To successfully persuade someone of something, it’s important to keep in mind how you come across to others—when you’re trying to persuade and when you’re not. It's a good idea to build up trust and credibility before you need something, listen to others when they're in need, and think about tailoring your message.

While a postmortem, or retrospective, is done after a project is completed, a premortem is done before the project starts as a way to imagine that the project failed and to explore what went wrong. You list every possible thing that can go wrong, then devise solutions to the most probable risks—before you need them.

With a week full of sessions, tutorials, training classes, and events, the Agile + DevOps East software conference had plenty of takeaways. Here are four highlights, including discussions about agile estimation, finding your ideal job, some challenges to advancing test automation, and leading self-organizing teams.