Agile on the Beach 2018
2018-07-12..2018-07-13
Falmouth, United Kingdom
[Agile on the Beach 2016, Agile on the Beach 2018, Agile on the Beach 2019, Agile on the Beach 2021, Agile on the Beach 2023, Agile on the Beach 2024, Agile on the Beach 2025]
who it's for
local software developers, apprentices and trainees, university programme leaders, community organisers, engineering managers and team leads, marketing and HR professionals, small business founders
topics
apprenticeship and internship programs; university-industry collaboration; regional tech ecosystem development; running a bespoke dev shop; continuous learning and XP practices; Kanban for creative teams; space software applications; innovation vouchers for startups; live streaming small conferences; freelance network and hiring pipelines
| title | author | length |
|---|---|---|
| Shirley Atkinson - Plymouth University | Shirley Atkinson | 04m |
University teams take students to Agile on the Beach to connect curricula to local employers and to show that Cornwall has a viable tech scene. Work includes… | ||
| Paul Massey - Bluefruit Software - Agile on the Beach Interview | Paul Massey | 02m |
Bluefruit Software describes 18 years of running a bespoke dev shop in Cornwall, claiming 18 years experience, founding member of Software Cornwall and a seat… | ||
| James - ThoughtWorks | James | 03m |
Conference grows from about 100 to 400 attendees yet keeps a close‑knit, mixed crowd where speakers and visitors mingle rather than retreat, and the content… | ||
| Jordan - Bluefruit Software | Jordan | 01m |
A practical account from a level four software developer apprentice about getting started: follows Software Cornwall courses, uses local networking to find… | ||
| Mike - Elsevier | Mike | 06m |
Describes a 25-year software career and running a small software engineering team that delivers customer value while doing some coaching to adopt XP practices… | ||
| James - AeroSpace Cornwall | James | 02m |
Cornwall is building a space cluster focused on software not rockets, claiming 80% of the space industry is software applications that drive satellite… | ||
| Francesca - Exeter University | Francesca | 05m |
A pilot program called Professional Pathways to Digital Innovation runs as a one‑week training followed by a one‑week internship, teaching coding, drones and… | ||
| Annette - Bluefruit | Annette | 03m |
Works as a marketing manager at Bluefruit in Redruth and tries to translate software HR and agile practices into a creative role, experimenting with a Kanban… | ||
| Garry Hunt - Digital Plymouth | Garry Hunt | 03m |
Digital Plymouth is a Community Interest Company for just over three years and challenges three common perceptions: the southwest is too remote, underpaid, and… | ||
| Natasha - Jetbrains | Natasha | 02m |
Cornwall-based tech events use live streaming to pull remote viewers into a two-day, small-conference format that deliberately prioritises tight networking… | ||
| Marcus and Paula - CFT Group | Marcus, Paula | 05m |
Company behind Safety Group started a software finance business in East Baltimore three years ago and has run a presence at Agile on the Beach for three years… | ||
| Sarah - Cornwall College | Sarah | 01m |
Cornwall College sponsors Agile on the Beach and partners with Software Cornwall to build a local software skills pipeline, running outreach in primary and… | ||
| Heather - Bluefruit | Heather | 04m |
Works as the final quality gate for client releases, writing a release report and testing embedded software on hardware rather than just cloud mocks. Says… | ||
| John, Laura and Jack - AOTB - July 2018 | John, Laura Williams, Jack | 02m |
Three students from Plymouth University describe a web-based app that connects students with industry mentors, built as a simple sign-up and email matching… | ||
| Lunchtime Live Stream | Tony Edwards | 20m |
A lunchtime Facebook live roundup from Agile on the Beach 2018 captures short on‑the‑spot interviews with Software Cornwall community members about sessions… | ||
| Highlights from sunny Cornwall. | Mark Smith | 04m |
450 people gather at Falmouth University Performance Centre for a concise highlights reel showing an opening evening with a pasty reception and quiz, two days… | ||
| Keynote | Gerd Gigerenzer | 54m |
