Arty Starr

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

8:30 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

10:30 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.

I.flow() Philosophy: Hacking your life with AI

1:00 PM MDT

In this session, we'll use I.flow() AI as a metaphorical lens to explore the world of philosophy.
Each one of us is on a journey to discover who we are, why we're here, and what it all means. I.flow() Emotional Intelligence AI evolved as a result of deep self-reflection, in the search for an authentic self, and the courage to live an authentic life.

“I.choose() therefore I.am()”

This session is a collection of life reflections and lessons learned, codified into diagrams and code abstractions using I.flow() AI. We'll start with the assumption that life is a video game, and humans are the AI. We'll break down models for human relationships, different ways of being in the world, and discuss the meaning of the game of life.

If you are someone that delights in a great philosophical discussion over dinner, you won't want to miss this talk.

Keynote: Theory of Emotional Intelligence

7:30 PM MDT

With the advancement of AI, the paradigm shift of blockchain, the media war for the Internet, and escalating emotion, it's time to explore brand new territory – using software as a metaphor to construct a functional model of the human mind. Imagine your brain's logic is written in code. You fire up the debugger, set a breakpoint in the “Self” class, and inspect your brain's internal state. What are the state variables? What does the code look like? How do we fix the bugs?

I.flow() is a theory of consciousness that models motivation behavior of humans using software as a metaphor, because… why not? From the origin of gut feel reasoning, to the feedback loops that drive you, we'll breakdown the functional architecture that makes the universe tick.

I.flow() is the underpinning theory behind MetaOS, the generalized AI platform being pioneered by Open Mastery. In an age where everything is changing faster than ever, and the magic of sci-fi novels is coming to life – we're faced with some of the most difficult questions about what it means to be human:

Who am I? What do I live for? What is the purpose of life?

“I.choose() therefore I.am()”

Flow Theory & AI Architecture

9:00 AM 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.

Reinventing Organizational Architecture

11:00 AM MDT

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

9:00 AM MDT

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?

Discussion: Test Automation Disasters and Lessons Learned

10:45 AM MDT

How much time have you spent automating tests, then discovered the tests were mostly useless, brittle, time-consuming, and hard to understand? How many times have you deleted everything, started over, and came with a substantially better strategy for next time?

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

One of the best ways to evolve our brain's Anti Pain gut feel system is through sharing disaster experiences, reflecting on alternatives, and distilling patterns and lessons learned. As a bonus, venting your frustrations is cathartic!

Discussion: Managing Dependencies Across Teams

1:30 PM MDT

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!