The fourth installment in the Improve series, Improve: Productivity is a one-day virtual event that will look at ways organizations can help their teams become more productive by providing tools and training resources that help individuals and teams gain skills and efficiencies..
Topics include:
Resolving Technical Debt with Productivity and Performance
Crack the Mind Code: Outsmart Lifetrap Déjà Vu
Beyond the AI Copilot – Developer Productivity in the Post-GPT World
Weaponized Developer Productivity - How Good Intentions Lead to Bad Outcomes
And more!
Tatyana Slavova
Life coach, Venture Capital Investment Atento Capital
KEYNOTE: Crack the Mind Code:
Outsmart Lifetrap Déjà Vu
"Why don't I get what I want in my life? What is holding me back from achieving peak performance in life and business?" In a world where perception shapes reality, we invite you on a transformative journey of empowerment. You will gain insight into the invisible forces known as mental lifetraps. These lifetraps create a gap between the person you are and the one you aspire to be. This keynote offers a pathway to a transformative software download, ushering in an upgraded life experience. By changing our thinking, we inevitably change the reality around us.
Key Takeaways:
• Empowerment through Perception: Immerse yourself in the profound role perception plays in shaping reality.
• Unveiling Mental Lifetraps: Decode intricate cognitive patterns that skew our perception, and understand how these patterns shape beliefs and actions.
• Transformative Strategies: Gain actionable insights to dismantle lifetraps and pave the way for personal and professional growth.
Mike Morris
CEO and Co-founder
Torc
Resolving Technical Debt with Productivity and Performance
Productivity metrics and performance management of development teams and software processes have a direct impact on enterprise technical debt and improving DevOps. Understanding the capabilities of resources (FT, nearshore, hybrid, etc.) and how they affect the SDLC; the role AI plays in coding, productivity and the developer experience; and avoiding common productivity and performance management pitfalls are the keys to achieving business value and protecting critical assets.
Chris Harrold
Developer Experience Program Director
Ansys
Beyond the AI Copilot – Developer Productivity in the Post-GPT world
As we move into a world dominated by generative assistants for all our tasks, one of the knee-jerk reactions is to expect AI to augment or even replace developers outright. While there are many great use cases for generative AI, relying on it to be the only way to augment developers is a recipe for mediocrity at best and failure at worst. In this talk we will cover the need for more, not less, enablement and support for your developers, the building trend against generative AI and the legal issues it can create, and how much more your developers need good old-fashioned skills and experience more than AI to succeed.
As we move into a world dominated by generative assistants for all our tasks, one of the knee-jerk reactions is to expect AI to augment or even replace developers outright. While there are many great use cases for generative AI, relying on it to be the only way to augment developers is a recipe for mediocrity at best and failure at worst.
In this talk we will cover the need for more, not less, enablement and support for your developers, the building trend against generative AI and the legal issues it can create, and how much more your developers need good old-fashioned skills and experience more than AI to succeed.
Andrew Boyagi
Senior Developer Advocate
Atlassian
Developer Productivity - How Good Intentions Lead to Bad Outcomes
Platform engineering is the latest rage, with companies actively investing in developer platforms to improve productivity. However, many organizations fall short when it comes to delivering a positive developer experience, resulting in decreased productivity and an unhappy workforce. The true path to success lies in prioritizing developer joy through a positive developer experience. Studies have consistently shown that highly satisfied workers are the most productive, and organizations that prioritize satisfaction significantly outperform those that don't. A developer platform created with the right mindset and features helps achieve this outcome. Andrew Boyagi will explore the key drivers of a superior developer experience, the essential features of a platform to achieve this goal, the mindset required to cultivate developer joy, and how these result in improved developer productivity.
Baruch Sadogursky
Principal Developer, Productivity Engineering Advocate
Gradle
Improving the Developer Experience with Developer Productivity Engineering
In this session, Baruch Sadogursky will introduce the emerging practice of Developer Productivity Engineering (DPE) and discuss how it can increase developer productivity by improving the developer experience. DPE views developer productivity as a technology challenge that can be solved by engineering solutions, rather than a people problem addressable by management techniques. As such, it relies on acceleration technologies and failure analytics to address the toil, frustrations, and process bottlenecks that most negatively impact developers. DPE aims to achieve faster feedback cycles and provide actionable data so that developers can spend more time doing what they love—innovating and writing great code. After this discussion, audiences will walk away with a better understanding of the benefits of adopting a DPE approach—like increased cost savings and delivering higher quality software, faster—as well as how teams can leverage it to maximize developer productivity.
Yishai Beeri
CTO
LinearB
Successfully Establishing an Engineering Metrics Program - Without Killing Dev Team Culture
As engineering leaders, we constantly hear from our managers or CEO that they need faster delivery and greater developer productivity. However, removing friction and bottlenecks is a near-impossible feat without data and visibility into engineering delivery processes. In this talk, we'll introduce the fundamentals of building a truly effective engineering metrics program focused on the health, efficiency, and business alignment of your teams––emphasizing ensuring that developer productivity doesn't come at the expense of engineering happiness and developer experience.