Distinguishes risk (known states and probabilities) from true uncertainty and shows simple heuristics often beat complex models. A hiatus heuristic — mark a… | ||
| Keynote | Woody Zuill | 49m |
Claims that colocated teams at one keyboard produce far more useful, higher-quality work: experiments report roughly ten times the finished work and only three… | ||
| Closing Keynote | Gwen Diagram | 40m |
Argues that top-down carrot-and-stick management fails and coaching, mentoring and community work better; converts a miserable team doing manual regression… | ||
| A Selectio of Lightning Talks | Ruth Scholefield, Belinda Waldock, Jordan Barkway, Richard Keast, Michael Mintowt-Czyz, Steve Parks, Sam Armondi, Stani Potupchik | 41m |
Eight rapid case studies and how-tos: practical fixes for team flow like introducing a definition of ready and a strict definition of done after seeing stories… | ||
| A Gentle Introduction to Neural Networks | Tariq Rashid | 43m |
A clear, hands-on intro that builds a tiny neural net in 30–40 lines of Python, uses sigmoid activation, trains with gradient descent and a tunable learning… | ||
| TDD for Testers workshop | Sarah Usher | 52m |
Shows a small Python credit‑rating kata implemented with unit tests and slower Selenium UI tests, exercising rules like minimum 0, doctor/lawyer/accountant =>… | ||
| We don’t need another hero | Cheryl MacDonald | 30m |
Argues that removing single-person heroics requires changing flow, not just culture, and gives concrete results and tools: value stream mapping shows 9 days… | ||
| Continuous Delivery with Containers: The Good, Bad, & Ugly | Daniel Bryant | 47m |
Containers become the single binary pushed through CI/CD and must be tested, labeled and versioned; Docker images + Kubernetes orchestration change runtime… | ||
| Behaviour Driven Development: Embrace Uncertainty | Liz Keogh | 45m |
Argues BDD is about conversations using concrete examples, not tools, citing JBehave and Cucumber as historical tools but stressing examples like refunding a… | ||
| Basic Pathologies of Simple Systems | James Lyndsay | 46m |
Watch James Lyndsay's session from Agile On The Beach 2018 entitled 'Basic Pathologies of Simple Systems'.
In this session James explores very simple systems… | ||
| It’s XP Stupid! | Mike Harris | 46m |
Argues that teams claiming Agile but lacking XP practices produce legacy, fragile systems and unpredictable delivery, backing it with two project case studies… | ||
| Microservices are Not Worth the Trouble!!?? | James Birnie | 42m |
Argues that microservices often shift complexity rather than remove it, with benefits like independent releases and reduced handovers achievable by other… | ||
| You build it, you run it | Chris O'Dell | 44m |
Argues that developers owning production reduces feedback gaps by combining code ownership with monitoring and on‑call practices, backing that with concrete… | ||
| Resilience As A Continuous Delivery Enabler | Steve Smith | 49m |
Argues that optimizing for MTBF (robustness) traps organisations in long lead times and “risk management theatre,” citing government teams spending 4–6 weeks… | ||
| Using Neuroscience To Build High Performance Teams | Elaine Sullivan | 44m |
Summarises current neuroscience for teams with concrete claims and practical levers: a baby’s brain starts with 600 million neurons (about 250,000 nerve cells… | ||
| Kaizen To Karōshi – Burnout in agile teams... | John Clapham | 43m |
Links Kaizen to Karōshi with concrete cases: Japan’s Aokigahara suicide forest (official counts stop ~2011 at ~200 and rising), a 22‑year‑old at Goldman Sachs… | ||
| Wheelchair ramps for the mind: how we use Agile to treat ADHD | Sally Bridgewater, Francis Watters | 30m |
Shows Scrum turned into a home system: a corkboard with daily scrums, visible backlog, one-task-at-a-time sprint planning, repeat tasks, a pizza-box… | ||
| Agile Methods are Dangerous | Julian Holmes | 49m |
Argues that Agile methods deliver value but become harmful when applied dogmatically, giving concrete failure modes: giant prescriptive manuals (RUP shrunk… | ||
| Making the Jump from Design to Product | Becki Hyde | 35m |
Built an Apple Watch app in five weeks by a four‑person team and shipped on launch day, featured in the App Store and MacLife’s top 25; explains the balanced… | ||
| Adjusting UX Research for an Agile world | Amanda Lacey Stockwell | 40m |
