Arty Starr

The Ultimate Metric

Tuesday, 8:30 AM EST

Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world. We try to explain our problems in terms of “technical debt”, but somehow the message seems to get lost in translation, and we drive our projects into the ground, over and over again.

What if we could detect the earliest indicators of a project going off the rails, and had data to convince management to take action? What if we could bridge this communication gap once and for all?

In this session, we'll focus on a key paradigm shift for how we can measure the human factors in software development, and translate the “friction” we experience into explicit risk models for project decision-making.

Data-Driven Retros in Practice

Tuesday, 10:30 AM EST

How does your team decide what's the most important problem to solve?

When we ask a question like “what's the biggest problem?“, it doesn't mean the biggest problems will come to mind. Instead, we're biased to think about what's bothered us most recently, annoyances, or pet peeves. It's really easy to spend tons of time working on improvements that make little difference.

But what if we had data that pointed us to the biggest problems across the team?

In this session, we'll dig into the data from a 1-month case study tracking Idea Flow Metrics, and discuss the patterns of friction during development, and how to identify the biggest opportunities for improvement with data.

Anatomy of Culture

Tuesday, 1:30 PM EST

What makes software development complex isn't the code, it's the humans. The most effective way to improve our capabilities as an organization is to better understand ourselves.

In this session, we'll breakdown the dynamics of culture into explicit architecture models based on a synthesis of research that spans cognitive science, biology and philosophy. We'll discuss the nature of Identity, communication, relationships, leadership and human motivation by thinking about humans like code!

If you want to better understand the crazy humans around you, you won't want to miss this talk!

Putting Out Fires with Gasoline

Tuesday, 8:30 PM EST

Once upon a time, it was just me and my app – the days when all I had to know was “get data, put on screen.” Fast forward ten years later, and what the hell happened? The level of complexity that we deal with in modern software development is insane.

Are we really better off than we were 10 years ago, or have we just been putting out our fires with gasoline?

In this session, we'll turn the projector off, and focus on a deep-dive discussion, contrasting the world of 10 years ago versus today. Rather than generalizations and hand-waiving about the golden promises of automation and magic frameworks, we're going to question everything and anchor our discussions in concrete experience.

Looking back across your career in software development, how has the developer experience changed?

First, we'll dig into the biggest causes of friction in software development, and how our solutions have created new problems. Then we'll focus on distilling strategies for overcoming these challenges, and how we can take our teams, and our industry in a better direction.