agile

Agile teams ship frequently and change things all the time--by design. In the middle of all this, agile teams need to make sure that their core user flows like sign-in, shopping carts and search features still work on every new build. Traditional testing is a poor fit for agile teams. AI changes all that with the ability to create automated verification for new user flows, and automatically maintain those verification steps even when the application changes. AI changes the game so that agile teams can move faster, with less risk or worry about breaking the app. Jason Arbon walks you through real world running examples of AI-based UI flow verification, and shares which machine learning approaches work the best. If your agile team struggles with testing and worries about quality, see how AI is changing the game and freeing up teams to move faster, with higher quality.

Continuous improvement is the goal of agile teams. But what does it look like when we create a continuous improvement strategy beyond our agile teams and bring it to the company level? Working at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith saw the benefits of its fantastic continuous improvement culture. When he joined Avvo as its new CTO, his primary goal was to help Avvo create that culture for itself. In this session, Kevin will show what Avvo has done to build a foundation for a continuous improvement culture. He’ll explore the frameworks used to create highly engaged teams and share the organizational and process models that support and empower individuals and groups to own and drive improvements to make themselves more efficient and the company a better place to work. You'll leave with a template to help you build a continuous improvement culture in your company.

Agile coach Ryan Lockard interviewed fourteen of the seventeen authors of the Agile Manifesto for a special podcast project. Originally the idea was to capture the intent of authors and to chronicle the story of the Agile Manifesto, but what emerged became much more. This session covers the real story behind the rise and fall of agile in industry and what we can do to reclaim it. Ryan will dive into the history behind the Agile Manifesto and its signatories, what precipitated the manifesto's creation, and what the vision for it was. From that story emerges the rise of an industry, and to some degree, that industry stepped on the initial ideals of the manifesto. Direct from the stories of the authors, in their own words, is the path to reclaim the mindset that set millions of professionals on their agile journeys.

Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore—actually, they haven’t been for quite a while. Agile's collaborative, iterative, incremental approaches to work have caused it to go mainstream. But can we apply team-based agile straight out of the box in a nonsoftware context? Although most of the principles and patterns apply, sometimes the practices and frameworks need modification for a particular context. Mike Cottmeyer will explore two case studies of agile journeys: an international hotel chain going through a major rebranding initiative, and a well-known fast food restaurant looking to optimize its kitchen production capacity. These are two totally different companies in two totally different industries, both trying to use agile to solve their problems. We’ll look at the challenges each faced, what they had in common, and the patterns, tools, and techniques they are using.