Dec
08
2015
2015 Christmas Lightning Talks Competition
Tue (06:30 PM - 09:00 PM)
Line up
David Turner
The One Bad Thing about BDD
Geoff Bowden
Sketchnoting Agile (one doodle at a time)
Kiran Singh
A Flying Experience
Karen Logan Smith
Winning with Agile
Steve Trapps
Being in an Awesome Agile Team
Michael Crane
TDD 101
Susana Lobao
Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
Matthew Skelton
How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm
Jon Fulton
Metric Driven Kaizen
Summary
The Agile Yorkshire Xmas Lightning Talks Competition is one of the highlights of the calendar. This year we again have nine fantastic speakers, many of whom have never spoken at Agile Yorkshire before. It's a super fun evening, plus a celebration of geekiness and oratory rolled into one. If your a public speaking aspirant within our community this is the place to start. The lightning talks format is simple. Contestants will speak for ten minutes and not a second more while a clock counts down for everyone to see. The topic can be anything geeky that our audience will like and everyone will be able to vote for their favourite speakers. At the end we'll have a grand prize giving to award the winner and runners up and then retire to the Midnight Bell for the speakers to unwind and sink an Xmas drink to kick off the festive season. This event has produced some amazing speakers in the past and this year the response has again been dazzling. In order to get through the evening on time we need to stick to a strict schedule and we'll be pulling out the noise makers left over from last year for the audience to "gong off" any over runners.
Programme
The One Bad Thing about BDD
BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) says to write executable specs that you can share with your customer. This idea is almost entirely brilliant, except for one thing. I'll discuss how to fix that one thing and thereby show how to make BDD into an entirely brilliant idea.
David Turner
David has spent the last 6 years at Tracsis plc working with a fantastic team of developers and doing his best to keep management and other obstructions out of their way. Sent half-mad by the experience of trying to retrofit an agile approach to a 40-year-old system written in a Lovecraftian combination of FORTRAN, Borland C++ 5 and C# 2, his team now writes production systems in Haskell.
Sketchnoting Agile (one doodle at a time)
In this talk we take a lightening tour through what sketchnoting is about, who can do it and how it can be used by a scrum master to promote interactions within the team. The talk will show sketchnoting examples and resources for learning and some of the presenter's own scribbles. If you think you can't draw, after seeing his attempts, your own won't look so bad.
Geoff Bowden
Geoff Bowden is a developer and scrum master working for Egton Digital making websites, intranets and mobile apps for corporate and NHS customers. After spending 20 years as a Waterfallian developer and planner he ran out of fingers and toes on which to count his experience and transitioned to agile methods. Now an Agile advocate he goes to meetings to talk to and learn from fellow Agilites. When not in the office writing human readable code and talking about SCRUM he can be found at home being used as a climbing frame by his young children or practicing his new found hobby of doodling.
A Flying Experience
A tiny glimpse of how flying works on a light aircraft, from my experience while undergoing training in the Indian Air Force in the 1990s.
Winning with Agile
A quick talk about how Quick Wins Agile allows a great to approach to improving existing design. Learn when, why and how to carry out rapid enhancements that can hugely affect user experience and journey effectiveness and how you and your team can have fun doing it.
Karen Logan Smith
A Lead Digital Analyst at HSBC, I specialise in creating and enhancing online banking journeys. I have 15 years experience of digital technology development, project management and analysis and have owned digital change within huge strategic programmes and rapid tactical projects and lived to tell the tale.
Being in an Awesome Agile Team
My part of working in one of the best Agile Teams I've ever worked in. I'll discuss the highs and lows, what worked well and what didn't and why it ultimately failed.
TDD 101
A brief introduction to Test Driven Development (TDD), an essential practice in Agile development that helps developers write high-quality, maintainable code. We’ll cover the fundamental steps of TDD: writing tests before the code, running tests, and refactoring code based on the results.
Resistance when Transitioning From Waterfall to Agile Scrum
My talk is about resistance among developers and QA teams when transitioning from Waterfall to Agile Scrum and some key actions to bring the levels down. The beginning of any transition starts with a major announcement …followed by the Agile Coach. How do Dev and QA teams feel about it? Why do they resist? How do we reduce the levels of resistance? The key is to understand Agile Scrum as a cultural change and stop thinking about our resistors as problems to overcome.
Susana Lobao
I have worked in the retail industry for many years (hey, who says retail is not fun????) in various roles all related to data and BI. Recently, I moved to another retailer and became a Technical Delivery Manager. I was given the opportunity to actively be involved with the transformation from Waterfall to Agile Scrum. It is a tough journey full of challenges but one full of rewards.
How to Bridge the Dev-DBA chasm
Forget the gap between Dev and Ops - the gap between Devs and DBAs is a chasm. Here are some observations from the field about the causes of the rift and some ideas about how to close the gap (and even whether the gap is worth closing). Oh, and I'm writing a book about it.
Metric Driven Kaizen
Metrics are not good or evil, but can be used for both. At Sky Bet we've been working on developing a Kaizen culture where metrics become a tool for the team's continuous improvement, not targets or weapons to be used against them.
Jon Fulton
Jon is a Scrum and Kanban coach type person who helps teams find their own path to Agility using a blend of methods. Jon has spent the last year at Sky Bet, part of the team helping to scale Agile using the Spotify model, and has recently been stealing the best bits from other scaling methods like SAFe. Jon likes exploring product development flow and the economics behind Lean and Agile.
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