Concurrent Sessions

History repeats itself as people once again become addicted to process. Today’s difficult problems call for a renaissance of agility, drawing on past success as we invent the future. Real value lies in intentional and contextual selection of agile tools instead of the noise associated with calls to practice “pure agile.” It is time to replace process-based thinking with outcome-based thinking. It is time to stop talking about process adherence and start focusing on product delivery. David Hussman calls on us to heed the audacious Frank Zappa’s challenge to “Shut Up ‘n Play Yer Guitar.” David speaks to selecting tools that foster measurable outcomes like product sales or market change. Topics covered range from product thinking to regression deficit to building teams and connecting programs to portfolios. Warning: If you are looking for an agile love-in, steer clear of this session. If you are looking to be challenged, show up ready to play yer guitar (metaphorically speaking, of course).

For organizations developing large-scale applications, transitioning to agile is challenging enough. But if your organization has not yet adopted an automation culture, brace yourself for a big surprise because automation is essential to agile success. From the safety nets provided by automated unit and acceptance tests to the automation of build, build verification, and deployment processes, the iterative nature of agile demands a culture of automation across your engineering organization. Geoff Meyer shares lessons learned in adopting a test automation culture as the Dell Enterprise Systems Group simultaneously adopted Scrum and agile processes across its entire software product portfolio. Learn to address the practical challenges of establishing an automation culture at the outset by ensuring that your organizational makeover incorporates changes to your hiring, staffing, and training practices. Find out how you can apply automation beyond the Scrum team in areas of continuous integration, scale and stress testing, and performance testing.

Recently we’ve been seeing a lot of things that just don’t happen in real life. A managing director at Bank of America abandons decades of organizational “best practices” and recreates his organization by letting people organize their own teams. And, if that weren’t unusual enough, the teams even choose their own coach. Impossible. A group of former managers reinvent their role as servants rather than masters. Also impossible. Then other managers who have been working at the bank for more than twenty years abandon their lofty titles and move out of their corner offices to join software delivery teams. Clearly impossible. The final straw is seeing a Java developer happily learning COBOL from a mainframe programmer. If not impossible, rather improbable. So what’s going on? Join Dan North and Kyle Thomson as they discuss these impossible things and what else has been happening before breakfast. It's all mad as a hatter.

Many organizations struggle with transforming from the old-style specialized silos of skills into agile teams with generalized specialists. Without this pivot, we get sub-optimal agile/Scrum environments. Howard Deiner describes what can go wrong when integrating testers properly into an agile organization and how to fix that. Without a proper agile mindset, an organization will “revert to form” and return to their old practices after a frustrating failure to adapt agile. Howard examines the real role of testers in the organization and identifies where they truly add value in the production of quality code. He speaks frankly about the skills that agile testers must master and the issues that organizations have that complicate testers’ lives. Finally, Howard discusses exactly what testers need to do to add value to the software development process and how they integrate in the DevOps model that is a contemporary solution to an age old issue.

One of the most cherished concepts of the Agile Manifesto is valuing individuals and interactions over processes and tools. Within this idea is the implicit assumption that individuals innately know how to interact. Dramatic lessons from aviation suggest otherwise. During the mid-1960s the frequent crashes of perfectly good aircraft alarmed the world’s airlines. Investigators discovered nothing lacking in the pilot’s “stick and rudder” skills; these accidents were the result of the flight crew’s inability to work as a team. Steve Adolph shares four leadership roles necessary for well managed communications in software development—Sheltering to create quiet, focused time needed to get the job done; Supporting  to cover the backs of others; Boundary Spanning to connect the silos of communications; and Drum Beating to prevent communications from grinding to a halt. Some individuals are blessed with “natural leadership” talents, but, no worries, these skills can be learned. Join Steve to discover how.

