 All right. Welcome, everyone. How are you doing this morning? Good. Not energized by the awesome keynote? All right. I feel the energy is low, so I'm not going to try and take too much time. But my name is Naresh. I happen to be one of the people who started this. Any idea when we started the Agile India community? Any guesses? One person can read the slides. All right. Awesome. That was a quick check to see if you can read the slides or not. But that's right. We formed the Agile Software Community of India, which is a non-profit body back in December of 2004. 2005 was our very first conference, and this is the 15th year of running the conference. So thank you for being part of this journey. 15 years, but 57 conferences, which means basically we did a lot of regional conferences when we started, and then we kind of said it's just too much, so we settled to doing only one conference every year, which is kind of what we call the Agile India conference. This is a little bit of... I'm wearing the data science t-shirt, so I should show some graphs and talk about stats, right? That's important. So that's a bit of what our journey has been, if you see, over the years. Ups and downs started very small and kind of growing the community over the years. I'm pretty excited to say that we have 14, 74 people this year at the conference, and I'm sure we'll hit the 1,500 mark, right? There are three more days left. There were 48 registrations last night, just to give you a sense. And in the last two weeks, we had half of the registrations for the entire conference. It's the true hockey stick growth, if you see. But yeah, we have people from 23 countries here, which is what makes this amazing, in my opinion, is that the kind of diversity of people coming from different backgrounds. If we had time, I would do a little exercise, but I'm going to skip that now. We're going to do that maybe tomorrow, because we need to do something different each day. This is the first year in the 15 years, and it's a bit of shameful, but this is the first year in the 15 years that we have actually childcare at the conference, because we want to encourage everyone to come in and participate and bring their kids. The youngest person at the conference is three-year-old, which is pretty amazing. We're trying to get the agile gene built right from the beginning. So we have a few kids who are here in the room next door who are going to be with us for the whole day and maybe for the next four days. If you have kids and if you had to juggle too many balls to get here so that you can find a safe place for your kids while you're here, don't worry, you can bring them here to the conference. If you've not registered yet, that's okay. You can still go to our website and register from there. So if you want to bring your kids tomorrow, day after tomorrow, please bring them to the conference. We want to make sure that you feel welcomed and parents can enjoy the conference equally, all right? With that, I want to call Deb on stage quickly for a quick exercise. She's promised she's only going to take five minutes. Yeah, I think we have time. All right, good morning. So my third day here, and I'm really happy to be with you, so I'm a coach and I coach coaches and change leaders. And I'm curious how many of you would consider yourself some kind of coach or change leader? Wave at me. My people, hi. So you know you're going to understand what I'm talking about when I say that one of the greatest enemies of the agile mindset is your inner critic. Your inner critic. Here we are talking about experimenting, having new experiences, learning, taking risks, and inside is your inner critic going, no, no, no, no, don't make a mistake, don't make a mistake, don't make a mistake. And I can tell you from experience, you cannot teach or lead from here. So I want to teach you a nervous system hack to undo that, and you might be able to use it today. Because I have good news and bad news for you. If you're like me, you'll make a mistake today. And the good news is called the failure bow. I'll tell you last time I used it. Oh, I think I used it teaching yesterday. On Friday here in the hotel, I dropped a china plate on the stone floor in the middle of the lobby. And it made a beautiful bell-like sound that expanded through the whole place and then there was dead silence and watermelon on the floor. And I stood there and inside I was going, no, no, no, no, no. I was right beside the concierge desk and immediately three helpful men were right there, saying, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it. And I just looked composed and walked to the elevator and got in and I could, it was still in my body. I was a mess. And I thought it's not too late for the failure bow so I introduced myself to the people I was in the elevator with. Turned out one of them was the groom on the second floor. And I said, here's something you may be needing soon. And I did the failure bow with him and we all laughed and went on our way. And I can tell you this story now and it's funny. And I didn't think about it again. It's a simple practice to undo this cringing and let you come back to the present because you are here to do great stuff and you need to be present to enjoy it and to share and to teach and to learn. Are you going to take a chance today? Are you going to do a talk for the first time? Or a new talk? Are you operating in your second language? People are taking risks all over the place here today. And there are going to be mistakes and we're going to celebrate them. I'd like to teach this to you. I'm going to do it. Do you want to do it