Argues that research must be embedded and scheduled — aim for a recurring slot (example: every other Thursday) and put UX work in the same backlog as… | ||
| What to Build First: Defining MVP with Scenarios | Tatiana Kolesnikova, Arvid Torset | 44m |
Goal-first approach builds an MVP by listing business goals, writing solution-agnostic scenarios for target personas, and trimming features to whatever enables… | ||
| Back to Basics | Ruth Scholefield | 04m |
Only about 30% of teams have a working agreement, and many lack a definition of ready or a definition of done. A team repeatedly drags a ticket through three… | ||
| Agile: "I have never" Game | Belinda Waldock | 05m |
A quick live game uses quick slides and a stand-up count to expose common sabotage tactics from a leaked field guide — people still delay partial orders… | ||
| Agile Apprentice | Jordan Barkway | 04m |
Level 4 software developer apprentice starts at 16 and first codes outside Scratch in October 2015 on an Arduino C robot Mission to Mars project, then… | ||
| "An Epic Story" | Richard Keast | 05m |
Team discovers three different definitions for feature/epic/story and shows how that breaks an attempted API hookup between Bluefruit’s BDD amigos workflow and… | ||
| The UX of ‘the gents’ | Steve Parks | 06m |
Describes why ordinary gents design spreads disease: a government H5N1 planning project shows behavior-level risk, and roughly half of men skip washing… | ||
| How we are building the agile business | Sam Armondi | 05m |
Everest Media scales from 6 to 18 staff in two years and applies agile beyond engineering: physical boards for policies and strategy, cards for every task, and… | ||
| A Control Freak at the Conference | Stani Potupchik | 05m |
Argues that being a control freak becomes a tactic: applies as a speaker and runs workshops to create predictable opportunities, runs a meetup.com group after… | ||
| Trust | Michael Mintowt-Czyz | 04m |
Claim: trust is the foundational team currency that is given not earned, distinct from mere reliability. Evidence comes from interviews, reading and practical… | ||
| Project Discovery & Liftoff with Agile Chartering | Lynne Johnson, Susan Engel | 41m |
Describes a repeatable liftoff process called Agile Chartering that teams run in half a day to a day to avoid later misalignment by drafting a concise vision… | ||
| The Agile Guide to Life | Claire Eason-Bassett, Rachel Picken | 48m |
Agile practices move out of software into daily life with concrete results: a visible family Kanban board that outsources chores and flags WIP, a child-led… | ||
| Cracking the WIP | Victoria Morgan-Smith | 35m |
Compares single-piece flow to multitasking with a live marshmallow enactment and uses Little's Law plus Kanban principles to argue limiting WIP improves… | ||
| Re-imagining agile ceremonies | Lyndsay Prewer | 43m |
Agile ceremonies lose value when teams go through the motions and that degrades service quality; the remedy is careful, low-cost change. Practical moves used… | ||
| “Jobs to be Done” – workshop | Ozlem Yuce | 27m |
Jobs to be Done claims teams stop building unwanted features by mapping the higher purpose behind purchases and running 75‑minute switching interview style… | ||
| Risks and problems: a healthy approach | Steve Parks | 40m |
Argues that traditional risk registers fail and replaces them with a simple radar board with concentric circles that maps external vs internal risks and lets… | ||
| Backlogs – the good the bad and the ugly | Lynda Girvan | 43m |
Argues that backlogs work when goals are decomposed into smaller business goals so teams deliver end-to-end slices of value rather than technology tasks, uses… | ||
| Awesome Products : Inspiration or Iteration? | Eben Halford | 38m |
Argues that great products come from iterating on real user behavior rather than waiting for a lone epiphany, showing concrete pivots: a Palm‑Pilot payment… | ||
| Agile Adoption: Building Better Habits | Helen Lisowski | 58m |
Argues habit change hinges on cue–behavior–reward: cues are the easiest lever, rewards live in the limbic brain and resist logic, and willpower only gets teams… | ||
| Games for Feedback Workshop | Stanislava Potupchik, Antonio Cobo | 50m |
