On the 22nd of February I was lucky enough to attend Unicom’s Showcase North event. The event was a witches cauldron of DevOps, Testing and Agile with three tracks in the afternoon.

I Chaired! the agile track which I was very lucky too given the quality of the speakers on show. Kevin Rutherford gave for me a very revealing “talkshop” on agile principles. The 12 principles behind the manifesto, analysing the words in great detail, what do these things really mean? Maybe one for a retrospective?

Jon Fulton talked Metrics and F1, two of my favourite subjects, I will defiantly be trying to track flow efficiency in the teams I am working with.

I don’t think I had appreciated what a skill it is to link seamlessly into each talk.

Matt Skelton gave a great talk on splitting monoliths a problem I am sure lots of you have come across. I liked the fracture plains idea, and code forensics using the code Maat and code city tools to visualise your monolith may give new insights. (I value visualisation) I have already set some enthusiastic and capable people off to visualise their monoliths. My sketch note of his talk is below:

I talked about Gamification, I outlined how I turned a boring ineffective environments scrum into a well attended meet driving behaviour change across 20-25 teams using badges to represent behaviours. Cross pollination of ideas and community formation and games for learning. Blog post coming soon.

One of the things I really enjoy about conferences is learning you are not alone out there. There are lots of similar people, teams and organisations out there who have similar problems and we should come together more. Community is important, @clempickering said recently paraphrasing that delivery pressure comes and goes but community is constant, you never hear anyone say I can’t help out with this delivery because I have community pressures.

One community I am particularly proud of and inspired by is the Testing community in Leeds UK. The continued support and attendance for the Leeds Testing Atelier a free punk independent one day conference is amazing. Looking forward to seeing you all on the 9th of May.