Top web companies employ continuous delivery of software to build and deploy systems faster and gain a marked competitive advantage. You can do it, too! Andy Singleton shares the patterns for testing in real time that result in more frequent and more reliable releases. He explains why you will have to invest seriously in automated tests and shares experiences developing the most time-efficient types of automated tests, setting up a social structure to get the tests you need, and employing existing layers of testing and production monitoring. Then, Andy goes on to describe the strategies and techniques within the development/delivery process that enable continuous delivery: developer code review workflows; specific ways to use Git, Perforce, and Subversion for version control; continuous integration approaches; and more. Join a discussion on the ways continuous delivery changes the roles of developers and testers and accelerates the value you deliver to your business.

If you’ve ever been involved in promoting cultural change within an organization, you may have experienced something even more disheartening than flat-out rejection—a full rollback of hard-won cultural change followed by a decade-long resentment of anyone remotely associated with the implementation. This has happened at countless organizations with agile, with SOA, with virtualization—and it’s starting to happen with DevOps. How can such a simple idea that’s been so successful at so many organizations become such a resounding failure at others? It’s not the organization, and it’s certainly not DevOps. The problem lies in the implementation, and ultimately, with its promoters and champions. Alex Papadimoulis discusses what this "DevOps thing" is all about, goes over the technical and organizational strategies for a successful long-term DevOps implementation, shares a few big failures at big companies, and covers the common and not-so-common pitfalls when promoting this type of cultural change.

In just a few years, the Lean Startup movement has gained influence by promoting a powerful but simple agile product management toolset—one that complements agile software development approaches such as Scrum and kanban. Arlen Bankston explores the tools and techniques product owners at startup companies and others are employing today for project visioning, experimental design, evaluating new feature impact, prototyping, split testing, and gaining early customer feedback. He demonstrates tools like Google Analytics and reveals where to find and how to exploit "pirate metrics." With case studies, Arlen illustrates how these approaches have been applied on large and small projects. Because the Scrum Product Owner role is often oversimplified yet difficult to execute well, these techniques have been welcomed in organizations ranging from Silicon Valley startups to the US government and its contractors. Join Arlen and add your name to the list!

Want your sprint/iteration planning to take less than fifteen minutes (excluding tasking)? The key is in the story writing we do during backlog grooming. Although the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has little to say about story writing, this "speed grooming" practice makes iteration planning a breeze, and better software comes out of the process. André Dhondt shares stories of real-world agile teams using this technique and how they've moved to a customer-empathy mindset. How does it work? You need to develop great stories—customer-focused, just barely enough detail, in thin vertical slices, and collectively designed. André reviews story writing and describes how to do the three phases of grooming in under one team-hour a week (typically, two 25-minute meetings) by defining the phases—Exploring, Sizing, and Splitting, plus one off-line activity Naming the Universe. Learn to avoid the overhead of long pre-backlog sessions, reduce Product Owner prep time, and prevent hidden dependencies from bumping a story out to the next iteration.

The Kanban Pizza Game is a hands-on simulation designed to teach the core elements of a kanban system—visualize the workflow, limit your work-in-process (WIP), manage flow, make process policies explicit, and improve collaboratively. Join Brad Swanson as the proprietor of your very own pizza shop to experience how kanban helps eliminate bottlenecks, minimize waste, and keep up with customer demand—all while competing against other teams for the title of “Pizza King.” Find out if you can really improve throughput and profit through the sometimes-counterintuitive practices of single-piece flow and limiting WIP. Finally, Brad relates your experience back to the software world to show how kanban can be an evolutionary path to lean-agile development. Whether you are a novice seeking to learn kanban in a memorable way or a seasoned practitioner looking for a great simulation to teach kanban to others, this is the session for you.

Even the fastest agile teams can struggle when they “test at the end.” As automation efforts fall behind, untested features pile up—and so does the pressure to cut corners. In contrast, Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) “tests first” by writing automated specifications for a new feature using concrete examples in plain language. This approach focuses everyone—from analysts and customers to developers and testers—on the same definition of “done.” Join Nate Oster as he explains his skeptical journey from traditional testing to ATDD. Nate shares the hard-won wisdom and real-world problems of successful test-driven teams from startups through multinationals. Traditional test scripts obscure the behavior of your product with long procedures and technical details. With ATDD, we briefly describe even complex behaviors using specific examples. At each stage of the agile testing journey, Nate illustrates how you can apply these practices right away with your own teams.