with me? So I'm going to invite you to do this. The first step is to remember the last time you did something really embarrassing where you felt this. And you know sometimes it happens in a conference room where you can pose but you know that inside you're going... So remember that. And put yourself in that body and know that you cannot do the work from there. So here's the failure bow. It has three steps. The first step is important. It's a big grin. And the second step is to let go of that cringe. Undo it. And the third is to say, thank you I failed. So if you'd like to try it with me please stand up. And anybody who's still sitting you have a role too. There's a fourth part which is to be the audience and applaud. And we're not applauding the mistake. We're applauding the agile mindset. The courage of this person. I'm going to count this down. I'm going to say one, two, three. And then we're all going to say together thank you I failed. One, two, three. I invite you to use this liberally this week in order to create a culture that invites and supports the agile mindset that we value so much. And it has a really weird effect. You'll experiment with it. You'll see what happens. This weird effect is that it erases the mistake. I've used it in large groups and afterwards nobody remembered that I even used it. It's very strange. See what happens. And so now you need to get back to doing that. And I wish you a happy agile mindset day. Awesome. Thanks, Deb. How many people know Deb and I partnered together to start the first coach camp back how many years? 11 years ago. Long time ago. And Deb has been kind enough to offer to be around and offer some coaching. So if folks are interested in taking that role, there are two chairs over there. So you can catch hold of Deb over there for a coaches corner. If there are other coaches in the room who would like to do the same, there are more chairs in this side kept for you to kind of participate in coaches corner. With that, where do we stand in our agenda? We kicked off the conference on 17th. We had a small coaches gathering, the agile coach camp, 50 people. Yesterday we had a pre-six pre-conference workshops, a five pre-conference workshops. And today is technically the first day of the larger conference where we have expecting about 450 people today. And that's the agile mindset day. And we have three awesome keynotes. We just finished one and we have two more to go. And then amazing talks through the day. But if we were to look at how did we get here? I think for a couple of you who read my email yesterday, right, we started this nine months ago. It takes about nine months to put this conference together. Some of the volunteers who participated in that are like, oh, no. Yes, it takes nine months. We got about 398 proposals, almost 400 speakers put in saying, hey, I'd like to present at the conference. And out of that, we were able to select 118 proposals. So that's what happens over the last nine months of filtering and doing this. All of this is done in an open fashion, which means that the proposals are open. People put their proposals, selection happens openly. Feedback is given openly. So everything is done in a very open and transparent manner. Many people don't like it, but we believe this is the way to run conferences and we continue to run this for 15 years. All right. And we have 94 speakers from 23 countries here. So big round of applause for the speakers who traveled far from here. And something that we have been trying really hard is to make sure that we are more inclusive and we try and focus on diversity. One aspect of that is the gender diversity that I would want to highlight. So we have almost one-third of the speakers at this conference who are women speakers. I wish the number goes up. But this is not bad, right, from where we stand. I want to quickly thank the awesome program committee who helped us put this conference together. So if you're in the room, I would request you to please quickly stand up so people can notice you and complain to you. So with that, I would like to invite the chair for today, Tataagat Verma in short TV. TV is going to quickly walk us through what to expect today. Thanks, Nareesh. It's my pleasure to be a partner in crime with Nareesh and the gang for the last many years. I can't say 2005, but definitely a few years down when it got started. And I think I've donned a lot of hats in the last 10 years as a volunteer here. It's been a volunteer. It's been a reviewer. It's been a track chair. And every time I come back, very satisfied and amazed by the kind of energy, the kind of freshness of ideas, the kind of original thinking that a lot of proposers here submit to us. This year has not been an exception. It's been equally easy, equally difficult or probably even more difficult. As you can see, our selection rates have been one fourth. So out of four, six accepted only one proposal. And I think that speaks a lot about the kind of high bar that we have been able to maintain here. And, yeah, of course, not at the cost of demarketing other days, but I would definitely want to take pride in what better way to start in Agile India Conference than to start it with Agile Mindset. And I want to thank Brian here for setting the stage on fire with leaving the stage with a lot of questions, probably more questions than answers, which is how I believe a keynote should be. We should not really be handing out some cookbook solutions. It should really be raising a lot of questions in the mind so that you cannot sleep in the night. We believe that that is what we would like to do. You should not