The twelfth QED conference is over! The conferecne took place 6–8 May in Zadar – and managed to attract the largest number of participants so far. Many IT experts (as well as experts in other fields) shared their business and life experiences through lectures, round table discussions and workshops. They all agreed that a good experiment cannot be random, it needs to be planned, done, evaluated and implemented.

During the three days, the experiment has been discussed in almost thirty conference formats.The will to experiment is in all of us, but the participants learned how to experiment well when it comes to strategy, business development, sales, interpersonal relations and different tools. The keynote was Tina Lee Odinsky-Zec, Director of Director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Center at Zagreb School of Economics and Management, who held a very interesting workshop where participants experimented with creativity.  Dragan Petric, executive editor of Bug magazine, talked about what can be done to turn a business venture in the tech community into a roaring success. David Brakoniecki of BP3 talked about using decision management techniques to conduct experiments in business. On the other hand, Gregory Keegan from agile42 confirmed that experimenting is of utmost importance for agile organizational changes. Apart from lectures held by a number of international speakers from companies such as Orange Polska, IBM and Sberbank Slovenia, we need to highlight the interesting lecture given by Zlatko Hrbuda from Zagrebačka banka. He talked about robots and artificial intelligence in banking systems and pointed out that artificial intelligence will carry out more than two million transactions for business clients in Zagrebačka banka in 2018.

This year the fun part of the conference included a performance by Ivan Kožar who demonstrated the musical Tesla coil and electrified the sky above Zadar. The STEMI team decided to make their Hexapod robot dance to the tunes of world-renowned Croatian pianist Matej Meštrović.

The last day of the conference was reserved for one of the most interesting debates – the round table on agile transition. The representatives of Erste&Steiermärkische Banke, Vipnet and Banca Intese RS shared their experiences with implementing the agile work technique, tips about adjusting to the changes that agile brings, both good and bad sides they experienced and the future perspective of agile.

During the closing ceremony CROZ’s Vedrana Miholić revealed the topic of the next QED conference. “There are no good experiences in organizations that don’t allow experiments. The real difference between an environment in which you really can experiment and one in which you can’t is the degree of trust within the company. Trust is one of the most important prerequisites for a good-quality experiment, but it’s also important for systems developed by computer scientists. Systems need to be reliable and there needs to be confidence that they will function well. We’d like to talk about that trust next year as part of the next installment of QED.”