ACP2015 Report

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POST CONFERENCE REPORT

ACP-2015, ISLAMABAD PAKISTANNovember 14, 2015

By

Najam Farooq Alvi(Founding Member: Pakistan Agile Development Society)

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Agile Conference Pakistan

Contents

1 Event Summary 2

2 Overview 7

3 Conference Program 7

3.1 Achieving technical excellence on an Agile project . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83.1.1 Presentation Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

3.2 Agile and Culture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93.2.1 Presentation Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3.3 Agile the way forward . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123.3.1 Presentation Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

3.4 Agile Testing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143.4.1 Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

3.5 Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153.5.1 Presentation Summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

3.6 Panel Discussion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163.6.1 Panelists . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

4 Audience Feedback Statistics 17

5 Online Resources 18

6 Special Thanks 18

7 Contact Information 18

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1 Event Summary

Event Name:

Agile Conference Pakistan (ACP2015)

Theme:

Agile Culture in Pakistan

Date:

14th November, 2015

Organizing Committee

Dr. Imran Ghani (Chairman Pakistan Agile Development Society)www.pads.pk

Najam Alvi (Country Manager at Zeropoint) https://zeropoint.be

Naveed Ramzan (Senior Developer at Zeropoint) https://zeropoint.be

Rizwan Abbas (Senior Developer Zeropoint) https://zeropoint.be

Jawad Hussain (Drupal Developer at Zeropoint) https://zeropoint.beKashif Mueen (CTO Zigron Pvt Ltd) http://www.zigron.com/

Barkan Saeed (CEO Vizteck Solutions) http://vizteck.com

Suhail Iqbal (CEO SysComp International) http://www.syscompk.com/

Khurram Shahzad (CEO GoldBar Tech) http://www.goldbartech.com/

Babar Ali (Engineering Head GSM Nation LLC) http://www.gsmnation.com/

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http://www.pads.pk/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/http://www.zigron.com/http://vizteck.com/http://www.syscompk.com/http://www.goldbartech.com/http://www.gsmnation.com/http://www.pads.pk/http://www.pads.pk/http://www.gsmnation.com/http://www.goldbartech.com/http://www.syscompk.com/http://vizteck.com/http://www.zigron.com/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/https://zeropoint.be/http://www.pads.pk/

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Event Sponsors:

Platinum Sponsors

Zeropoint Pvt Ltd https://zeropoint.be

Scrum Alliance https://www.scrumalliance.org/

Gold Sponsors

Zigron Pvt Ltd http://www.zigron.com/

Vizteck Solutions http://vizteck.com

SysComp International http://www.syscompk.com/

GoldBar Tech http://www.goldbartech.com/

Discretelogix http://www.discretelogix.com/

PMI Islamabad http://pmiislamabad.org/

EVERYTHING.PK http://www.everything.pk/

Hotel Grand Regency http://www.grandregencyhotels.com/

Venue:

Hotel Grand Regency Murree Road Islamabad, Pakistan

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https://zeropoint.be/https://www.scrumalliance.org/http://www.zigron.com/http://vizteck.com/http://www.syscompk.com/http://www.goldbartech.com/http://www.discretelogix.com/http://pmiislamabad.org/http://www.everything.pk/http://www.grandregencyhotels.com/http://www.pads.pk/http://www.pads.pk/http://www.grandregencyhotels.com/http://www.everything.pk/http://pmiislamabad.org/http://www.discretelogix.com/http://www.goldbartech.com/http://www.syscompk.com/http://vizteck.com/http://www.zigron.com/https://www.scrumalliance.org/https://zeropoint.be/

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Event Affiliation:

Tesla Amazinghttps://teslaamazing.com/

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Participants:

223 Professionals registered for the event and140

attended the full day session.

Company Name Participants RemarksBentley Systems 3Business Analytics 8Code Enterprise 2Discretelogix 10Elixir 8Enterprise DB 8Individuals 27

Intelligentsia 3Makkays 2Organizers 8PMI-Islamabad 10Smart IS 14Speakers 7SysComp 2Target Systems 4VizTeck 3Volunteers 4

Zeropoint 5 One guest from BelgiumZigron 9 One guest from USASupporting Staff 2

Table 1: Participants List

Profession ParticipantsDevelopment Field 74

Testing Field 18Scrum Certified 5PMP Certified 9

Table 2: Participation by professions

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Experience ParticipantsLess than 3 Years 143 - 5 Years 316 - 10 Years 3510+ Years 12

Table 3: Participants Experience

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2 Overview

The Agile Conference Pakistan (ACP2015) was held in Islamabad on November 14, 2015.The conference was an outcome of the efforts of Pakistan Agile Development Society(www.pads.pk) working for the betterment of Pakistan IT industry by promoting Ag-ile development practices, sharing experiences and collaborating for new ideas for betterproject delivery by using Agile development approach in Pakistan.

