The field of software engineering has always favored people who can learn new things quickly. As the fundamental underlying principles and tools of programming change, especially with the rapid growth of artificial intelligence, what continues to matter most are the foundational ways of reasoning about programs. In this talk, we’ll share how, at the University of British Columbia, we teach a timeless approach to understanding software.

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What does a cult that clears runways in the forest and wears coconuts like headphones have to do with Agile? You’ll find out in this talk that is a refresher of the foundation of Agile with a focus on the why behind all the different practices used by teams. No tales about pirates this time, but we’ve got stories about toothpaste tubes assembly lines, a manager who offered to buy a rocket for our team, and a modern real-life version of the emperor who had no clothes fairy tale.

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In this 45 minute session, we are going to discuss ways to create a sense of urgency that will help create a healthly working environment for your team. We'll also look at pitfalls -- things to avoid that create unhealthy urgency and drive counterproductive behavior.

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With the aid of maps a wander through the history of technology development, what it means, where we are going and what should we learn from the past.

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You've probably heard the term MVP for minimal viable product. In this session we are going to take 45 minutes and do an ultra focused lunch & learn driven mostly by interactive polls to look at what MVP means to different people and some of the advantages and pitfalls of using an MVP approach on your project.

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I’ve worked with a number of incredible Scrum Masters over the years. For this talk I asked several what they feel is the most important secret behind their success. This session covers the things they identified as well as my observations about some of the things that made them successful.

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Flow Engineering has helped many businesses save months, millions, and morale in a few hours. Its rapid, collaborative mapping helps you define value, vision, direction, and alignment for your teams. Then we use it tackle your most critical bottleneck. I'll show you how to set a target, understand needs and workflow constraints, and connect opportunities to action.

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For some, life just doesn’t seem fair. They compete accessing the same science and technology, subject to the same rules and regulations, chasing the same opportunities, yet there’s those few who somehow seem to get more value out the door, better easier and quicker, with appreciation showering over all their stakeholders. How’s that happen? The very best are just “smarter at getting smarter” having build their “social circuitry” of processes and procedures, not to force control and conformance but to make it way easier to solve hard problems faster, delivering solutions that are wildly appreciated. How’s that happen? It’s with repeatable reliable approaches for making problem solving easier to do, problems easier to solve and problems more obvious early, before they have chance to become big.

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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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The typical recommendation is that role of software leaders is just empowering teams and removing roadblocks. While this can work in organizations where small teams can work independently, I believe it is just wrong for large complex organizations. In these cases, if the organization is going to deliver the results the business deserves leaders are going to have to play a much more active and adaptive role.

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