Scrum to Swarm: Rethinking Software Delivery for the Age of Agents
This session explores the new muscle memory software teams need as development shifts from synchronous, single-threaded work to asynchronous, multi-threaded collaboration with AI agents. Agile was designed for human handoffs, so what still fits, what breaks, and what needs to change in the daily flow of modern engineering teams?
As models and agents become commoditized, advantage moves elsewhere: high-quality context, fast review loops, strong automation, clean architectures, and the practices that help agents produce reliable results. Just as important, teams must rethink how policy, governance, and security are applied early and at scale in an agent-driven SDLC.
Through practical concepts and live demos, we will look at how agentic workflows can eliminate menial work, unlock parallel implementation paths, make long-delayed refactors and rewrites newly viable, and challenge familiar Agile assumptions around ceremonies, story points, and velocity. Attendees will leave with a concrete mental model for evolving their SDLC, team habits, and platform strategy for the age of agentic engineering.
About the speaker
Colin Dembovsky
Colin Dembovsky is the Director of Field Services for GitHub Copilot. He is a self-proclaimed DevOpsologist and was a Microsoft ALM MVP from 2011 to 2022. He is based in Spring, TX but remains proudly South African 🇿🇦!
After completing an MSc in Computer Science at Rhodes University, he worked as a developer and later systems architect, implementing DevOps “by feel” and in the trenches. In 2010, he left development to start consulting, using his experience, insight and strategic thinking to help organizations put DevOps into practice. By 2019, Colin was leading a DevOps practice at 10th Magnitude. In 2021, Colin joined GitHub as a Solutions Engineer.
Colin is passionate about helping teams improve the quality of their software and do it more efficiently and securely. Colin is a frequent guest speaker and regularly blogs at http://colinsalmcorner.com and can be found on twitter at https://twitter.com/colindembovsky and on https://github.com/colindembovsky.
When he is not working, he is playing guitar, mandolin or drums, 3D printing, hacking an rPi, flying a drone, board-gaming, or entertaining his wife and 2 kids.