QCon empowers software development by facilitating the spread of knowledge and innovation in the developer community. A practitioner-driven conference, QCon is designed for technical team leads, architects, engineering directors, and project managers who influence innovation in their teams.

I will give both a keynote and a regular talk at QCon Beijing:

Keynote: The Need for Continuous Improvement in Agile

For decades organizations are looking for the best way to do software development. Many methods have been explored and frameworks have been published to guide organizations on how to do it. Although our industry as a whole has improved, many organizations struggle. Delivering working software still seems to be hard.

Agile takes a different approach to becoming the best in software development by stating “We are uncovering better ways of developing software by doing it and helping others do it”. Agile never promised to be silver bullet, it’s not a one size fits all approach and doesn’t have all the answers.

We hear from organizations that have become successful with agile, but there are also agile transformations that are not bringing the expected results. Better software development is not about implementing the the best framework or method throughout the organization to have everybody working in in the same way. What matters is that people, teams and organizations become flexible and able to adapt to the needs and situation at hand.

Continuous improvement is what makes agile work. It’s at the heart of agile. In his keynote Ben Linders will show why continuous improvement matters in agile and what you can do to help your organization to really become agile.

Track: Valuable Agile Retrospectives

The agile manifesto proposes that a “team reflects on how to become more effective”. Agile retrospectives can be used to inspect and adapt the way of working. They help teams to deploy agile practices in an effective way and to continuously learn and improve themselves.

The retrospective facilitator (often the scrum master) should have a toolbox of retrospective exercises, and be able to pick the most effective one.

This talk explains the “what” and “why” of retrospectives and the business value and benefits that they can bring. Examples will be given of exercises that you can use to facilitate retrospectives, supported with advice for introducing and improving retrospectives. It is based on the successful book Getting Value out of Agile Retrospectives (also available in Chinese).

Retrospectives are a great way for teams to improve their way of working, to become more agile and lean. Getting actions out of a retrospective that are doable, and getting them done helps teams to improve continuously and deliver more value to their customers.