Arty Starr

Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

Tuesday, 8:30 AM EST

This is my story of lessons learned on how to stop the crushing effects of business pressure… I was team lead with full control of our green-field project. After a year, we had continuous delivery, a beautiful clean code base, and worked directly with our customers to design the features. Then our company split in two, we were moved under different management, and I watched my project get crushed.

As a consultant, I saw the same pattern of relentless business pressure everywhere, driving one project after another into the ground. I made it my mission to help the development teams solve this problem. This is my story of lessons learned on how to transform an organization from the bottom up. I'll show you how to lead the way.

The crushing business pressure is caused by a broken feedback loop that's baked into the organization's design. In this presentation, I'll show you how to fix the broken feedback loop. Learn how to:

• Gather evidence of developer productivity loss
• Identify the key organizational changes required for success
• Make the case to management for improvement
• Partner with your manager for long-term success

If the system is broken, we need to fix the system. You can change the system by making the decision to lead.

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

Tuesday, 10:30 AM EST

This is my story of lessons learned on why improvement efforts fail… I had a great team. We were disciplined about best practices and spent tons of time on improvements. Then I watched my team slam into a brick wall. We brought down production three times in a row, then couldn’t ship again for a year.

Despite our best efforts with CI, unit testing, design reviews, and code reviews, we lost our ability to understand the system. We thought our problems were caused by technical debt building up in the code base, but we were wrong. We failed to improve, because we didn’t solve the right problems. Eventually, we turned our project around, but with a lot of tough lessons along the way.

In this talk, we'll go through a deep-dive case study that starts with project failure, then revisit all the mistakes we made over a 3 year journey to turn the project around. We'll discuss bad assumptions, strategies that failed, ideas that changed, techniques and tools that changed, and how we eventually learned our way to victory.

After reviewing each mistake, we'll have a group discussion about the underlying reasons, so you can avoid these mistakes on your own project.

Discussion: Managing Dependencies Across Teams

Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST

Software development is hard enough with one team, but coordinating work across multiple teams can be especially challenging. The more brains involved, the more complex the dependencies, the easier it is to make mistakes.

What are the biggest pains you see out in the wild? What types of strategies have you found to work? Come share your stories and lessons learned.

In this group discussion, we'll dig into one story at a time, explore the nuts & bolts, then distill lessons learned and improvement ideas.

If you love a good war story, or have your own story to share, you won't want to miss this session!

Reinventing Organizational Architecture

Tuesday, 3:15 PM EST

Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world – the clash of top-down control, money, and economics, versus art, freedom, working with our friends, and bringing awesome creations to life.

Overcoming these challenges in our industry requires a huge paradigm shift – rather than building organizations as money-making machines with top-down control, our organizations need to become thinking, feeling, interconnected social organisms, where our humanity isn't boiled down to a few numbers.

How do we shift the paradigm of the organization, to bridge these two worlds together? The short answer – with the help of software.

By measuring the friction in a developer's Flow, we have a data-driven feedback loop for personal improvement. What if we measure Flow across the team? Across team dependencies? Across the organization?

What would it take to build an organizational operating system, that uses our past experience and lessons learned as the foundation for an intelligent hive mind, that helps everyone in the organization make better decisions? What if we codified our organizational ideals into the business accounting rules of the software, then sold it as the “the next big thing” in the industry?

At the end of the day, business is a game. If we take responsibility for making up the rules, we can redefine the game we wish to play. In this session, we'll discuss a potential future for our industry, where we design the organizational operating system that runs the world.

Discussion: Generalized AI and the Impact on our Future

Wednesday, 5:00 PM EST

Flow AI is an emotional intelligence AI platform based on I.flow() theoretical brain models, and is in the very early stages of being developed as a co-operative community effort. Given the inevitable evolution toward generalized AI, what does this mean for our future?

In this group discussion, we'll talk about the implications of the next major scientific revolution in AI, the similarities and differences from scifi movies, the challenges, the risks, and how advancements in AI will change our world.

What type of future do we want? What will it take to build that future? Is there a path to get us from where we are to where we want to be?