The theme for the conference was Agile Culture in Pakistan. The Conference pro-gram addressed the core cultural barriers faced by the IT industry while adopting Agiledevelopment methodology. Another aspect was to let the professionals from the industryshare their experiences they faced while adopting Agile development approach specificallywithin Pakistan. The cultural aspect was well focused by speakers and they highlighted

the issues very well as well as proposed the solutions to handle them with the culturallimitations.The conference attracted 223 registrations and 140 Participants attended the confer-

ence as compared to the initial target of 100 participants which was a huge increase inparticipants numbers as compared to last year (2014) conference.

Participants included the researchers, project managers, developers, testers and stu-dents. Representatives from the major IT companies across Pakistan proved the peopleinterest for learning, sharing and fixing the problems faced by the IT sector. The pres-ence of guests from Belgium and US gave the conference another dimension by letting thestake-holders understand the cultural aspect of IT industry in Pakistan.

Presentations covered topics such as Agile culture in an organization, Technical excel-

lence, Agile the way forward, Agile Testing, Emotional intelligence which was followed bya panel discussion about Agile principles in Pakistan by the industry experts.

The objective of the conference was well achieved by knowledge sharing through pre-sentations but also by attracting good number of participants and a networking sessionduring the lunch & tea breaks.

3 Conference Program

The conference program included 4 speakers and 3 presenters. The speakers choose variety

of topics to cover the all the aspects of conference themes. The detail of topics is as follow:

Achieving technical excellence on an Agile project

Agile culture

Agile the way forward

Agile testing

Emotional intelligence and project management

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Agile principles in Pakistan

Key note speaker included:

Ather Imran (Sybrid Pvt Ltd)

The formal session was started by Kashif Ur Rehman with a welcome note which wasfollowed by recitation of Holy quran by Babar Ali. The Conference provided a learningopportunity to the professionals from Pakistan software industry. This also helped tounderstand the cultural barriers involved while implementing the Agile in an organization.

3.1 Achieving technical excellence on an Agile project

Conference was initiated by Adeel Ali who talked about achieving technical excellenceon Agile project. He started his presentation with 1 definition about technical excellencewhich states in an agile project, technical excellence is measured by both capacity todeliver customer value today and create an adaptable product for tomorrow.

In his opinion technical excellence can only be achieved by responding to change overfollowing a plan. Adeel explained that the responding to change is directly proportional totechnical excellence. The more rapidly you respond to change the more technical excellenceyou will achieve.

While elaborating further he quoted Agile manifesto ninth principle about technicalexcellence and good design which enhances agility. Building a right software means it has

a simple design, is maintainable and flexible. Successful software needs to be able to evolveto meet expanding needs.Even Scrum practices will not give you excellent results if you gave less importance

to technical excellence. Technical practices plays an important role and you have to takethem seriously. Less importance means the Scrum is flaccid and the transformation fromflaccid to awesome can can only be achieved by maintaining a high quality on both ends(Developer facing as well as customer facing).

Software cost model, process dependencies, test driven development, TDD maturitymodel and practices & process were the core point of his presentation fully supporting histalk about technical excellence in an Agile project.

1Jim Highsmith

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3.1.1 Presentation Summary

Ability to deliver customer value today and create adaptable product for tomorrow. Responding to change.

Continuous technical excellence can only be possible by good design which leads toagility.

Build in right perspective.

Complex problem and simple solution.

Scrum becomes flaccid scrum in the absence of technical excellence.

Maintain internal and external quality.

Test first approach.

Test driven development model.

Maturity model (SHU HA RI)

3.2 Agile and Culture

Ather Imran as a key note speaker delivered the speech about Agile and Culture. Heexplained the Agile transformation using the golden circle Why How and What. Heexplained that people are more loyal to culture then to Strategy or process. Tactics,Strategy and process are only visible part within an organization the real ice berg hiddenbelow the water line in the form of culture. Without addressing organizational culture thestrategy can never be set right.

