Soft Skills Matter Too: Agile + DevOps Day 5 AAR

Thursday morning dawned as the second official day of the conference. I’d cut my post-conference networking down significantly after Tuesday’s little adventure, and was ready for the first Thursday event of the day: a 6:45am group run.

The scenary for running was a nice change from my usual South Dakota views. One of the years I'll be back with time and
budget to ride this monster!

As it turned out, it wasn’t so much a group run as people just heading out and running. At least I got to see a few people I recognized from the conference heading in opposite directions. The area we were staying in is almost exclusively hotels and resort housing, so it was neat to see other members of my extended #FitFam who made the decision to pack our workout gear and not let fitness take a vacation.

On to the meat of the day, starting with a keynote presentation from Andrea Goulet of Corgibytes. Her presentation about the role of empathy in software development proved to be one of my conference highlights, and deserves an entire post unto itself unpacking the concepts there. I don’t agree with everything she said, but her focus on the concept of Rational Empathy was both refreshing and realistic. As an industry pro, she recognizes that most software developers view empathy as being one of those soft, fluffy skills that’s about as useful in software development as a broken keyboard. Andrea’s talk made a compelling argument for why that isn’t the case.

Another soft, fluffy, usually neglected skill among us introverted developer types is making friends. It's amazing how
much we have in common once we get to talking and find that despite being from different areas and radically different
industries, we're all facing a lot of the same problems!

Other interesting presentations of the day included a case study in running without a QA department by Nate Custer at The Testing Consultancy, a presentation of commonalities of Agile and DevOps Transformations for Large Organizations by Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and What Aircrews Can Teach DevOps by Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol.

The conference closed with a final keynote called All You Need is Product Love by Todd Olson (Pendo CEO) who challenged us to believe in and love the products we’re creating. And if we’re not feeling that way now, to take a hard look at our organization and figure out if the problem is with our products, or if it’s that we’re feeling disengaged from the cool stuff that our products actually do. This was another really challenging talk that I’m still mentally unpacking ramifications from. More on that in another future blog post, I suppose.

The day ended with a networking and discussion event for the Leadership Summit that would consume Day 6. More on that tomorrow!