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.

Many companies avoid genuine innovation for fear of making potentially complex changes without producing measurable results. But you can start small with internal changes that have limited scope and that deliver prompt solutions, so there's less upfront investment—and less risk. Here's how to innovate inexpensively.

Being a mentor is a big responsibility. It becomes a greater one when the person you're mentoring is set to become a mentor to someone else. What advice would you impart to your mentee? What do you wish you'd thought of when you were starting out as a mentor? Payson Hall distilled his experience into five principles.