On October 14th, 2016, developers, tech leads, and managers came together at the BIC to discuss the newest trends, share the lessons they've learnt and spend valuable time together. Here's a taster of how it went down!

Agile in the Public Sector

Roo Reynolds - COO at Digi2al

Government departments are finally getting to grips with agile software delivery. Roo will share a brief history of how the Government Digital Service (GDS) are using digital to transform government, together with what he has learnt about agile delivery in the UK public sector. Ever wondered if the public sector can *really* embrace agile ways of working? Bring your questions.

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Software Craftsmanship vs Lean Product

Elizabeth Ayer - Product manager at Redgate

You want to get your product out to users, but you want to write clean code. Test your market fast but keep the product maintainable. Lean product development and software craftsmanship just can’t work together, right?

Does Craftsmanship take focus off the end user? Does Lean make poor trade-offs between speed and quality? Can the same team follow both principles? Elizabeth will explore common misconceptions, as well as genuine areas of contention between the two approaches.

There's More to Code Reviews than You Might Think

Clair Shaw - Software engineer/tester

So, you do code reviews, and that’s great. But there’s always more that you can check during the review. More places you can check for any potential bugs or problems before deployment, before you find yourself with technical debt. Or worse: unforeseen downtime.

In this talk Clair will be going through the things that you should be checking to ensure confidence for developers, project owners and stakeholders. We’ll be looking at documentation, commit messages, and common code problems, with examples and tips along the way.

Employee Evangelism: Make Your Team Badass

Melinda Seckington - Developer at FutureLearn

Hiring good people can be hard. Keeping good people can be hard. It’s made easier though if you can set your company apart as a place that people want to work at. But how do you make the community aware that that’s the case?

Developer evangelists typically evangelise products to developers, but what if the thing you’re trying to sell is the team itself? How can you get your entire team sharing with the community what you’ve built and how you work?

This talk will examine why you should evangelise yourself and your team, and give concrete examples of how to encourage your team to do so.