A hands-on workshop that treats feedback as a skill to rehearse: participants draw a product as a Monsters game, write an 8‑minute specification, swap papers… | ||
| Estimates or NoEstimates | Woody Zuill | 01h 45m |
Argues that time/effort estimates are guesses that often mislead and proposes slicing work into decoupled, valuable chunks instead. Demonstrates with stopwatch… | ||
| Agile, Digital & the new business paradigm/heuristics | Allan Kelly | 47m |
Claim: the digital revolution is driven by Moore’s Law plus cheap CPU cycles and therefore agile is the process that matches digital. Evidence: transistor… | ||
| Agility in HR Analytics bringing business benefit | Nicky Clement | 45m |
Unilever builds an HR analytics team of nine plus a global community of 60 to serve 160,000 employees, and applies data science, Power BI/Tableau, gamified… | ||
| Native Agile Psychology of Teams and Individuals | Valerie Andrianova | 34m |
Argues that agility comes from people not prescriptions, showing concrete practices at JetBrains: flat teams of ~800 with subsystem owners and shared product… | ||
| Eliminate waste..are we doing it all wrong? | Ilan Kirschenbaum | 41m |
Standish 2016 shows 30% of projects never complete and surviving projects overrun by ~190% while delivering 40–80% of scope, framing waste as a symptom not a… | ||
| eXtreme volunteering... | Marcin Bazydlo | 49m |
Leads an 18-person regional volunteer team that screens families, delivers 40 Noble Boxes and follows up with 80 visits over six months, turning donor groups… | ||
| Powerful Powerless Leader | Anna Obukhova | 45m |
Argues leadership maps to biology: leadership needs three measurable components — rank potential tied to dopamine receptors, primivity/prime activity (social… | ||
| Communicating Beyond The Agile Bubble | Judy Rees | 37m |
Demonstrates a specific conversational framework, Clean Language, with two repeatable questions and the simple repeat three words mirroring trick borrowed from… | ||
| The final frontier - how to engage business users in agile. | Richard Cowlings | 46m |
Argues that engaging business users needs time and small experiments rather than fast demo cycles, using two-day user trials and a two-month pilot with… | ||
| Structure Drives Behaviour... Minimum Viable Organisation | Jeremy Renwick | 46m |
Argues that traditional hierarchies reassert themselves and block agility, then describes implementing an adaptive organisation at Agilesphere (≈100 people… | ||
| Turning the ship or the lighthouse | Naveed Khawaja | 48m |
A pharmaceutical enterprise with a $200M IT change portfolio and 65,000 employees shifts approach: rather than training IT alone, it trains ~100 change agents… | ||
| The Business Case for Business Agility | Jenny Bailey, Ady Dike | 33m |
Consortium publishes a 28‑page white paper arguing business agility improves strategy, engagement and innovation and cites S&P firms outperforming by 14x over… | ||
| The Power of Questions – Workshop | Claire Ashcroft | 47m |
Claim: precise questions change thinking by refocusing overloaded attention. Uses the NLP Communication Model and a live non‑content coaching routine (the… | ||
| Building services for user needs at HM Land Registry | Lorna Jordan | 30m |
HM Land Registry pivots into user-centric digital services by picking a thin slice first: an update my address service as the alpha to reuse common components… | ||
| Journey of an Agile Coach… through the looking glass! | Georgina Hopkinson | 31m |
Hands-on workshop that teaches concrete empathy tools: a quick sweet vs savory role swap to force perspective-taking, a team self-assessment using fist-of-five… | ||
| When Trying to Figure Out What Is Worth Building Backfires | Stefan Wolpers | 32m |
A checklist of twelve concrete anti‑patterns that derail product discovery: a two‑axis model of discovery (vision → experiments) versus delivery (roadmap →… | ||
| Becoming Customer Focused – Learning to Listen | James Routledge | 34m |
Workshop gives concrete interview rules and rapid experiments: play a 90‑second game (ask about someone’s last holiday) to surface goals, pains and… | ||
| Software Cornwall - Meet Cornwall's Tech Community | Jordan Barkway, Tony Edwards | 24m |
Software Cornwall describes concrete outcomes: an education outreach program that wins Careers Enterprise Company provider of the year (West & Southwest)… | ||
| nothing matches | ||