Tackling Tech Debt at Scale: Smarter Strategies with AI! (Tues, September 9, 2025)
AI is often referred to as the "magic bullet" to replace engineers. This idea stems from engineers rapidly deploying at speeds that impress leadership. Looking deeper, we see critical flaws in enterprise environments. AI focuses on point solutions without considering scalability or roadmaps, creating significant tech debt. Without alignment to Program Increments and proper definition in Program Backlogs, these solutions rarely support sustainable value streams. When engineers review AI code, they often can't understand what it does, increasing maintenance risk during turnover. This undermines quality principles and prevents Agile Release Trains from delivering predictable value. We can leverage AI to minimize technical debt by integrating it with architectural runways, using enabler stories for dependencies, and ensuring solutions align with portfolio vision rather than just delivering isolated features.
Key Takeaways
Using the Power of Story Telling to Prioritize Tech Debt (Thur, September 11, 2025)
In software development, technical debt often becomes a barrier between business, product, and engineering teams. This talk will explain how storytelling can be a powerful tool to demystify technical debt, making it accessible and understandable for everyone in any team or organization. We will step through an example of how unrecognized and concerning amounts of growing tech debt was explained to align stakeholders through the power story telling. By bridging the gap between teams, we will show how we fostered a culture where everyone becomes a steward of the product, always thinking about the most impactful customer experience.
Technical debt is often misunderstood and undervalued, leading to decisions that can negatively impact the product and customer experience. By using storytelling, we can create a shared understanding and commitment to managing technical debt, ensuring that all teams are aligned and working towards the same goals.
Using the Power of Story Telling to Prioritize Tech Debt (Tues, September 16, 2025)
In software development, technical debt often becomes a barrier between business, product, and engineering teams. This talk will explain how storytelling can be a powerful tool to demystify technical debt, making it accessible and understandable for everyone in any team or organization. We will step through an example of how unrecognized and concerning amounts of growing tech debt was explained to align stakeholders through the power story telling. By bridging the gap between teams, we will show how we fostered a culture where everyone becomes a steward of the product, always thinking about the most impactful customer experience.
Technical debt is often misunderstood and undervalued, leading to decisions that can negatively impact the product and customer experience. By using storytelling, we can create a shared understanding and commitment to managing technical debt, ensuring that all teams are aligned and working towards the same goals.
Protecting Your AI Agents from Threats (Wed, October 1, 2025)
As AI adoption accelerates across industries, securing AI agents has become critical for business operations. Organizations integrating AI into products and operations often overlook the unique security risks these systems face. AI agents are vulnerable to multiple threat vectors including prompt injection, data poisoning, social engineering, agent hijacking, resource exhaustion, and supply chain attacks. Attackers can exploit vulnerabilities in infrastructure and ML models to manipulate outputs and compromise system integrity. These adversarial attacks involve subtle modifications to input data that cause ML models to make incorrect predictions while evading detection. The consequences can be severe, especially in critical applications like autonomous vehicles, healthcare diagnostics, and financial systems, requiring robust evaluation frameworks and proactive defense mechanisms. Learn how to build a secure AI agent foundation to ensure reliability in high-stakes environments.