Understanding the organizational culture is important before adopting the Agile pro-cess as Agile is totally dependent on willingness of people to be more collaborative andinteractive and ready to respond to change which is core thought of Agile process. Agilemostly deals with the change and uncertainty and allows you to manage the complexitiesin better way.

An Agile organization is one whose culture is based on the Agile values. Within anorganization values plays an important role in achieving the target culture for the Successfuldelivery of complex projects.

Further he shared the survey2 results which was conducted in 2014. The survey wasfocused on Why organizations are choosing Agile? 59% of survey participants respondedthat they choose Agile to accelerate project delivery.

29th Annual state of Agile survey

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In an other survey topic about What causes Agile projects to fail? In which 42% ofresult showed that the failure of Agile projects was due to the mismatch of organizationalculture and core Agile values.

Reasons ResultsLack of experience with agile methods 44%Company philosophy or culture at odds with core agile values 42%Lack of management support 38%External pressure to follow traditional waterfall processes 37%Lack of support for cultural transition 36%

Table 4: Top five causes to agile project failure

Where as the survey results about Barrier to further Agile adoption shows that 44%

saw the ability to change organizational culture as the biggest challenge.

Reasons ResultsAbility to change organizational culture 44%Not enough personnel with necessary agile experience 35%General organizational resistance to change 34%

Table 5: Top three barriers to further Agile adoption

While encouraging the audience to think and evaluate their respective organizationalculture he introduces the Schneider culture model which is based on collaboration andcultivation at most. The model focuses less on control without undermining the importanceof technical excellence in the form of competence.

At the end he discussed about the transformation and adoption of Agile culture which isa methodical, incremental and evolutionary process. The transformation can be conduciveor non conducive and depending upon the diagnosis results.

Non conducive environments need management buy in and cellular model can be usedfor a complete transformation where as in case of conducive environments use Agile man-ifesto and principles with incremental and evolutionary approach.

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The golden circle. Culture eats strategy.

People are more loyal to culture.

Bringing the change into people life.

Why agile culture is important for an organization

Agile manifesto and principles

Evaluating target culture for handling complex projects.

Agile succeed due to culture.

Schneider model (collaboration, cultivation, competence, control)

Evolution vs revolution

Cellular model

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3.3 Agile the way forward

After the tea break the next speech was from Suhail Iqbal. He started the session with asocial network activity focused on do more with less in which all the participant were askedto exchange their business cards within 2 minutes. The winners (got maximum number ofcards) had a selfie with speaker as reward.

After the activity he discussed Agile the way forward by comparing LEAN and Agileand sharing the concept of LeAgile. LeAgile can be implemented in non-conventionalindustries as well.

Agile projects are more focused on speed and flexibility and how quickly a team canreacts to changing requirements where as LEAN focuses on removing the waste.

Some of similarities between Agile and LEAN are that Agile focused on customersatisfaction where as LEAN focused on customer value, Agile focus on simplicity whereas

LEAN focuses on eliminating waste ultimately the goal of both approaches is to facilitatethe customer.

LeAgile uses the best of both approaches and both systems are lean by nature. Bothfocus on decreasing waste and increasing productivity.

His talk was mostly about using Agile in non conventional industries by mixing it upwith LEAN which can produce following benefits for businesses:

Reduce waste in non-conventional projects

Make them much more efficient and profitable

Can be fast and flexible

Saving enormously on time and cost

Satisfy our stakeholders and

Be able to sell more


Introduction LEAN and Agile

What is Lean Agile?

Challenges in conventional industries.

Project break down

Scrum master vs PM (SM is classical servant)

LEAN vs Agile (philosophy vs working model)

Best possible way to use both all together

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Lean explanation

LeAgile model

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3.4 Agile Testing

Before the lunch break the last presentation was Agile Testing by Majd Uddin. Thespeech was well orchestrated, knowledgeable and well demonstrated. He briefly introducedthe audience to Agile testing and move to the advance concepts.

The changes are coming in a very fast pace now a days. The only possibility to deliverand maintain the quality software is through more tests.

The concept of Testing quadrants was very well explained which was much liked andappreciated by the audience. All the testing involved for prototypes, UX testing, unittests, performance, security and scalability can never be ignored. The heavy base of unittesting is the only way in an Agile project to deliver better quality software.

After explaining the four testing quadrants he initiated an activity in which he requestedthe audience to draw the testing model of their organization.

