JHB: DevOps Culture -Understanding SW engineering -Applying the Spine Model

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· Welcome (start 17h00)

· Lightning talk (start 17h05) - 10min - Kevin Trethewey

· Session 1 (start 17h20) - 20 min - Jacques de Vos

· Session 2 (start 17h45) - 40min - Rouan Wilsenach

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Title: Applying the Spine Model on the path to software development mastery

Facilitator: Kevin Trethewey

In < 10 minutes I will explain the essence of the Spine Model (http://spinemodel.info).

The model has many applications. For devs it promises a chance to get past dogma to deeper understanding and more meaningful conversations.

Instead of a prescriptive framework the model is a "thinking path" to understand the true meaning of what you are doing when building software.

Using the Spine Model to walk these paths together with your teammates, managers and customers promises deeper insight, better relationships and more meaningful work.

Starting out as a dev and moving into organisational coaching and consulting, Kevin has had the opportunity to work in and observe projects, teams and organisations in different environments, and seen vastly differing levels of success amongst them. Through experience he’s grown an understanding of what is required for a healthy work system and gained deep experience in bringing these things into organisations.

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Title: Understanding software engineering with equations

Facilitator: Jacques de Vos

Software engineering is hard!

In his work as developer coach, the speaker has noticed a few traps that most software teams step into that affect their delivery speed, predictability and quality.

In order to escape these traps, teams and managers need to understand the consequences of their decisions - they need to understand the dynamics of software engineering. This is not an easy task and we need solid help. We need maths!

In this talk the speaker will explore a few equations that describe dynamics in software engineering, which can help us see the forest from the trees. The speaker will also cover some modern practices - and show how software engineers can get back control of their delivery.

The problems addressed include:
• Deadlocked by Dependencies: Inability to deliver due to waiting on something
• Code-Degeneration: Code changes become more difficult over time
• Congestion: Slow, unpredictable delivery even though we are very busy
• Firefighting: We know what we should do, but we don’t have time to improve

With more than 12 years of experience in leading development teams on cutting-edge software systems, Jacques is driven to build systems, teams and processes that not only address immediate project needs, but also enable clients to meet their strategic goals. Most of his experience has been in developing crucial front-end applications, specifically in the financial industries: online trading, online banking, insurance and branch banking.

Besides running tech product startups, lately his focus has been on coaching software engineering teams and businesses of all shapes and sizes on how to excel at building the right products, well. This touches on a wide variety of areas like engineering practices, software architecture approach, team culture and processes.

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Title: DevOps Culture

Facilitator: Rouan Wilsenach

Even with the best tools, DevOps is just a buzzword if you don't have the right culture. Join Rouan as he explores what DevOps culture looks like and how it supports rapid, scalable production releases. He'll talk about collaboration and how important shared responsibility is to enable it. He'll cover the cultural shifts that need to happen within an organisation and he'll provide some insight into the culture of successful teams. More importantly, he'll explore the phenomenon that DevOps has become. Why does it seem to encompass so much more than better releases and stable systems? Why is the DevOps Movement gaining so much traction?

Rouan Wilsenach (@rouanw) is a software developer at ThoughtWorks. He has built software for companies in the financial services, health, media and education sectors. He has worked as a consultant and coach, helping teams learn and adopt good engineering practices and has helped businesses with organisation-wide agile adoption. He enjoys automating infrastructure and deployments and has experience showing organisations how to leverage these techniques to make their release processes simpler and more reliable.

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