be able to sleep in the night tonight and for the next four days, because we want to leave you with so many meaningful questions, so many new people to talk to, so many new ideas to pilot and prototype with, that you go back brimming with energy and you go out and change the world there. Just a quick here. We have five parallel sessions. All the sessions are going to be on this room. This is GBR1, then we have 2 and Jupiter 1 and 2, and then we have Neptune there. So these are the five ones. Please familiarize yourself there. We do have somebody in each of the room that will be kind of not really controlling it, but just kind of facilitating the whole thing, but we do expect it to be really self-organizing kind of a behavior. Nareesh will talk a little bit more about how we do that, but these are some of the awesome speakers that we are lucky to have. Amidst today there, please use this opportunity to be in all the five of them if you can be, but if not, obviously there will be recordings available later on that will help you understand what happened in the sessions that you could not do that. So with that, I want to go back again to Nareesh here and I look forward to chatting with you guys and give us your feedback so that you can see what we have always done there. Thanks a lot and have a great agile conference. Thanks, TV. Awesome. I like the way you said the whole day. So that's cool. And TV has been amazing help. I know for folks in the community who know TV, he is a person that is highly respected in the industry. So thanks, TV, for being the chair. We finished, like I was saying, we finished five workshops yesterday. There are a few more workshops happening. So if you've not signed up for the workshops, there's still some availability. You can go online and look it up. This conference would not be possible without the awesome support from the sponsors that we have. Yes, this is a completely voluntary nonprofit run conference and so we need support from sponsors to help us. It's not only financial support. Financial support is a big part of it to help us reduce the cost of this conference, but also just all support in terms of, you know, like we believe this conference is important. If you see, we don't do a lot for sponsors. We are one of those arrogant conferences which basically say, look, this is a community conference. This is not a sales marketing conference. People come here to learn. People don't come here to, you know, basically meet sponsors or exhibitors. But in spite of that, these guys have shown tremendous support and have been behind us. So if you see them around, they are all outside, so please do thank them. Without them, we wouldn't be possible. With that, I want to play a quick two-minute video from the founder of Zoho which is one of the, which is the kind of the day sponsor for today. One thing that we say, we joke about in Zoho is that we have never shipped any software product on time ever in our 20-year history. And the reason, of course, we don't ship on time is we don't actually set a particular time at which a particular product has to be ready. This is something that goes so much against the grain of what we all know as project management. It definitely bears some explaining. Let's step back. When you think about project manager's cradle, what is the first analogy that comes to mind? Something like let's keep the trains running on time. That's a very familiar analogy we all use. A train running on time goes on an already laid track where everything is predictable. Barring some unforeseen like a weather event or an accident somewhere, everything must be predictable on a track. But a software project is more like laying a new track through an unknown terrain. If you accept that analogy that software projects are like being in an unknown terrain, laying a track through an unknown terrain, what do you do? How do you actually keep those projects on track, so to speak? Well, you improvise. You make it up as you go. And that's actually there is this very familiar to us Indians. We have this word jugad. How many of you have heard this jugad, this term jugad? And the definition in Wikipedia I would say it's basically improvising or coming up with a solution to a problem using in a low cost way using available materials all of that, that jugad. Basically you improvise with what you have at hand. That's what you do in reality in software projects. You keep improvising. And interestingly we look at a jail project management as a formalization of that jugad. As a way to come up with a formal ways of recognizing this improvisation process. And if you look at Indian classical music Indian dance, all of them have that strong element of improvisation in them. So jugad is something that is woven into the fabric of Indian culture, so to speak. To a very large extent, even our formal things, our formal music has that essential element of improvisation in it. And that's exactly how we marry that whole formal stuff that you track with the improvisational ways that we work together in order to achieve our objective. So these folks are outside, so I would request you to go meet them. Thank you. How many people here believe that they are experts on agile? Come on. There are some interesting quizzes that are running out there at different booths that are interesting quizzes. It's a great way to see where you stand, so I would encourage you to kind of take the quizzes that are there. Different sponsors are running lots of different quizzes. Great goodies to be won, so hey, something to get before you go home. We have a lot of authors here and we thought it