Arty Starr

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

9:00 AM MDT

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.

Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

10:45 AM MDT

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.

Flow Theory & AI Architecture

1:30 PM MDT

I.flow() AI is an emotional intelligence AI that learns to respond in real-time to the pain of humans, for example, developers that are having a hard time. The I.flow() AI Platform is still in the early stages of mapping theory to concrete implementation, so in this talk we'll breakdown architecture strategy, pain metrics, pair programming buddy, supply chain flows, and the underpinning of Flow theory.

Flow is an old concept, adopted into the software world by mapping Flow from Lean manufacturing. When we map a metaphor between two different domains, our brain locks onto the isomorphisms between contexts, and “Flow” becomes stickies flowing on a whiteboard, or features flowing out to customers. It becomes difficult to see Flow any other way.

What if our object-oriented blinders led to an object-oriented notion of Flow, and there's a totally different way to look at the system? Flow, at it's core, is a paradigm shift, a metaphorical lens, that helps us see, understand, and predict the behavior of any Flow System. Better predictive models, enables AI automation like we've never had before. It's about time we started applying AI to our own problems.

Learn Your Way to AWESOME.

3:15 PM MDT

How do we turn our company into an AWESOME company? Our projects get crushed over and over again by bad decisions caused by relentless business pressure, a lack of visibility, and huge communication problems.

Fixing our software problems isn't an engineering problem, it's an organizational problem. It means the people of the business world and the engineering world need to learn how to communicate, learn together, and work together to optimize the whole.

So how do we get from Point A to Point AWESOME? We learn.

Idea Flow Learning Framework is a data-driven improvement framework specifically designed to get managers and developers all pulling the same direction by combining the power of Idea Flow with the power of science. By visualizing our pain, we create a data-driven feedback loop for systematically improving productivity on our software projects.

In this talk we'll cover:

• A quick summary of how to measure the friction in a developer's “Idea Flow”
• The scientific method and how we can use science to support data-driven software mastery
• An overview of Idea Flow Learning Framework from bottom to top (from the weeds of development to the investment level of the company)

Learn how to measure the pain across the organization, run experiments to learn what works, and distill your knowledge into patterns and principles. If you want to start learning and improving faster than ever before, you won't want to miss this talk.