This book contains all of the material presented at the 2014 ACE! Conference on Lean and Agile Software Development which took place in Kraków, Poland on 16 and 17 June, 2014.

I'm spending about $3000 in the production of this book and I have no intention of profiting, so I'd take it as a kindness if you'd pay whatever it's worth to you to help offset the production costs (mostly the sketchnote artists and transcription services). Once the costs have been covered, any future income will go 100% to charity. At this point, the book contains the transcripts of all of the talks and all of the sketchnotes. Most of the transcripts have been edited by the speakers for easier reading. All of the slides that we have are embedded, thanks to the hard work of volunteer (and talented skethcnote artist) Derek Graham.

The account thus far is as follows:

Transcription $250

Sketchnotes $1395

Total Costs: $1645

Sales to date: $38

Net: -$1607

Contents:

Liz Keogh: Keynote - Superheated Test Tubes and Anti-Bumping Granules

Explosive revolution vs. simmering evolution: the contexts in which each of them work, why it might be necessary to do one or the other, and the power we have as individuals to help make change a gentler, faster process.

Tom Gilb: Keynote - Power to the Programmers

Stephen Parry: Keynote - Three principles for designing adaptive, innovative and engaging workplaces

Hear how a global software organisation decided to trust their staff to redesign the work, the senior manager’s job roles, and even the organisational structures. All of which lead to remarkable positive outcomes.

Russ Miles: Pair Programming Considered Bad For Your 'Mental' Health

Examining the latest theories from psychology and how they throw new, interesting and sometimes frightening light on the tools, techniques, process and practices that are often the dogma of modern software development.

Paweł Brodziński: Culture: The forgotten bit

We'll explore how to tame this fuzzy culture beast. You may learn why some of your efforts were failing or how to be a better leader or that it’s time to move on and find a new job. Most of all you will understand one more layer of a complex environment we call a workplace.

Martin Burns: Dive into A3 Thinking

An introduction to the A3 method; a powerful improvement and problem-solving thinking approach that: Solves problems effectively, Keeps everyone on-board so they *stay* solved, and Develops problem-solvers yet is operated on a single piece of paper.

Michael Hogan: How SAFe Differs from Scrum

Covering Don Reinertsen's concept of cost of delay as an economic framework for thinking about Agile and translating Agile into terms accountants at large organizations can understand and the concept of Release Trains and portfolio level planning.

Olaf Lewitz: Reduce politics and improve culture

The first commandment of corporate politics-Cover Thine Ass-leads to so much wasted effort. Olaf will help us understand how to create options for people to let go of this education - and make way for wholehearted organisations. We deserve to love what we do.

Håkan Forss: Flow Thinking

Learn how to shift your focus from keeping people and equipment busy to having work flowing to your customers without unwanted waiting time and how that new focus will affect your meetings, process management, and metrics.

Marcin Floryan: #NoLearning

Explore some common misconceptions about learning, discover examples of failures to learn at a grand scale and what we can all do, as individuals, to make sure that the permanent bombardment of our sensory inputs results in meaningful connections in our neural networks.

Kasia Mrowca: The Art of Saying No 

What to do with senseless requirements? You might try to defend yourself from doing nonsense by estimating accordingly. There is another way! Kasia will reveal the secret art of saying no and expressing disagreement in a firm but user-friendly manner.

Zuzi Sochowa: Mastering Retrospectives

During this talk I will share with you from my experiences how to become ‘master of retrospectives’ and how to use it to build trust and openness in many different situations.

Gitte Klitgaard and Lilian Nijboer: Why Change is So Hard 

Even if people (say they) want to change there is often resistance. We address what causes this resistance and what you can do to help people overcome it by using examples we encountered in our own work and welcome you to share your experiences.

Monika Konieczny: How to Wake Up and Feed the Mysterious Motivation Beast

Learn various approaches to motivation and ideas how to tweak your daily rituals like scrum, planning, demo, and most importantly retrospective to increase motivation and in result achieve Ri (Shu-Ha-Ri) level.

Torbjörn Gyllebring: Sustainable Pace: lessons learned from running 100 miles

How does preparation, execution and the dynamics change? This is a talk about running, and about how one XP couch potato had to dig deep and apply all his insights into sustainable pace to persevere.

Andrea Provaglio: The Expectation

One of the major sources of resistance, as well as of failure, are misplaced or unrealistic expectations. This talk will give you practical "tools" that you can use to promote change and innovation in yourself and in the environment in which you work.

Darci Ducher: Expertise is Not Enough

Is user experience expertise enough to design the perfect piece of software? This talk will cover how experimentation is often more important than pure expertise in creating the types of experiences most software teams want their customers to have.

Tammer Saleh: Teaching the Elephant to Dance

Agile process meets Agile platform. In less than a year, we managed to turn around a project that was stagnant and unresponsive. Within six months we migrated a public platform from dedicated hardware to the AWS cloud, and moved from yearly to weekly deployments.