ways to determine which type of leader you are and how each type can grow, become better, and influence positive change in their organization.
In the last 30 years, our industry has been upended by advancements that unlock previously unimaginable capabilities. It still seems like there is far too much failure and not enough success in IT systems though. To be successful in the 21st Century, you will need to understand where we are and where we are going. It is a complex amalgamation of developments in hardware, computer languages, architectures and how we manage information. Very few people understand all of the pieces and how they connect.
In this talk we will cover how technology changes are enabling longer term capture of business value, modernization of legacy systems, resilience in the face of increased mobile user bases, IT sovereignty and distributed, layered, heterogeneous architectures.
Continuous Delivery extends the spirit of agility, from development to production, in order to keep pace with the fast changing business demands. In order to succeed in that spirit to keep up with change, we need to bring in several sustainable practices. Without proper discipline and rigor the efforts for continuous deliver can soon turn into a nightmare for teams and organizations that rely on them.
In this presentation we will discuss a dozen practices, why we need to focus on each one of them, and how they impact the ability to keep pace with continuous delivery.
When it comes to developer success, factors like work-life balance and workplace culture often take center stage. However, an underexplored yet critical component is the engineering environment and the supporting tools. This talk aims to shed light on how managers can invest in Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) to drive developer success and organizational growth.
As managers, you hold the keys to shaping the engineering culture within your teams. We'll discuss the importance of collaborating across departments to refine engineering processes and tools, all with the goal of enhancing developer productivity. We'll also offer strategies for identifying gaps in your current toolset and adopting new tools that excel in promoting productivity.
The concept of DPE serves as a framework for these efforts, unifying various initiatives aimed at boosting productivity through engineering best practices. By investing in DPE, managers can not only improve individual developer performance but also drive broader organizational success.
Join us to gain actionable insights into elevating developer productivity from a managerial perspective. This talk will equip you with the knowledge and strategies needed to foster a culture that prioritizes developer success, benefiting your teams and your organization as a whole.
If this approach aligns with your goals, you'll find this talk to be a valuable resource for understanding how a focus on Developer Productivity Engineering can lead to transformative changes in your engineering culture.
The target audience for this talk would be managers, team leads, and decision-makers within organizations who are responsible for overseeing development teams and engineering processes. This includes not only technical managers but also those in higher-level managerial roles who are interested in optimizing developer productivity as a means to achieve broader organizational success.
Extreme Ownership is a leadership philosophy developed by former US Navy SEALs Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, which emphasizes the importance of taking full responsibility for one's actions and decisions, as well as the outcomes of one's team. This concept has been widely embraced in various industries, but its application in engineering management remains under explored. In this talk, I will delve into the principles of Extreme Ownership and demonstrate how they can be effectively applied to engineering management to drive team success and achieve organizational goals.
I will begin by introducing the core tenets of Extreme Ownership, including the importance of taking full accountability for both successes and failures. I will then explore how these principles can be applied to common challenges faced by engineering managers, such as project delays, cross team collaboration and team conflicts.
Using personal experience, I will illustrate how engineering managers can leverage Extreme Ownership to create high-performing teams, improve communication and collaboration, and foster a culture of ownership and accountability.
Overall, this talk aims to provide engineering managers with valuable insights and actionable strategies for incorporating Extreme Ownership into their leadership approach, ultimately leading to more effective and resilient teams.
Code quality is an abstract concept that fails to get traction at the business level. Consequently, software companies keep trading code quality for new features. The resulting technical debt is estimated to waste up to 42% of developers' time, causing stress and uncertainty, as well as making our job less enjoyable than it should be. Without clear and quantifiable benefits, it's hard to build a business case for code quality.
In this keynote, Adam takes on the challenge by tuning the code analysis microscope towards a business outcome. We do that by combining novel code quality metrics with analyses of how the engineering organization works with the code. We then take those metrics a step further by connecting them to values like time-to-market, customer satisfaction, and road-map risks. This makes it possible to a) prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements, b) communicate quality trade-offs in terms of actual costs, and c) identify high-risk parts of the application so that we can focus our efforts on the areas that need them the most. All recommendations are supported by data and brand new real-world research. This is a perspective on software development that will change how you view code. Promise.
