Keep Austin Agile 2019

Members of the Software Engineering community are beginning to explore the exciting capabilities of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to remove even more of the mundane and manual tasks from our jobs. Engineering organizations that have already instilled a culture of automation with their prior adoption of Agile, Test Automation, and DevOps practices, are the best suited to begin the exploration of the AI-inspired solutions to the Engineering SDLC processes.

The next generation of Automation in Engineering SDLC comes to us in the form of AI-inspired approaches: Analytics, Machine Learning, and Natural Language Processing. Geoff refers to this as Cognitive Automation, which offers the promise of the automation of tasks that up until now could only be performed by humans.

Engineering practitioners going down the path of Cognitive Automation should proceed with caution due to the combination of excessive hype and unprecedented complexities as compared to prior stages of automation.

Join Geoff as he provides a framework for organizations to use when considering the application of AI to tasks within their SDLC. The approach, developed while leading the Dell EMC Test AI initiatives, provides Engineering teams with a means of countering the optimistic and sometimes unrealistic expectations of their leaders and subject matter experts with a pragmatic, yet goal-oriented approach.

Does your team bring the goods but feel bad? Shouldn't teamwork be supportive, collaborative, and friendly? Reality check: even high performing teams will eventually have conflict and disagreement. But when a team turns toxic, good results won't last. There are four sources of team toxins - and your ability to understand and neutralize these combustible agents help you achieve a happy, challenging, and empowering work life - and a great scrum team.

In this session, Leland and Heather will introduce you to four toxins that often poison teams and organizations. They'll talk about how to identify them, the root cause of the toxic behavior, and some common antidotes that can help you manage the toxins successfully, so you have a healthy team environment that is fun, supportive, and collaborative.

Customers are not paying for your product, they are hiring your product and are paying for positive outcomes and impacts. Agile was marketed with promise of faster value delivery to customers but, as it went mainstream, many organizations focused only on mastering different elements of Agile frameworks and progress is being measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts leaving customer success sideways.

Taking teams to the next level of satisfying customers through the continuous delivery of valuable product requires an alignment between the product engineering team and their customers. Join Kalpesh as he shows, through storytelling and practical techniques, how connecting teams to customers can move them from "feature factory" to collaborative partners in driving customer success.

In the six decades since its first usage, the term Knowledge Worker has become synonymous with Software Engineers. With an almost singular emphasis on STEM skills and an excused lack of people skills, the reputation of the successful software engineer evolved into that of the genius in a cubicle. Two factors have caused us to re-examine the relative importance of hard and soft skills in Software Engineering. First, the very nature of how we produce software changed dramatically with the advent of Agile practices compelling us to develop software…socially. Second, Automation and AI are reshaping the tasks which can be performed by machines putting even more emphasis on soft skills. This confluence doesn't diminish the demand for Engineers. According to Geoff Colvin, tomorrow’s most valuable engineers will not be geniuses in cubicles; rather, they’ll be those who can also build relationships and collaborate. Colvin calls these Relationship Workers.
 
So how do we as test engineers thrive in an environment where we were never taught, nor encouraged to develop, these skills? Join Geoff as he goes beyond the "whys" and explores the "hows" of relationship building such as establishing a "How can I help?" mindset and other tips and tricks that he's gathered from the research of contemporaries such as Simon Sinek, Geoff Colvin, and Rob Lambert and his own personal and professional experiences in his 35+ years in software engineering.

Bob Payne has worked for 20 years in the Agile Industrial complex and as a community we have focused way too much on the build side of the house and not enough on the business side. That is increasingly changing to a model of Strategic Execution and focusing on the value first and then optimizing delivery with Agile.

Many organizations are adopting End 2 End Value Stream Teams (E2E VSTs) and redesigning their organization's structure, funding, and governance to support these value delivery engines. These organizations are still a minority, but the rate of adoption of this model is at a tipping point. This change requires a discussion of what is value and constantly prioritizing value first. To do this, many people are aligning E2E VSTs with product lines or lines of business. To truly go E2E, many of them are embedding business functions with delivery teams. These are functions such as business operations, marketing, HR, legal, planning, funding, and, of course, the folks that define what the right thing to build is. By cutting across all those silos to create delivery teams, we allow things to go from "Idea to Implementation" or "Concept to Cash" very quickly.