Arty Starr

The Ultimate Metric

Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world. We try to explain our problems in terms of “technical debt”, but somehow the message seems to get lost in translation, and we drive our projects into the ground, over and over again.

What if we could detect the earliest indicators of a project going off the rails, and had data to convince management to take action? What if we could bridge this communication gap once and for all?

Data-Driven Retros in Practice

How does your team decide what's the most important problem to solve?

When we ask a question like “what's the biggest problem?“, it doesn't mean the biggest problems will come to mind. Instead, we're biased to think about what's bothered us most recently, annoyances, or pet peeves. It's really easy to spend tons of time working on improvements that make little difference.

But what if we had data that pointed us to the biggest problems across the team?

Anatomy of Culture

What makes software development complex isn't the code, it's the humans. The most effective way to improve our capabilities as an organization is to better understand ourselves.

In this session, we'll breakdown the dynamics of culture into explicit architecture models based on a synthesis of research that spans cognitive science, biology and philosophy. We'll discuss the nature of Identity, communication, relationships, leadership and human motivation by thinking about humans like code!

Putting Out Fires with Gasoline

Once upon a time, it was just me and my app – the days when all I had to know was “get data, put on screen.” Fast forward ten years later, and what the hell happened? The level of complexity that we deal with in modern software development is insane.

Are we really better off than we were 10 years ago, or have we just been putting out our fires with gasoline?