Presentation: TweetWhy Agile doesn't scale, and what you can do about it

Agile doesn't scale. There, I said it. Actually people have been telling me that for over ten years, and I've just refused to believe them, but they were right. Does that mean you can't deliver large-scale programmes using agile methods? Not at all. But to scale you need something else, something substantively different, something the Agile Manifesto and the existing team-scale agile methods don't even have an opinion about.

I have seen a handful of successful large-scale deliveries across multiple agile teams, multiple locations and multipou programmes start to look uncomfortably like those of traditional programmes, and involve phrases like delivery assurance, governance and portfolio management. They just approach them differently.

What made them work? The challenge is getting large numbers of people to think in the same direction. Shared guiding principles, a clear vision and a common understanding enable what I call contextual consistency. I believe this one lever is the single greatest enabler of technology delivery at scale, and is at the heart of the thing we call empowerment. In this talk I will explain why.

Presentation: TweetPower use of programming tools part 1

Dan North: "Awk" sed Vi, "Ar" sed Ed

Thus begins an old, and sadly lost in the mists of Usenet, love story about Vi and Ed (who becomes her "ex"), told entirely in Unix commands. I had no idea when I started learning these arcane (guess how the "dd" command got its name) and cryptic (what about "grep"?) Unix commands how incredibly useful they would become over the next two decades. If your primary OS is Linux or OSX on the desktop, and maybe iOS or Android on the move, you'll find this 40-something year joke ("Unix" itself was a bad pun) has managed to embed itself into every facet of your technological life.

Being comfortable at a shell prompt and having a healthy working knowledge of Unix commands and regular expressions will give you a whole new level of capability. In this fun talk I'll introduce a few commands and shell tricks you should have in your back pocket, and show you how to start taking control of your operating system. If you ask nicely I'll even tell you about the production system I wrote using Makefiles.

Martin Westergaard Lassen: Typeless writing in a strong typed world

Java developers always tend to declare types themselves. Even when using other APIs where types already have been declared. Do we really need to do this redundant work over and over again?
This is an induction to my typeless Java coding lifestyle.

Russell Miles: The Pamphlet of Geb (Abridged), Part 2: Geb for Automation

Synopsis: In this lightning talk, Russ Miles will share his love of Geb as he shows how simple it is to use Geb's little-understood ability to automate tasks.

Workshop: Faster Software Delivery: from months to minutes Tweet

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You plan and deliver in sprints, you have an automated build, you practise TDD religiously and rotate pairs like clockwork. In fact you couldn’t be any more agile. So is this as good as it gets? Some teams deliver in days rather than months, and iterate in hours rather than weeks. These teams don’t just break all the rules, they make up new ones of their own.

On this course you will learn unusual and counter-intuitive techniques for software delivery and understand the principles behind them. Using a mixture of discussion, instruction and exploration you will start to think differently about agile development, automation and team dynamics. By exploring several architecture and development strategies you will learn how you and your teams can produce and deploy software faster than they thought possible. You’ll never look at TDD the same way again, not to mention copying-and-pasting code.

What you will learn

• The three ages of a product lifecycle, and why understanding them helps you go faster
• How design and architecture are at the heart of faster delivery
• How to do just enough planning and estimation
• Why up-front thinking is valuable and how to keep it focused
• How to critically assess agile and non-agile practices

Syllabus

• Unpacking the Agile hype
• Techniques for faster development
• Rethinking analysis
• Rethinking planning and estimation
• The Build and Deployment ecosystem
• The value of Operations
• Building effective teams

Praise for Faster Software Delivery

• “one of the best courses I have ever attended, if not the best!”
• “really interesting with good discussions and lots of relevant information”
• “the mind map approach instead of slides made the course flow in a neat and agile way”