Prioritizing technical debt is a hard problem as modern systems might have millions of lines of code and multiple development teams — no one has a holistic overview. In addition, there's always a trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features so we need to use our time wisely.
What if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start making decisions based on information from how the organization actually works with the code?
In this workshop, you'll learn how easily obtained version-control data lets you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data.
In this session, you’ll learn:
To prioritize technical debt in large-scale systems
Balance the trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features
Visualize long time trends in technical debt
Take a data-driven approach to technical debt.
During this workshop, you get access to CodeScene – a behavioral code analysis tool that automates the analyses – which we use for the practical exercises. We’ll do the exercises on real world codebases in Java, C#, JavaScript and more to discover real issues.
Participants are also encouraged to take this opportunity to analyze their own codebase to get actionable take-away information.
Prioritizing technical debt is a hard problem as modern systems might have millions of lines of code and multiple development teams — no one has a holistic overview. In addition, there's always a trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features so we need to use our time wisely.
What if we could mine the collective intelligence of all contributing programmers and start making decisions based on information from how the organization actually works with the code?
In this workshop, you'll learn how easily obtained version-control data lets you uncover the behavior and patterns of the development organization. This language-neutral approach lets you prioritize the parts of your system that benefit the most from improvements so that you can balance short- and long-term goals guided by data.
In this session, you’ll learn:
To prioritize technical debt in large-scale systems
Balance the trade-off between improving existing code versus adding new features
Visualize long time trends in technical debt
Take a data-driven approach to technical debt.
During this workshop, you get access to CodeScene – a behavioral code analysis tool that automates the analyses – which we use for the practical exercises. We’ll do the exercises on real world codebases in Java, C#, JavaScript and more to discover real issues.
Participants are also encouraged to take this opportunity to analyze their own codebase to get actionable take-away information.
It’s inescapable. The capabilities that ChatGPT and Large Language Models provide have become discussion topics on the news, in social gatherings, online, at work. Things that would have seemed impossible a few years ago are now nearly pedestrian in how ubiquitous they are becoming on a daily basis. While they show very well, very few people actually understand what is going on, and worse, what is or isn’t possible.
How then should we evaluate these achievements as we make decisions on how to adopt and adapt to powerful new technologies? What will they mean for us as a society and as individual knowledge workers? In addition to a discussion specifically about ChatGPT and its peer technologies and what they portend, we will also discuss critically evaluating new technology as make decisions in the future.
Learning Objectives:
After attending this talk, you will be able to:
Explain what Large Language Models (LLMs) are and how they are used
Understand intuitively how they are built and work
Understand where they fit into the overall history of natural language processing
Understand the use cases where they are effective and appropriate in modern Enterprises
Understand the limitations of these models and how they can go wrong
Understand the moral, ethical, and legal complications that surround the development and use of these models
Understand the externalities of developing and operating these models which are often not priced into the fancy demos
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.
The enneagram is a personality typing system that describes patterns on how people interpret the world and manage their emotions. Like many other typing systems, the enneagram is taking off in the “business self-help” world as an effective leadership tool.
This session will dive into what the enneagram is, what enneagram type you are, understanding the enneagram types of others, and how you can use your type to effectively manage others into a growth mindset while leading them away from stress.
In todays tech environment, both people and organizations must continuously learn and adapt to be successful. Yet study after study shows that learning is difficult for most organizations.
In this talk, we will discuss whats preventing smart people from learning new things, the development of personal and organizational growth mindset, and how leading by example proves to be extremely important for creating a learning organization.
Is allegiance to the status quo paralyzing your organization? Are you tired of settling for compliance? Do you crave committed and needed change?
This session will illuminate the hidden human drivers of resistance and how to neutralize them in order to mobilize people. In this session, attendees will learn about proven, practical tools to influence change in individuals and across organizations. Participants will come to fully understand that to effectively influence others to change we must let ourselves be changed…and that one of the best ways to change ourselves is to truly focus on others’ needs, challenges, and objectives. By the end of this session, participants will have been introduced to tools that will help them change their own perspectives and then invite others to change in ways that reduce resistance and inspire commitment rather than compliance.