Lightning talks

Sip your morning coffee while listening to five-minute lightning talks based on day's theme.

9:20 Sami Lempinen
9:26 Janne Pitkänen
9:31 Eveliina Vuolli
9:37 Arto Santala
9:43 Ilmari Kontulainen

Petteri Hiisilä & Juha Röyskö: Case London Olympics: From a rough idea to release in 9 months

Last Winter and Spring, Nokia Siemens Networks researched and developed a new real-time mobile radio network monitoring solution to be used for London Olympics by a major U.K. telecom operator.

Immovable deadline called for early and swift UX iterations with light-weight prototypes, continuous collaboration with real end users, and brisk backlog and expectation management, to find an optimal set of features for 1st and 2nd releases - both to be deployed well before the Games.

In this presentation we show and tell how we did it, how it turned out, what worked great, what we now regret, and discuss how these lessons could be applied in other time-boxed projects.

Sam Aaron: HyperAgile — Empowering creativity within software development processes

Highly interactive programming languages provide developers with a remarkable ability to empower their creativity through a unique and highly responsive development process. This can be seen to broadly similar to the differences between the waterfall model and more recent agile approaches yet at an different timescale - that of moments vs minutes, rather than days vs weeks. Programming with an approach which allows one moment to flow frictionlessly to another without having to wait for compile cycles gives the developer a unique HyperAgile workflow which will be examined in detail in this talk.

Vasco Duarte: Democracy at Work — How Agile is revolutionizing the work place!

The world is changing, crisis, businesses die, insecurity. Our workplace is changing fast as a consequence. We are asked to change constantly but given no method to do it. We need to have a framework that helps us adapt to the new environment. Agile provides us with a set of values and principles that can help us adapt, but what can we learn from Agile regarding work management? We need to look at the underlying principles of adaptation, how it works and it is already revolutionizing the work place. In this talk we set the road-map for that change and describe a method to get it done.

Karri-Pekka Laakso: A seven year marriage of Agile and UI

In 2005, when I started as the first functionality architect (or UI designer) at Reaktor, we had a lot of ideas but no experience of how to make UI design and agile methods work together in harmony. Today, tens of projects later, we have a set of established practises which seem to work. And of course we made all kinds of mistakes on the way which you could and should avoid.

I'll be talking about how we do things today and what we've learned so far and - since we believe in constant change - what we think we'll do in the future.

Markus Hjort: Building the Right Thing: Developer Point-of-View

Business Model Canvas, MVP, Pivot, XLM, continuous deployment. Many terms have been coined by the Lean Startup movement. Most of these practices radically change the way businesses do their job - making them more agile as a result. The idea is to make sure we are building the right thing. But what do I care as as a developer? I've noticed that on a daily basis, many "building the right thing" decisions are made when the team members play the implementation of the design by ear. Many interesting discoveries are often stumbled upon during this process. All of these small decisions have a huge impact on our capability to build and launch new products.

In this talk I will explain why it is important for all the developers to have the "right" mindset. After all they are key people in making sure the ship is sailing in the correct direction at all times. All the small actions taken during the course are counted. I will share real cases, propose solutions and present pitfalls to avoid.

Marko Taipale: From a concept to viable business — How do we know if we are building the right thing?

In this session Marko will explain the essential building blocks of any kind of business and how one should go about validating the business.

Open space

One of the best parts of any conference is the coffee breaks. You can meet people interested in similar things and discuss exactly what is important for you, not for the speaker on the stage.

Open-space session is a slightly-structured way for getting an extended and productive coffee break-like discussions. Everybody can start discussion on a topic, everybody can join or leave the discussion at any moment.

The Fundamental "Rules" of the sessions that happen during OpenSpace conferences are:

• Whoever shows up is the right group
• Whatever happens is the only thing that could have
• Whenever it starts is the right time
• When it's over, it's over.
• Use the 'Law of two feet.' If you feel that you are not contributing or benefiting from a presentation, please feel free to move on to something else.

Ralf Kruse: A journey from an idea to a ready to use backlog

A product backlog should reflect our current view on how we want to build our product. Product Backlogs look deceptively simple, but the visible Product Backlog is in fact just the top of the iceberg. The true value lies below the surface and comes out of the communication while creating and working with it. In most cases people start building a backlog using their old mindset, and miss opportunities to identify better ways of building the product. The problem is that the knowhow you need to adopt new ways of working can only partially be gleaned from books: you really have to experience it on your own.

In this hands-on session we will focus on the creation of a product backlog from scratch, to build a backlog collaboratively including its surrounding context of the product. In this session we will:

• start at zero even before defining the idea by discovering the context first,
• nail down our idea to something that can give us direction,

Join me on the journey from defining the product idea to a backlog, to give you an impression on the unseen parts of the iceberg. Like the captain of the Titanic... prepare to be surprised!

Horace Dediu: Developer as Artist

How to understand the creative process if you have a degree in Engineering. Steve Jobs once joked that Engineers think Hollywood writers do their work by drinking beer and telling jokes (and that Hollywood thinks that building software is about writing a check). In reality creating software and creating art are more similar than they are different. The phenomenon of mass market software in the form of entertainment has blurred the lines even further. Making software has become much more like making movies than making machines. There are lessons to be learned from designers, marketers, managers and performers that all developers should learn.

Anssi Lehtelä: Magile versus Stiff Testing

I’ll talk about how I’ve found My agile way of testing, by working in rather stiff environments, and also contrast the methods a bit to the more traditional testing practices (which I also used to follow in the beginning of my career).

As a seven-year testing consultant, doing almost all of my testing on theoretically complete products, created by mysterious vendors, in avalanche/waterfall projects, I promise that the viewpoint is pretty different than what is the Agile way.

Martin von Weissenberg: Zero day exploit — the old management mafia p0wned your product!

For new Agile organizations, deciding what to do next is hard. In only too many cases the problem is made diffuse by old decision and power structures. Is the Product Owner actually more of a Backlog Secretary, regularly clobbered by the loudmouths from Sales & Marketing led by the CEO’s nephew, and occasionally vetoed by Mr. J. Random Senior Vice President? In this presentation, I will introduce the concept of governance in relation to product management, open up a Pandora’s box of interesting questions and show some real data that will knock your socks off.

Sam Aaron

Live music hacking with Overtone

Company that builds the right thing

Come hear the panelists and join the discussion yourself.

Why do some companies seem to be able to build products that fit their customers' needs exactly while some do not? How to build a company that builds the right thing?