He emphasized that the testing is the role and responsibility of every single member ofthe team in Agile. With the help of three amigos he explained that how customers, testersand developers need to collaborate right from the beginning in an Agile project. Theinvolvement of testers right from beginning and their collaboration and communicationwith customer has same level of importance as software developers. Audience participatedin the topic by drawing their own testing amigos.

The automation testing pyramid foundation is based on large numbers of unit testsfollowed by acceptance test, GUI test and then manual tests which maximizes the ROI.

While concluding his speech he highlighted the real spirit of Agile testing with the helpof testing manifesto:

Testing through out instead over testing at end.

Preventing bugs over finding bugs.

Team responsibility over tester responsibility.

3.4.1 Summary

Accepting change is the essence of Agile.

Define test strategy.

Agile testing quadrants.

Testing is a role (every ones job).

Testing amigos.

Automatic testing pyramid.

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3.5 Emotional Intelligence or Emotional Quotient

After a luxurious lunch & refreshment break the session started with Mohsin Lodhi talkabout Emotional intelligence (Emotional Quotient). His huge experience in coaching lead-ership courses all over the world, he presented a very complex topic in such a way thatenable the audience to understand it very well. Later it was proved by audience feedbackthat placed his session on the top of the the list.

With the help of modern research studies he explained the importance of EQ andits role in success. EQ and self awareness are two key enablers for social awareness andrelationship management. His clear guidelines and tips are so relevant to Agile valueswhich demand a collaborative and communicative approach within team. EQ is all aboutusing emotions smartly, being honest, being aware about others & yourself feelings whichultimately resulted into better performance and team results. In Agile teams relations

played an important role in success and EQ is the right tool to cultivate harmony andgood relations within team.

He explained that emotional information can be used successfully to guide thinkingand behavior. Better team work, 3 times productivity gain, better conversation, goodmanagement and leadership skills are some of the fruits of investing into EQ. At the sametime 75% of the cases in career growth are failed due to lack of EQ, trust and inability tohandle interpersonal problems.


Why EI? EI and competencies

IQ versus EQ

EQ benefits

How to raise EQ

PM new story do more with less by doing self management. self awareness (strengthsand weakness), self control, managing self emotions, behaving, relationship manage-

ment,

Adaptability, service oriented (contribute), know your organization, develop others

Leadership to deal with people, growing the people, change catalyst, conflict man-agement & influencing people

PM ability to build relationship, build effective team (results), change management,result oriented.

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3.6 Panel Discussion

Before the closing ceremony the last session was a panel discussion. Participant were wellknow IT professionals and Entrepreneurs from the capital city of Islamabad.They discussed about the Agile principles in Pakistan. The ultimate goal was to identify

the challenges faced by the companies while adopting Agile in Pakistan and share theexperience how to overcome them.

The participants proposed that empowering people, removing workplace restrictions,changing the mind set w.r.t empowerment and recognition of failure as tool can overcomethe challenges. Failures should not be discouraged rather it must be used as tool to learnand improve. Investing into people, providing them training and then setting up rightgoals are key factors for a successful business.

Our culture promotes command and control where as Agile denies it. Increasing the

capabilities to collaborate and being self organized are also the key contributors. Rightenvironment and right culture with accountability within team and organization need tobe improved. Agile accepts the change and we need to be prepare for change.

3.6.1 Panelists

Barkan Saeed (CEO Vizteck)

Kashif Mueen (CTO Zigron)

Nauman Faridi (VP at Digital Processing Lab)

Owais Anjum (President Open Islamabad)

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4 Audience Feedback Statistics

We received 106 feedback forms out of 137 audience.

Category ResultsEmotional Intelligence 94.37%Agile Culture 93.67%Agile Testing 89.03%Pre-Conference information 84.46%Panel discussion 83.77%About refreshment & venue 78.21%Agile the way forward 77.29%About Host 66.45%

Table 6: Audience Feedback

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5 Online Resources

You can find all the resources related to conference at:

Conference day photos ACP2015 Gallery

Speakers presentations ACP2015 Speakers Contents

Blog posts Post 1andPost 2

6 Special Thanks

We (Pakistan Agile Development Society) are thankful to the speakers, organizers, spon-

sors, participants and affiliates.

We would like to specially recognize our platinum sponsors Scrum AllianceandZero-point.befor their full support and provision of resources to make this event successful.

7 Contact Information

You can reach the author of this report atAuthorand Pakistan Agile Development SocietyatPADS Contact

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