This talk will cover aspects like visibility and how to use your SDLC data to find inefficiency and improve business alignment, as well as how to get started with benchmarking to understand your metrics better and build a better path forward with software delivery management. You'll leave this session with a practical strategy and step-by-step guidance for setting tangible, data-driven improvement goals to drive business success and predictable software delivery.
Bryan Finster
Value Stream Architect
Defense Unicorns
Fundamental Problems to be Solved to Achieve Continuous Delivery
The book "Accelerate" states: “Continuous delivery improves both delivery performance and quality, and also helps improve culture and reduce burnout and deployment pain.” Those of us who work this way know this is true. We also know that CD is a powerful tool for organizational improvement. Neither of these will be true if we aren’t using a real CD workflow. In this talk, we will cover the fundamental problems to be solved to achieve CD and how working to solve those problems acts as forcing functions for finding and removing the waste and pain that so many organizations are suffering with daily. Everyone in the value stream should live better lives, and solving these problems will go a long way to getting us there.
Manish Gupta
CMO
SonarSource
The Key to Unlocking Developer Productivity is Cleaner Code
More than 83% of software developers report suffering from burnout, according to a 2022 study published in SD Times. While workload and the demand for faster products are obvious drivers, deeper review reveals that developers spend up to 42% of their time rewriting bad code, a critical factor in slowing down productivity – both in the development process and for future updates. Emerging tools – like generative AI – promise relief in the way of code velocity and volume, theoretically helping to lessen this sentiment of burnout by freeing up 20-30% of developers’ time, according to McKinsey. However, if developers don’t address the underlying issues that result in bad code being put into production in the first place, increased production will mean one thing: more code to fix.
The most impactful way to improve the state of code today – and as a result developer productivity – is to start embracing the concept of ‘secure by design’ at the start of the development process. Embracing the attributes that result in clean code, code that is consistent, intentional, adaptable, and responsible, produces software that is secure, maintainable, reliable, and accessible, plus more. It also positions businesses to embrace policy efforts around ‘Secure by Design’ in the U.S. and the ‘EU Cyber Resilience Act’ while improving productivity.
This session will explore the pressure on today’s developers (existing and emerging), provide a framework for how to take advantage of AI while mitigating risk, and greatly reducing the amount of rework on their plates.
Arthur Hicken
Chief Evangelist
Parasoft
Elevating Productivity & Quality Assurance With Generative AI
With the launch of tools like ChatGPT and CoPilot, technology leaders spanning multiple industries recognize the impact that traditional and Generative AI (GenAI) technologies can have on productivity and process optimization. In the realm of software testing, both technologies can assist application teams in enhancing their automated testing procedures. Join this session to learn how GenAI can boost team productivity and lead to comprehensively tested, superior-quality software that's delivered on time.
We’ll discuss:
• How GenAI and AI technologies are being applied across the software testing space.
• Key benefits of GenAI and its impact on testing productivity.
• Should you incorporate GenAI into your testing practice?
Erica Cuttitta
VP, Software Engineering
Pluralsight
The Connection Between Productivity and Human-centered Leadership
Leading engineers to be more productive doesn’t start with burn-down charts and weekly ticket counts. Using data points from productivity tools and JIRA boards won’t reveal the big picture of why some teams succeed with a screaming output and others struggle to deliver. In this talk, we’ll explore the connection between productivity and human-centered leadership. We’ll examine how productivity improvements can be gained with small, weekly interactions that over time, help you identify bottlenecks, personal roadblocks and team workflow challenges.
Adjusting minor and seemingly unimportant things in the way you lead, can have a big impact on creating the high performing and productive team you need to achieve your goals.
Natale Vinto
Developer Advocate Lead
Red Hat
The Internal Developer Platform and Golden Paths: Scaffolding for Cloud-native Development
In recent years, modern application development has extended far beyond developers merely dealing with the source code of an application. Many complex aspects and critical tasks related to the build, test, and deployment cycles have progressively shifted more towards development teams. However, larger organizations often suffer noticeable productivity losses and frequently face the challenge of regaining control over the resulting 'wild growth.'
In this session Natale Vinto explains the advantages of implementing an internal developer platform (IDP) and how developer teams can benefit from consuming 'golden paths' for their daily work. The IDP is built by a platform team to enable developer self-service and ultimately promote a great developer experience. It consists of many different technologies and tools, integrated in a way that reduces cognitive load on developers without abstracting away context and underlying technologies.
At the end of session, you'll have a clearer view on how 'golden paths' provide a robust foundation for cloud-native development with out-of-the-box support for immediate guidance to components, resources, and relevant documentation. Your team can swiftly deploy the right tools and components to start work promptly, and we'll showcase real-world use cases where 'golden paths' are put into action.