There are two parts to speed in software product delivery:
- The human experience of delivery feeling slow or fast
- Delivery actually being slow or fast.
Feeling fast is about removing friction; delivering fast is about designing how you deliver. It's possible and necessary to address both of these aspects. It is soul-crushing when delivery feels slow; it is business-crushing when delivery is actually slow. This talk will explore this way of thinking about "high velocity" and specific examples of concepts and practices to try from experiences at ThoughtWorks and Spotify. For example, the friction introduced by something as simple as bad naming and the significant impact of a “divide and conquer” strategy versus “conquer and divide”.
The talk explores this way of thinking about "high velocity" and specific examples of concepts and practices to try from experiences at ThoughtWorks and Spotify. For example, the friction introduced by something as simple as bad naming and the significant impact of a “divide and conquer” strategy versus “conquer and divide”.
Change and innovation: This talk is intended to change both how attendees think about how they work and specific practices at both the detailed day-to-day and broader coordination level.
Expert-Practitioner Driven: The speaker is both involved in these types of activities as well as represents a recognized company in the Agile space (Spotify)
Originality: There is a Medium post this talk is expanding on: https://medium.com/@jchyip/what-does-speed-mean-in-software-product-delivery-9bc95c1c36c3.
Jason Yip, Agile Coach @Spotify, previously Principal Consultant @ThoughtWorks
Have you ever had a gut feeling a project is about to go off course but no way to validate (or invalidate) that feeling? Has your team ever been burned by an inaccurate estimate or unreasonable expectation? Have you ever wished you could peer a bit into the future?
Navigating the uncertainty of knowledge work is often difficult and uncomfortable. During this session, you’ll learn new ways to visualize your team’s reliability and variability of delivery using the data you already collect. Instead of relying entirely on your gut or laboring over estimates, you’ll learn to predict outcomes and describe their likelihood. While this session won’t teach you to eliminate uncertainty or allow you to see the future, it will provide you with tools to explore and chart a reasonable course through the inherent ambiguity of knowledge work.
Cat Swetel, Agile Methods Coach & Advocate for Woman in Tech
Is your service architecture and engineering velocity constrained by organizational concerns? Does it seem impossible to give priority to key initiatives regardless of intent? Are engineers switching tasks so often that they are just treading water? Are critical projects endlessly backlogged? Has staffing up pushed the limits of your team structure? Navigating through challenges like these can be daunting and solutions fraught with uncertainty. How do you know what, where, when to change. And whatever the answer is today it will most certainly vary over time. Effective organizations evolve, at key inflection points, to support critical business and technical goals. There is not only a strong relationship between organizations and the software they produce (Conway’s Law) but many organizational solutions can be derived from analogs in the technical realm. In other words, we can treat organizational improvement as a refactoring exercise. Over the last 20 years Netflix engineering has proven time and again an ability to adapt and grow, resulting in undisputed dominance over the global internet tv market. In this talk we’ll use Netflix as a case study to illustrate how specific strategies, framed as technical analogs, have been employed to maximize engineering agility, velocity, and impact. These powerful, yet simple strategies and solutions provide a useful blueprint for organizational success.
Josh Evans, Engineering Leader at Large (formerly Director of Operations Engineering @Netflix)
Happiness means more than being happy while you are working independently. It also means being happy with your team, your boss, your company. Yet, too often, teams gloss over the importance of team communication, only to find it’s their achilles heel of morale. In fact, effective team communication is the foundation upon which individual happiness is built. This talk takes you through an easy 5 step plan to improve communication on your team, and to create a team that people truly want to be a part of. The best part is that the plan is actionable so you'll be able to take these tactics back to your team immediately.
Most teams are familiar with estimates using relative sizing, or story points based on the Fibonacci series, or t-shirt sizes. Most teams either agonize over the details of every estimate, hoping to be as accurate as possible, or rush through planning knowing the result will be off no matter the effort.
There's a better way, though; one that doesn't involve marathon meetings or half-hearted attempts; a way that can provide accurate plans automatically. Monte Carlo simulations are based on previous performance and sound statistical techniques. Teams no longer need to estimate individual stories - simply building a backlog is enough to forecast delivery dates. In order to build a strong backlog, we'll need to come up with an accurate number of stories up front. Using user story mapping, we can be confident we have the entire picture.
In this talk, we'll walk through how to use Monte Carlo simulations to remove the guesswork from planning, story mapping to discover the whole story up front, and review an example of how to automate a useful forecast.
Plans are worthless, but planning is everything.
Conal Scanlon, Product Management, Lean/Agile Software Development @FlatironHealth
