 which was kind of the popular agile method back then. And over the years now, over the last nine years, we have done over 50 conferences, and the idea has always been to kind of spread the awareness about agile methods and kind of reach out to practitioners and to network with them. And I'm extremely thankful to our friend Vinod, who I can't see anymore. I think he's outside, who actually helped us put this conference together. So I'll quickly run through some of the things that we will give some background about the conference, and then we'll get started with Venkat who's already here, his keynote. How many people here, just so I can get a sense of who's in the audience? How many people here have attended any other agile conference before? Quick show of hands. So that's good to see a lot of new people, which is fantastic. What we'll do is, we'll start with a quick activity so everyone can kind of break the ice a little bit and then warm up. So we are ready for Venkat session. What I want you to do is, talk to your neighbor, any one neighbor and ask them, what is their favorite agile practice? Each of you can share with each other, what's your favorite agile practice and why. All right, that I think is good. So everyone's got to know what your neighbor's favorite agile practices. Next, what I want you to do is turn to the other neighbors. If you spoke to the person who's sitting on the left, now turn to the right and speak to that person and ask them, what is their worst agile practice? Which practice they hate the most? You need to speak to someone else, not the same person. If you spoke to the person on the left, then you need to speak to the person on the right now. If you're sitting in the corner, then you need to go somewhere behind and find someone. I hear daily scrum a lot. If you spoke to the person on the right, they said practice X is their favorite practice. And then you spoke to the person on your left and they said that's the worst practice they experienced. Anyone's experienced polarity here? One person, all right. So what was that? Retrospectives. So one person said retrospective is their favorite, that's the best practice. Another person said that, all right, interesting. Anybody else? Yes, please. So the person on your right said daily stand-up is their favorite practice, while the other person said it's the worst practice. When it's done daily, that's a point, right? Daily stand-ups. We expect about 127 people, at least 127 people have registered for the conference, and from 34 different companies, this is actually fantastic, right? I mean, we have quite a bit of a variety of people who are gonna be coming to this conference, and if you look at the, understand and listen from other people's perspective, other people's experience, what it is to be at the beginning of this agile adoption cycle, right? Let's quickly look at some of our speakers. Do you guys recognize any of these guys in the picture? Some of them are sitting there in the back. We have some people sitting here. So you'll get to meet these speakers, and this is basically our program over the next, so this is today's program. I hope everyone's got the program sheet in your kits. You have a had a look at it. So we'll be starting with Venkat's keynote, and then we will do the agile boot camp, and then split into two rooms. So post lunch, track one will continue here, and track two, we will go to Malabar in a session, where you're not getting value or not contributing value, right? So for example, if you're sitting in this boring session right now, and you don't think you're getting any value out of it, then you need to use your two feet and take yourself to a place where you'll find more value. It is not rude to get up in between a talk and leave. Is that clear? Of course, you don't want to disturb everyone while you leave, so if you can leave silently, that's great. So because we'll be having two tracks, you'll be able to find another track where you can meet other people. If nothing else is happening, you can hang out outside, and maybe you will find other people who have similar thought process that it's a very boring session, right? I want to go, it will exactly match your expectation, which is why we say you are investing two days of your valuable time over here, and it is your responsibility to make sure you get maximum out of it. Is everyone okay with the law of two feet? It's very important that you practice the law of two feet. Every conference we run, and when we take feedback, people say this was the best thing we actually knew about the conference, right? So sometimes you find yourself in a session that might not be exactly what you're looking for, then you go find another session where you get value. Don't sit there and not twiddle your thumbs, because that's not what we are here for. I would quickly like to thank our sponsors, without whom this conference would have not been possible. So we have UVG Tech, and we have Cubust. Both of them have really helped us put this conference together. We also have Macafe and USD, who supported us to run this conference, so we greatly appreciate your support, thank you. This is quickly our team who put together this conference. I guess most of you might have already met Vinod or no Vinod. He's kind of, Vinod, why don't you come here please? So I met Vinod at Agile India 2012 conference, which is our global conference that happens in Bangalore, and Vinod said, you know, why don't we have this conference in Kerala? And 2013, he asked the same question again. And we said, well, if you want to do a conference in Kerala, you need to take an initiative. You need to do something, because we need someone at the ground to take some initiative. Along the way, we also had Manoj, who joined our team, who played, so Vinod is kind of the program chair. He was essentially this conference chair, who was essentially responsible for the whole conference. Last night he was here. I think he's not slept now for a week. Putting a conference like this is a lot of effort. Along the way, we also got Manoj, who joined us as a program chair, and he was essentially responsible for working with the speakers, going through the selection process, which took about two months to select the speakers and all of that stuff, right? So it's a fairly intense process. We have a few volunteers who are present here, helping us with all the logistics. So if you see them, do thank them. We also had a big review team from different companies who essentially reviewed the papers that were put in, and then did the selection of the speakers, spoke to the speakers to make sure they just don't write good stuff, but they also can present stuff. So all of that stuff went in to put this conference together. Because this is the first conference, without folks like these who have actually supported us, who have personally gone and helped us promote this conference inside their companies, outside their companies, without their support, I think this conference would have not been possible. So if you see them here, please do thank them, or if you belong to one of these companies, do thank them. Originally, we did have plans to give conference t-shirts, so probably some of you who have filled in the registration form would have filled in the t-shirt sizes and things like that. But as you understand, this is a non-profit conference that we run privately through people's money, and then the sponsor's money. We were hoping we would get sponsors for the t-shirt we did not, so we apologize, there are no t-shirts. That's pretty much it from my side. So I would hope that the next two days would be a really fruitful time for you to learn and network with people and share your experience as well. And we're all here, so let's make the best out of what we have. Thank you again. And I would call upon Venkat, who is our keynote speaker, who's flown all the way from Chennai and before that Sri Lanka and before that London and before that US, to come here to give this talk. It's an honor to have Venkat. He's one of the best speakers if you've interacted with him, or as you will get to see. So over to you Venkat.