The model that Netflix came up with: "Full cycle developers" is a model where a development team, equipped with amazing developer productivity tools, is responsible for the full software life cycle: design, development, test, deploy, operate, and support. So how do we build, support and grow a culture that enables "full cycle developers" from the team level to an organization level. From the developer practices in a day to day, to building an organization at a high level, we will discuss in this track at all levels how to build this culture to drive a successful business to be differentiators of the future. Learn more from the pioneers.
Track: Driving Full Cycle Engineering Teams at Every Level
Location: Mountbatten, 6th flr.
Day of week: Monday

Track Host: Cassandra Shum
Based in New York, Cassie is a Technical Director in North America for partnerships and cloud solutions. As a software engineer and architect, she has spent that last 9+ years at ThoughtWorks focusing on architectures including event-driven systems and microservices, a wide range of technologies with an emphasis on mobile and software delivery excellence.
Cassie has also been involved in growing not only organizations in the delivery practices and technical strategy but also the next generation of technologists. Some of her passions include advocating for women in technology and public speaking. She is also involved in promoting more female speakers in technology.
10:35am - 11:25am
Secrets of a Strong Engineering Culture
Engineers today have many choices about where they work. A big determinant is the engineering culture - an aspect that reaches across the full stack. As a technical leader, what can you do to influence, change and build a stronger engineering culture?
In this talk, Patrick will explore the building blocks of engineering culture, share examples of how he has enabled and transformed the engineering culture of many teams and organisations and how it can positively change the full stack.
Unlock the secrets of a strong engineering culture and leave with knowing what areas you can focus on, ideas on what you can implement and understand how other companies have built strong engineering cultures.
11:50am - 12:40pm
How to Build an Engineering Culture That Focuses on Business Impact
Intercom London has been around for two years. In this short period, and as a brand new and growing team, we have been in the critical path of several highly impactful product releases for the company. In this talk, we will discuss how we apply our company values, engineering principles and development processes to build an engineering culture that focuses on solving customers’ problems, fosters collaboration and promotes a continuous shipping cadence.
Leave with a good understanding of how you can get your engineering team to operate cohesively and demonstrate full alignment with your business goals while encouraging a culture of inclusion and growth.
1:40pm - 2:30pm
Should We Really Run It if We Build It?
"Build it, run it" is the war-cry of the startup and scaleup industry. Is it really that simple? Are there hidden costs like engineer burnout and a lasting impact on a young culture? And do B2B and B2C companies have different prerogatives?
4:10pm - 5:00pm
Leading a Journey to Better Quality
Often managers are tasked with work to help improve teams and the engineering disciplines they follow. Most managers, unfortunately, end up deciding for themselves what practices will work best for the team and start by mandating change. However, a true leader likes to think about how everyone can be a part of their thought process and how they can encourage teams to implement collective ideas.
I have also been in this situation a few times. I have been brought in and asked to ‘improve overall quality’. In this session, I will discuss how I launched an initiative and created “quality champions” to help achieve this goal. The role of these “champions” was to help with some of the initiatives. I will talk about the steps I took to define the term 'bad quality' and how to better discover it as an earlier part of the software delivery process rather than as feedback from the customer.
Business impact and outcomes
- How can quality be part of almost every phase of the SDLC
- What metrics can be used to measure quality
- How to keep everyone informed about these initiatives and their results
5:25pm - 6:15pm
Developer Effectiveness: Optimizing Feedback loops
We all (hopefully) use metrics to measure and improve productivity. Common ones like the DORA metrics lead time, MTTR, change failure rate and deployment frequency, are really great indicators of team’s progress towards adopting a DevOps Culture. Analysing the processes that affect these and fixing the bottlenecks will yield big gains in productivity.
However we find that misses part of the story. To fully address productivity we should start with the things that developers do 1000 or 100 times again, micro-inefficiencies, that by themselves are not a problem, but quickly sum up to causes a lack of efficiency of the team, and general feeling of helpless.
Great software engineering relies on the cognitive and creative ability of developers. High functioning organizations have created environments that allow developers to spend most of their energies on things that matter.
Fixing the inefficiencies in the technical platform, but also with how the organization collaboration and communications, will lead to create results. Engineering Leaders have a large part in creating an environment conducive to the improving the developer experience.
In this talk I will present research gathered from ThoughtWorks varied clients and projects, I will show some of the metrics our teams have identified as guides to creating the platform and the culture for high performing teams.
Last Year's Tracks
Monday, 2 March
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Next Generation Microservices: Building Distributed Systems the Right Way
Microservice-based applications are everywhere, but well-built distributed systems are not so common. Early adopters of microservices share their insights on how to design systems the right way.
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Streaming Data Architectures
Today's systems process huge volumes of continuously changing data. Hear how the innovators in this space are designing systems and leveraging modern data stream processing platforms.
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Driving Full Cycle Engineering Teams at Every Level
"Full cycle developers" is not just another catch phrase; it's about engineers taking ownership and delivering value, and doing so with the support of their entire organisation. Learn more from the pioneers.
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When Things Go Wrong: GDPR, Ethics, & Politics
Privacy, confidentiality, safety and security: learning from the frontlines, from both good and bad experiences
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JavaScript: Pushing the Client Beyond the Browser
JavaScript is not just the language of the web. Join this track to learn how the innovators are pushing the boundaries of this classic language and ecosystem
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Modern CS in the Real World
Head back to academia to solve today's problems in software engineering.
Tuesday, 3 March
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Hard-earned lessons from the names you know on scalability, reliability, security, and performance.
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The Future of the API: REST, gRPC, GraphQL and More
The humble web-based API is evolving. This track provides the what, how, and why of future APIs.
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Building High Performing Teams
There are many discussions outlining the secret sauce of high-performing teams. Learn how to balance the essential ingredients of high performing teams such as trust and delegation, as well as recognising the pitfalls and problems that will ruin any recipe.
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Machine Learning: The Latest Innovations
AI and machine learning is more approachable than ever. Discover how ML, deep learning, and other modern approaches are being used in practice.
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Bare Knuckle Performance
Crushing latency and getting the most out of your hardware.
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Modern Compilation Targets
Learn about the innovation happening in the compilation target space. WebAssembly is only the tip of the iceberg.
Wednesday, 4 March
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Growing Unicorns in the EU: Building, Leading and Scaling Financial Tech Start Ups
Learn how EU FinTech innovators have designed, built, and led both their technologies and organisations.
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Kubernetes and Cloud Architectures
Learn about cloud native architectural approaches from the leading industry experts who have operated Kubernetes and FaaS at scale, and explore the associated modern DevOps practices.
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Chaos and Resilience: Architecting for Success
Making systems resilient involves people and tech. Learn about strategies being used, from cognitive systems engineering to chaos engineering.
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Leading Distributed Teams
Remote and distributed working are increasing in popularity, but many organisations underestimate the leadership challenges. Learn from those who are doing this effectively.
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Scaling Security, from Device to Cloud
Implementing effective security is vitally important, regardless of where you are deploying software applications
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Evolving Java
JVM futures, JIT directions and improvements to the runtimes stack is the theme of this year’s JVM track.