Summary

The February 2025 Agile Yorkshire meetup offers an opportunity to explore innovative ideas and gain insights from expert speakers. The event will focus on practical strategies and real-world applications to improve agile practices, team collaboration, and overall effectiveness. This session is ideal for professionals seeking to enhance their skills, share knowledge, and connect with others in the agile community. Secure your place today to engage with like-minded individuals and advance your agile journey.

Programme

Silence Isn’t Golden: Psychological Safety and High Performing Teams
Imagine a tech team that makes few mistakes and quietly gets on with its work. Sounds great right? As a leader it’s one less headache perhaps, one less thing to need to worry about. But what if the lack of noise wasn’t actually a good sign? What if the lack of mistakes was actually because people were reluctant, or even afraid, to admit them? And the silence was a signal of people holding back, from asking questions, raising concerns or suggesting new ideas? Suddenly the picture is less rosy - we’re storing up the risk of more significant issues down the line, and worse, potentially wasting the potential for genuine high performance. In this talk we’ll explore the concept of psychological safety and how it’s the key underpinning for all high performing tech teams.
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Clement Pickering
Clement is an independent coach and consultant focused on helping tech leaders increase both their impact and personal fulfilment through compassionate, people-focused leadership. He combines a background in technology and consultancy with his ICF-accredited coaching practice to help individuals and organisations create the conditions for better communication, high-performing teams and inclusive, engaging company culture. Clement brings experience based on an extensive career starting in software engineering and from a wide range of leadership roles spanning dev, test, architecture, people operations and tech academies. He’s helped several highly successful organisations on rapid growth journeys from start-up to scale and worked as a consultant helping both private and public sector clients adopt modern approaches to software delivery and operations. Clement is known for his empathetic and warm style and strongly believes that organisations that put humanity first are the most successful.
From Quality Gatekeeper to Quality Coach: Empowering Agile Teams for Better Releases
Every Agile team Katja has worked with has, at one point or another, felt held back by their quality assurance process, and often rightly so. Too many quality assurance professionals have been trained to be gatekeepers, not enablers of safe releases. In this talk, Katja will explain how modern quality assurance professionals can shift from being bottlenecks to becoming quality coaches, finally breaking down silos and building a stronger engineering culture. She will present practical strategies for implementing this shift, such as pair testing, collaborative code reviews, and quality-focused workshops that will improve the entire team’s testing capabilities.
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Katja Obring
After 20 successful years in the software industry, she now teaches teams and individuals shift-left testing strategies and leveraging DevOps practices to achieve speedy delivery with predictable quality. Her tenure at companies such as Linden Lab (Second Life), Disney Online, Infinity Works, and Accenture has reinforced her belief that most technology challenges are fundamentally about people. Therefore, her focus is on developing processes and nurturing relationships that foster high-performing, contented teams. She emphasises that effective testing is a critical component of quality engineering that will speed up your delivery, not slow it down.

When & Where

Wed 05 February 2025 (06:00 PM - 08:30 PM)
Platform, New Station Street Leeds LS1 4JB
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Check with the street level reception but Agile Yorkshire events are normally on Floor 1, Rooms A&B