TechFest 2024

Written in 2001, the Agile Manifesto has become a successful framework in software development, quickly spreading from the US to the rest of the world. The manifesto was authored by 17 individuals, 14 of whom are American, and all of whom are male from Western countries.

However, most software development teams today are far more diverse than the original authors, both in terms of gender and culture. Additionally, many companies operate globally, with teams collaborating across borders, cultures, and languages.

This talk aims to provide tools for Agile practitioners to adapt their implementation to a broader cultural context. Using Erin Meyer’s “Culture Map” framework, we will explore how cultural differences related to feedback, persuasion, and hierarchy impact team dynamics and suggest tools to make Agile practices more inclusive.

I would present a SDLC tool that we developed in-house. It's a CLI toolset that can reset a database schema and data in order to have a known set of data in a SQL Server database.

It uses a tool to generate data from SQL Server into "INSERT" scripts. It then uses them, along with the schema scripts from SQL Server, to build a database from scratch.

 In my opinion, the most interesting part is how we were able to build the dependency tree. This tree allows us to reset data between E2E tests using the CLI. It deletes and re-inserts the specified tables and all ancestor tables (for better performance).

This would be a PowerPoint led presentation consisting of storytelling, backed behind two decades of executive operations experience, data and applicable process improvement models.

Generative AI has been one of the biggest positive disruptors within the past 2 years. There are claims that it is the “new electricity”, electricity having radically transformed society 100 years ago, moving us to an increasingly automatable world no longer significantly dependent on human labor.

In many ways, this is true. Instead of laboriously designing slides for our technical work that may fall short of visualization and storytelling best practices, generative AI will empower us to design everything at a high standard within minutes. Instead of wondering whether the presentations we’ve created are “good”, AI can help us immediately gather feedback and make iterative improvements.

Generative AI is therefore more than the new electricity. It is the new “fire” of our age, empowering us to realize our most archaic and deep-seated human impulse of all: to share knowledge and tell great stories. In this session you will learn how to:
- Reliably prompt AI to efficiently create your slides and enable better data-driven decision making
- Avoid the most common mistakes made when presenting technical information
 - Personalize your presentation to your audience’s needs for maximum organizational impact

Few teams ever start out great. They have skill imbalances, power dynamics, lack resources or time, and different personalities. Growing outstanding teams takes time but, more importantly, regular continuous improvement activities. One of the most useful and powerful of these activities is the Retrospective. It doesn't matter what industry you're in or what your team makeup looks like; if you've got a group of humans working together towards a shared outcome - you should be running retrospectives with them. Taking teams from Bad to Good, or Good to Great, can happen but it will not happen accidentally. In this session you will learn the skills necessary avoid the classic Retro Rut. Instead, you can craft the right retro for you team and avoid any of the pitfalls that damage the team's improvement.