// Keynote: The Culture of Continuous Flow

Delighting customers by through the fast flow of features into production depends, like other capabilities, on repetition and habit. In this talk, I present some observations on plant floor engineering and operations (the birthplace of Lean), and then derive the behaviors, rituals and processes that are essential to fast flow in software development. Some practices you’ll have heard of (e.g., continuous integration and delivery, TDD, etc.), and but some will be surprising and novel (e.g., the Improvement Kata). We’ll show how these practices are all interrelated, and how to institute them to create a culture of continuous improvement leading to happy users, fast flow and fulfilled practitioners.

// Jez Humble

is a vice president at Chef, and co-author of the Jolt Award winning Continuous Delivery, published in Martin Fowler’s Signature Series (Addison Wesley, 2010), and the forthcoming Lean Enterprise, in Eric Ries’ Lean series. He has been fascinated by computers and electronics since getting his first ZX Spectrum aged 11, and spent several years hacking on Acorn machines in 6502 and ARM assembler and BASIC until he was old enough to get a proper job. He got into IT in 2000, just in time for the dot com bust. Since then he has worked as a developer, system administrator, trainer, consultant, manager, and speaker. He has worked with a variety of platforms and technologies, consulting for non-profits, telecoms, financial services and on-line retail companies. From 2004 – 2014 he worked for ThoughtWorks and ThoughtWorks Studios in Beijing, Bangalore, London and San Francisco. He holds a BA in Physics and Philosophy from Oxford University and an MMus in Ethnomusicology from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He is presently working for Chef and living in the San Francisco Bay Area with his wife and daughters.