Event summary: Agile Alliance's Deliver:Agile 2018

We are back to reality after a week full of learnings, new contacts, and experiences during the Agile Alliance's Deliver:Agile 2018 conference, in Austin, Tx. SoftwareDevTools was a proud sponsor of this event.

The Agile Alliance puts together this tech-oriented conference to showcase and discuss the more technical topics around Agile software development. Marketed as a conference for Hands-on development, in-person collaboration & actionable feedback it featured great speakers (more on that in a moment), and revolved around 5 major topics:

• Development practices and craftsmanship.
• DevOps.
• UX
• Cloud Computing.
• Interaction skills.

There is a wealth of new Agile software development tools and techniques, new patterns, and practices. This conference was about learning how best to support and evolve your Agile engineering practices in light of these new capabilities and technologies.

We were very happy to see a very diverse crowd. We met a lot of people in different roles. Agile is now a multi-disciplinary field. Developers and QA, of course, but also UX Designers, Infrastructure Engineers, Data Scientists, Cloud Specialists and more.

We did get to see a couple of unicorns:

During the sessions, it was all about hands-on learning and discussions. Sessions avoided theorizing, and instead, the speakers shared about teams' real-life experiences.

Talking about the speakers, we were very happy to see some of the great Agile collaboration experts. Some of them are longtime friends of the SoftwareDevTools team, but never really had the chance to meet before. Like Diana Larsen. We've had an interview with Diana Larsen before, but never really met her in person:

A bunch of experts shared different topics with all of the attendees. It proved to be very hard to be in all of the talks, but here's a brief recap of some of the interesting talks we got the chance to attend:

Fadi Stephan, principal consultant at Excella and a long time Agile thought leader and speaker based in DC. He delivered a great talk about UX in an Agile World. This talk was submitted and chosen amongst the attendees. It just goes to show the importance of UX in the Agile world lately.

AgileForAll's Rob Myers whose talk was about his experience with "Black Swan User Stories" (A term borrowed from Nassim Nicholas Taleb), referring to those few stories that have a tremendous impact in the project. The talk was properly named "True tales of Anti-Fragile code" (Also from Nassim).

Sidney Bee, Mobile product owner for Liberty Mutual took the stage to talk about the next challenge in UX: Building conversational interfaces for chatbots. We discussed several related topics and she shared essential design components for various use cases of bots. She's actually very knowledgeable on this new topic.

Another interesting talk was hosted by the famous GeePaw Hill. Mike talked about Optimizing for Collaboration. He makes an interesting point that we'll definitely follow-up on: "The scarce resource in the geek trade is ideas. Fortunately, collaboration provides a nearly infinite source". If you find him in an event near-by, don't miss him, make sure to follow him on twitter.

A great talk about collaboration was Heidi Helfand's. She's a known speaker and author on the topic of Dynamic reteaming. It's a great topic that helps almost every fast-growing organization. She works at Procore, and her findings apply to the software industry and more. Make sure to catch her conference or buy her book, we're sure you'll love it. Here's her website: http://www.heidihelfand.com/dynamic-reteaming/

I was personally thrilled to meet her and share a few quick thoughts:

Doguhan Oluca, another expert from Excella. He shared how to build a Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment pipeline using Docker, Heroku & CircleCI. An interesting talk for tech and DevOps Agilistas.

Definitely, the best-dressed speakers of the event were Bryan Beecham & Bill Wake, with their "Three-Ring design circus" talk and full circus attire. It was a great moment during the conference. They juggled various refactoring and test-driven development challenges, explaining what they do and taking questions from the audience as they perform.

Check them out. What do you think?

Allison Pollard & Michael Jesse, both from Improving Enterprises hosted a workshop to work better in teams. The goal of the interactive workshop was to learn how to listen to a team and coach them to become greater through the words they use. A great workshop about team collaboration. Looking good!

Another great talk was hosted by the Agile Alliance's Director Declan Whelan. This workshop explored the capabilities of Elixir and showed how it can be used to build highly scalable performant fault-tolerant systems. A great topic forms a seasoned speaker.

We know not everyone gets to be at the event. So that's why we are sharing a brief summary of interesting talks. We hope you enjoyed it and find it useful. If you'd like to know more about the program, you can check it out here: https://www.agilealliance.org/deliver-agile-2018/program/ You'll also find each speaker's twitter so you can reach out.

As usual, SoftwareDevTools sharing experiences and knowledge with the Agile community.
Check out our previous event's experiences, like #StrideCon, Atlassian Summit, Connect Week and some other events we've attended.

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