It's important to create a culture that inspires and infuses your development team with great ideas. But ideas are not action. Ideas in and of themselves are nothing more than unrefined, random thoughts, and worse, most ideas never get implemented. Even when you do follow through on some of the best ideas, they can cause great harm without proper planning and execution. While creativity is an asset, unbridled creativity where disparate ideas abound outside a sound decision-making and execution framework will create distraction and chaos. In this session, Melissa Petak will show you how to transform your organization into a value-creating machine. Using Forbes 15 elements of spurring innovation, Melissa will show you how to balance your innovation portfolio, establish a competitive advantage, and drive business engagement. You'll learn how to create a corporate culture that turns ideas into innovation.

Agile teams ship frequently and change things all the time--by design. In the middle of all this, agile teams need to make sure that their core user flows like sign-in, shopping carts and search features still work on every new build. Traditional testing is a poor fit for agile teams. AI changes all that with the ability to create automated verification for new user flows, and automatically maintain those verification steps even when the application changes. AI changes the game so that agile teams can move faster, with less risk or worry about breaking the app. Jason Arbon walks you through real world running examples of AI-based UI flow verification, and shares which machine learning approaches work the best. If your agile team struggles with testing and worries about quality, see how AI is changing the game and freeing up teams to move faster, with higher quality.

Continuous improvement is the goal of agile teams. But what does it look like when we create a continuous improvement strategy beyond our agile teams and bring it to the company level? Working at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith saw the benefits of its fantastic continuous improvement culture. When he joined Avvo as its new CTO, his primary goal was to help Avvo create that culture for itself. In this session, Kevin will show what Avvo has done to build a foundation for a continuous improvement culture. He’ll explore the frameworks used to create highly engaged teams and share the organizational and process models that support and empower individuals and groups to own and drive improvements to make themselves more efficient and the company a better place to work. You'll leave with a template to help you build a continuous improvement culture in your company.

Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you guide your team toward improved performance. He’ll explore the notions of QA ownership, test planning, test automation, and test case development and execution in agile contexts, as well as look at different risk-based, exploratory, and other testing practices.