would be cool for people to get a personally signed book from the speakers. So if you have the books of these speakers, you can bring them along. The speakers will be ideally the best place would be to catch them right after the talk. So you go to the talk and right after the talk you can catch them and they would be happy to sign this. There's also a little bookstore that we have set up because a lot of times people say hey, it would be nice if you can bring a collection of books here. So we have a small bookstore available where you can purchase books and then get signed by the speakers. So please use that facility. Quickly talking about the Wi-Fi. I believe everyone's got the email with the Wi-Fi username password. If not, you can quickly make a note of it. On all the doors outside there is a signage which shows the Wi-Fi username and password. So that is available. I'm hoping all of you have downloaded the app, the Convengen app for the day. This is where you have the schedule. This is where you can rate the sections. You can give feedback about things. You can see who else is attending a particular session and so forth. So there's a bunch of things that are available. Again there is small posters put outside where you can get how to download this app. With that I just will take two more minutes and wrap up. Many people ask us why don't you have a code of conduct on the website? These days every conference has a code of conduct on their website but we don't. Why is that? Is it because we don't believe in a code of conduct? It is because I believe that just simply putting a code of conduct on the website and saying okay we believe in code of conduct doesn't solve the problem. I would say that it is our responsibility as a group here to make sure that every other person in this room feels comfortable, feels safe, feels at home and I'm sure each one of you will help us achieve that. Yes? In case if you notice something that you think is not appropriate, is not a good behavior at the conference, then I would encourage you to drop a note or come find any one of us in person, whatever you are comfortable with but we do have Ellen who is volunteer to basically receive that feedback and act upon it. Any one of us that we are here please bring it up to us and we will make sure that such behaviors is not tolerated. We've not had such incidents before. We don't expect it will be there but it's important to highlight it so people feel that we are serious about this stuff. All right? How many people have been to an Agile India conference before? Clap. Okay? Half of the room I would say. One of the things that I think we take pride in ourselves is that we actively talk about the law of two feet. The law of two feet basically comes from open space and one of the things that I do want to really emphasize is that we've tried our best to pick the best sessions we could find but there will always be a possibility where you will go into a session and you will find yourself adding value or getting value. Right? What do you do in such cases? Use your two feet and take yourself to a place where you can add value or take or get value, right? Yes? It is completely okay. It's completely acceptable to leave a session in between. It's not it's not offending the speaker. You are investing your valuable time here and we want to make sure that you take charge of that, right? That you are responsible for making sure you are getting value. Do not expect that, you know, in the end you will fill a feedback form and everything will be fixed because the time is already gone. So please make sure you use the law of two feet. It is not rude to get up in between and leave. It is rude to make disturb everybody else when you leave and leave. Nobody is going to be upset about it and hopefully you will find something much more better. I think TV made a mistake. He said there are five tracks. We actually have six tracks, right? There are five tracks in the hall and there's one track which is the most interesting track outside the hall. Which is where I think the best discussions happen. All right? So there are six tracks and if you don't find anything valuable in the five tracks, it's the sixth track which is outside. So that's the law of two feet. I hope everybody uses that. Can everyone please look into their kits and see if they found the feedback forms? If you don't find one, it's not a mistake. We do not do feedback forms at this conference. I know a lot of people started leaving now. We don't do feedback forms. It's a very terrible idea to fill a feedback form and give feedback to people. It's much better to walk up to people and tell them or try and influence and contribute in terms of improving the situation. There are small things that can be fixed and I hope you will take responsibility along with us to fix some of those things. For example, there's not enough chairs in the room. That's okay. There are a lot of empty chairs and we can try and help each other. No point filling that in the feedback form because that's only going to happen a year later. Too late to fix the problem. Let's take charge now and let's fix some of these things. With that, I'm going to shut up and I'm going to let you enjoy the conference. We will meet again post lunch where we will have the second keynote for the day. Thank you again. Coffee and tea will be outside. This is going to be hall number one. Track number one is going to be here. Track number two is over there. Outside, we have marked so you can figure these things out, I'm sure. Coffee and tea is served outside. I'm going to open these halls now. Thank you again.