The Blurred Boundaries Between Dev, Test, and Ops
Ken Johnston, Microsoft
It’s like watching a chase scene in a major summer blockbuster movie. You’re totally focused on the action when suddenly you realize the background is a blurry mess. Trees, buildings, street signs, and pedestrians on the sidewalk have become one mass of smeared colors. As we increase the rate of new software releases and rely more and more on running web services for both interfaces and apps, we are beginning to see the boundaries blur between development, test, and operations. Ken Johnston pokes some fun at the walls between our disciplines and then dives deep into working examples of organizations that are erasing the lines between Dev, Test, and Ops to create more fluid and innovative businesses. Using his experiences from the Bing search development team at Microsoft, Ken describes the impact of lean thinking, Kanban, cloud computing, and continuous deployment on role definitions. He shares his insights on the evolution of testing in this new data rich, continuously evolving ecosystem of live web services. Rather than redrawing the Dev-Test-Ops lines, you can become part of the revolution that helps blur the lines into total obscurity.
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Ken Johnston
Integrating Systems Thinking into Enterprise Agile
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
While Scrum and XP have become very popular in agile development shops, most companies adopting them run into problems beyond just a few teams. These challenges often fall into a common set of patterns, which points to a lack of systems thinking—the process of understanding how things influence one another within a larger whole. Alan Shalloway shares his ideas on how the agile community can move beyond its team-centric approach to adopt a more holistic, systems-based approach. Systems thinking creates new opportunities to create substantially larger development teams—Alan calls them “pan-teams.” These teams work interdependently with a common vision and context. Pan-teams enhance the motivations for the teams and individuals to collaborate as a normal part of their daily work thus reducing the amount of forced collaboration. Although not a panacea, systems thinking provides a better platform to solve enterprise-wide challenges because your organization learns to approach problem solving holistically and avoid the trap of unintended consequences.
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Alan Shalloway
Sustainable Software Quality—at Warp Speed
Richard Hensley, McKesson Health Solutions
Businesses demand high levels of product quality, development productivity, planning reliability, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And yet, people and organizations often ignore all those goals and focus on building systems with as many features as possible delivered by a specific due date. When the work is complete, retrospectives surface the dissatisfaction concerning missed dates, poor quality, technical debt, and more. Richard Hensley describes his last three years at McKesson, where they have delivered 103 production releases with no significant defects, fulfilled sixteen multi-million dollar contracts, maintained high employee morale, and trained 5,000 users. Employing the Kanban approach for change management, McKesson implemented new tools selected from RUP, XP, Scrum, and lean—daily focused planning, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, TDD, information radiators, user stories, etc. They automated anything they could and measured everything possible. Most importantly, though, they developed a culture that puts quality and continuous improvement at the forefront. Richard outlines the ideas behind McKesson’s cultural and delivery success, and describes how their approaches can work in your business.
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Richard Hensley
Agile Measures that Matter: What Are You Really Learning?
David Hussman, DevJam
“Speed” describes how fast an object is moving and let’s us compute the distance it has traveled. “Velocity” is different—it defines both speed and direction. So why do I meet so many teams who talk about their velocity but lack direction? Once you can track speed and distance, the real challenge becomes envisioning, validating, and measuring direction and purpose. David Hussman explores what teams typically measure and track in agile projects today, and compares these to what is most important to the business and to the project’s success. Come ready to question what you are measuring and how it is helping you improve. Join David to learn how to use data in more meaningful ways, discover new ways to measure velocity, and identify new tools to help ensure you are doing more of what is really needed. Come away with the answer to the key question: How do your teams know that they are building the right things for the business?
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David Hussman
