Adding a new member to a team can be tricky, but a good onboarding process can set the team up for long term success and have a big impact on the culture. In this talk we are going to look at some ways to do effective onboarding as well as some practices to avoid.

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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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These three words strike fear into the hearts of development teams everywhere, yet Testing in Production can significantly accelerate product delivery by unleashing improvements in quality, feedback loops & infrastructure cost.

In this session you’ll see demos of real world, ultra-lean delivery pipelines. You’ll also see code examples that can get you to production without all those pesky Dev, QA, Staging, UAT, PreProd & Performance environments.

When you walk away from this session, you’ll have the confidence & strategies to start your journey towards implementing a true Continuous Deployment pipeline that culminates in automated Production Testing.

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In this session we are going to walk through steps for improving a typical Agile team and look at a general outline of how an Agile coach might approach helping a team begin to make incremental and continuous improvement in their ability to deliver.

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While everyone likes the idea of radiating information instead of creating lots of reports, many teams aren’t working in a way that actually allows information to be radiated. Other teams could but haven’t found a good way to actually radiate the information. Both situations leave in you a position where creating reports can take a great deal of time and effort without producing a lot of value or even transparency. Any small step we can take to make information more transparent and more meaningful simply in the way we organize our work is a worthwhile investment. When teams organize their work around the goal of transparency and accountability, it reduces the dependence on costly reporting which frees more time for doing the actual work.

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In this online version of my popular interactive token flipping workshop, we are going to simulate some work, do some experiments to optimize the flow, and then talk about the principles we can apply to the way we deliver software. We'll also look at the story of how the namesake of Lowell Observatory "discovered" Martians building canals on Mars and talk about how that relates to the way we deliver software.

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Work-In-Progress limits are a powerful but unintuitive technique that can lead to rapid improvements in performance and processes. Teams using Ryan Latta's simplified approach often deliver work 4x to 10x faster. In this talk Ryan will cover what they are and a simplified approach to using them so you can see results in less than two weeks and common pitfalls.

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Retrospectives are an important part of most Agile teams driven by the principle of reflecting and improving the way the team works. Not all retrospectives achieve that goal. Some teams have trouble coming up with anything actionable and degrade into regularly scheduled sessions to complain about things outside their control. In this session, we are going to look at ways to help teams succeed in making retrospectives a useful positive tool that drives the self-improvement process.

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When most people see ChatGPT, they think the main use case for it is new write new code. In this talk, Jason Swett will show us that just because ChatGPT can write code doesn’t mean all the benefits of TDD are somehow invalidated. Tune in to see the way Jason does TDD with the assistance of ChatGPT.

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User stories drive the process of creating software. Good user stories help develop software efficiently, but poor user stories can lead to lower return on investment and even cancelled projects. We will look at a number of example user stories from robotic milking machines to online shoe stores to discover the key to creating stories that effectively represent complex work with simplicity.

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