Arty Starr

Stop Getting Crushed By Business Pressure

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.

Top 5 Reasons Why Improvement Efforts Fail

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.

Flow Theory & AI Architecture

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.

Learn Your Way to AWESOME.

How do we know if our improvements are actually making things better? If we refactor the code, did we make it better? If we skip the tests, are we making things worse? What does better really mean, anyway?

Once we start tracking metrics on the pain we experience during development, we've got a data-driven feedback loop to learn what actually works! Objective data enables us to do something we've never been able to do before in our industry: science.

The “Continuous Acceleration Toolkit” includes new metrics, new tools, and new science-based learning processes, designed to accelerate you and your team to a whole new level of productivity.

Reinventing Organizational Architecture

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.