Abstract: Software engineering teams face a number of challenges on a regular basis. Software practitioners have employed agile methods for over two decades to work around challenges such as inadequate customer collaboration, poor management practices, teamwork issues, and coordination challenges in large-scale teams. While they have served us well for over two decades, agile methods are not without limitations. Transitioning into agile methods as well as adapting agile practices to suit different domains such as Finance, can be challenging for software teams, management, and firms at large. In her keynote, Rashina will share her experiences from industrial Agile research to shed light on what’s been working, what’s missing, and what can be done better, including a vision of a new future of software project management that combines a deeply human-centric approach (‘the heart’) with AI-assisted techniques (‘the mind’) to augment and boost current agile practice.

Bio: Rashina Hoda has been researching industrial agile software engineering practice since the mid-2000s. She is constantly in awe of how practitioners make projects work, despite the practical challenges. With her research teams, she has developed evidence-based theories and published over 100 research articles on topics such as self-organising teams, self-assignment, role of the project manager in agile teams, coordination in large-scale agile, and human values in agile methods. In 2017, Rashina received a distinguished paper award on her ‘theory of becoming agile’ at ICSE, which she later applied to present the idea of ‘agile nation’ to address wider societal challenges in a 2019 TEDxAuckland talk. Rashina was selected as one of the 2020-2021 ‘Superstars of STEM’ by Science and Technology Australia. Rashina enjoys presenting the ‘voice of agile research’ to a wide range of audiences. She is an Associate Professor in Software Engineering at Monash University, Melbourne, Australia.

Professor of Software Engineering, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Australia www.rashina.com