Mats is currently holding the position of Chief Operating Officer at Adform – a leading digital advertising software company. Mats’s career spans over 17 years of leadership roles within the IT industry, including seven years of managing large cross boarder teams at technology giant IBM. He is perceived as a highly appreciated leader with deep technology understanding, an open mind and, of course, a great sense of humour.

Opening keynote - The best strategy is no strategy

In the Agile tour Kaunas 2013 Mats will prove that the best strategy is no strategy in creating game changing products; and how this “strategy of no strategy” is successfully adopted in Adform, driven by Agile methodologies.

Armands has been in the Information Technology industry for 9 years and currently is a solution architect in a recently founded company eBIT Ltd. His diverse professional interests span from SOA concepts and augmented reality to Agile practice implementation and usability.

He is also guest lecturer at Riga Technical University and Riga Business School.

Myths and truths about Agile

Armands has been implementing Agile practices in various projects for past few years. Whether he is going through basic principles with project managers on supplier side or trying to convince his customers to give Agile a chance, he have faced almost the same questions about Agile. Is it complicated? Is it expensive? Is there really no documentation? What about contracts? Armands wants to share some thoughts from his experience on which of these preconceptions are true and which are just myths.

This presentation is aimed at people just starting with Agile or those struggling to convince others to try some of the Agile practices.

Gediminas Guoba works as Developer and General Manager at Drivr Development having over 12 years of experience developing software. Currently his main areas of work are distributed applications, messaging, clouds and continuous delivery. Gediminas Guoba is „Certified Hadoop Developer“, „Microsoft Certified Solution Developer”. Also, he is experienced Java, .NET and Web UI developer implementing connected but decoupled applications.

Test automation & Best practices

Testing by hand is easy but takes a lot of time. At Drivr (drivr.com) we try to automate everything including testing before releasing our applications. I will share our experience how we have reached zero manual testing after releases and how we are sure that our applications still work, CSS changes haven't broken layout, and our web sites still look good on different browsers and on mobile devices.

Simonas Razminas is a member of "Agile Lietuva" association. Through his ten years of experience in IT field he has been working in different technical and managerial roles. Currently Simonas is working as Director of Engineering at MarkMonitor part of Thomson Reuters. It is already second company which has succeeded with Agile and continues to advance with Simonas lead.

Demystifying roles in Scrum team

Scrum recognizes no titles for Development Team members other than Developer, regardless of the work being performed by the person; there are no exceptions to this rule. What does that mean? Should everyone write code? What about testers, designers, architects or data-warehouse specialists? Should every Scrum Team get one person per such role? What if potentially releasable Increment of “Done” product cannot bet achieved without infrastructure design? How does IT come to the picture? Who is responsible for architecture of components and solution (especially when multiple teams work on them)? When North Korea is going to stop their madness? All questions but last will be revisited on presentation by Simonas.

Karolis introduced himself as having experience in: 9 years in international catering and architecture business from bottom to the very top; 2 years in IT ERP research and development avantgarde; 6 years ERP development “for fun”; 20+ years in martial arts and 12 years in dances. Every part covered from starter to trainer. Perfectioning learning curve and getting users to their destination seamlessly.

Untangling Neuro-Fuzzy co-worker correlation.

Building a team? First start-up? Going up to middle-manager post? Reorganising fluently working start-up? Then You are very well aware of the “human” part of Your company. Idea - great, plans are running, but some things starts to smell fishy. That is then You have to apply shock for others and steadily untangle situation for Your self if was not doing it from the beggining. As in UML boxes build bigger boxes. Karolis will provide starting boxes and some scenarios for making Your business "human" part more modular. Probably the way You like Your code.

Clement Pickering has been with the Callcredit group for almost 14 years leading Development teams in creating a wide range of products for the financial services industry. He has long been an advocate of agile development practices and the philosophy that underpins agile as he passionately believes it helps teams deliver more effectively. He has been involved for many years in helping Callcredit adopt agile practices and in his current role has most recently focussed on helping the QA community and project teams within Callcredit get to grips with agile testing.

Closing keynote - Transitioning a QA team to Agile testing

An experience report from Clement Pickering, Callcredit, a fast-growing company based in Leeds which now follows (or attempts to follow) agile development methodology. The talk aims to share experiences gained on the journey from a traditional focussed QA team (and what this meant!) to an agile testing approach (and what this means!). Approached from three key angles, People and Mindset, Strategy and Approach and Tools and Techniques the talks goal is to share thoughts, observations and knowledge with attendees and initiate discussion on others experience