To kick off our first lunch & learn in 2025, we are going to review the 12 Agile Principles by looking at each principle and then hearing a pirate's take on it. Invite your team for a fun review of the Agile Principles.

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Over the last four years, the world has experienced an unprecedented shift to remote and hybrid work environments. This poses questions for those interested in high-performing teams, because physical distance from our teammates has created challenges to fostering and increasing psychological safety.

This talk presents original research on and explores the relationship of remote environments and psychological safety. Participants will learn about factors that impact safety in a remote environment and ways to promote safety in remote and hybrid teams, as well as implications for leadership, teamwork and generative work across all environments, in-person, hybrid and remote.

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In this session, Mark will give brief stories of five software projects and discuss lessons learned that apply to most software efforts. We will look at dangerous hidden pitfalls that defeated teams despite what looked like inevitable success and recount the hardwon victory of projects where teams delivered despite all odds.

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Jim Collins' book Great By Choice looks at what makes companies succeed in times of uncertainty and chaos. We are going to do a summary of the book, look at some of the key takeaways that apply to Agile teams, and give away a copy of the book--all in about 30 minutes.

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Featuring a newly finished Agile Cartoon that we'll be continuing our walk through all 12 Agile Principles,looking at Principle #7 - Working software is the primary measure of progress. Is this principle so obvious that it doesn't need to even be mentioned? We'll explore how teams sometimes let things other than working software become their primary measure of progress and talk about how to avoid that danger on your own team.

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Do you find your organization misses opportunities because of cross functional misunderstandings?

This workshop addresses the growing reliance on specialists and knowledge silos in organizations, which often leads to communication breakdowns and can be detrimental to successful strategies. By utilizing insights from the book "5th Discipline" and the technique of Causal Loop Diagramming, the workshop aims to preemptively solve these issues. It offers a deep dive into understanding complex adaptive systems within organizations, highlighting cause and effect patterns that improve the performance of typically separately managed systems.

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What is DevOps and how can it help a software team bring agility to the development process? In this session we are going to look at what DevOps means and why it is a valuable tool in helping Agile teams deliver working software that delights the users. We'll also look at some of the ways that organizations try to implement DevOps in a diluted way that cancels out the very things that make it a powerful tool.

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In a world where AI is transforming the way we work, Agile development remains a powerful methodology for managing complex, dynamic projects. However, working with AI introduces new challenges and opportunities that Agile teams must navigate. This talk will explore considerations for working with AI technology in an Agile team.

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In 1925, Bruce Ingram was given a mummified hand with the words "Cursed be he who moves my body. To him shall come fire, water, and pestilence." Soon after receiving this grim gift, a mysterious fire burned down his house. Ingram rebuilt his house only to have it destroyed by water in a flood. Coincidence? You be the judge, but it was enough for Ingram who is said to have disposed of the hand and was able to keep his house in one piece after that.

In this talk we are going to look at some of the happenings surrounding the opening of Egyptian tombs that caused many people to believe they were cursed. From there we'll look at some of the coincidences around testing and talk about testing beliefs that can lead to "The Curse of the Testing Pyramid." Our goal is to look carefully at what type of return on investment we hope to get from testing and use that to drive the way we create and shape our tests.

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Eric Lee, a Sr Solutions Architect with AWS, will be joining us to talk about AWS DeepRacer. It is a program that introduces participants to Machine Learning through training a model used for autonomous driving vehicles. This sessions covers how to complete the model training, how the inferencing within the vehicle works, and the different ways participants can try this out.

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