Christmas Lightning Talks Competition 2017

It may have been just a few short hours before the latest episode of Star Wars opened, but on Wednesday 13th December 2017 in a galaxy not so far far away, a Yorkshire crowd amassed. They witnessed a small band of rebels take to the stage to complete lightning talks, faster than the Millennium Falcon could do the kessel run.

In our opening episode, we met our story’s hero. Sally Bridgewater had a love story worthy of the silver screen, telling us how she has helped her partner deal with ADHD with the simplicity of the Scrum framework.

Next, Gary McAdam told of MVPs from the dark side and teams force choked by scope negotiation. He showed us the path to redemption through the build, measure, learn cycle.

James Scanlan rounded off our prequel trilogy with an ancient battle between Enterprise Architecture and Agile. James sought to bring balance to the force through both disciplines. Eva Barabas told of how user needs surround us and bind us together. Complete was her team’s training as they emerged with t-shaped skills.

Jedi Master Andy Butcher had an enlightened approach to Agile architecture, warning us that upfront design leads to silos, silos lead to ivory towers and ivory towers lead to suffering. The force was with Bernard Jaurequi and his common Agile smells within companies the size of empires. Fear of committing code, knowledge silos and immature CD approaches were a few examples of his wisdom.

Rescuing a princess rewards more money than you can imagine, although Tom Hudson could imagine quite a bit. His tale of large numbers illustrated the relative speeds of processors, caches, solid state drives and internet searches.

Difficult to see the future is, but not for prophet Geoff Bowden. While we may be taken over by droids, Geoff believes there will still be jobs for us Jawas. Episode 9 saw our saga unlocked by Brian Teeman. In a galaxy full of different languages, it was the Queen's English that could finally teach Master Yoda how to form a sentence.

Finally, Sith Lord Andy Burgin directed the voting procedure and all that was left was our very own throne room ceremony, with our heroes collecting their medals, except for poor Chewbacca.