Agile Dev East 2016 - Agile Development

Although continuous delivery (CD) and DevOps are growing in popularity, not much practical information is available about how to get started. This hands-on technical tutorial is the place to get your feet wet and your questions answered. Bring a laptop with the appropriate software installed (see note below), and Ken Mugrage will provide everything else you need for this workshop. You will configure a complete continuous delivery pipeline from source code commit through deployment. Learn when to run each common type of automated test for the fastest possible...

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on...

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability,...

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills...

You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster. You are ready to take on the world—when reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from “What is management’s role on a scrum project?”...

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns on their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides...

Ryan Ripley relates that during his last agile transformation project, a key stakeholder asked, “Why are we adopting agile?” Ryan talked about increasing quality, delivering software sooner, and fostering a more collaborative relationship with business partners. After a few moments, the stakeholder raised his hand and said, “I get all that. But how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?” Ryan says that leaders must answer the better, faster, cheaper question if they want their agile transformation and associated projects...

Join Adam Serediuk on his journey leading change during the transition from IT Ops to DevOps and the driving forces behind making this change. In this non-tool talk, Adam describes the cultural and organizational approaches, challenges, and techniques his company used in establishing successful DevOps teams and their continuing journey toward NoOps. Adam outlines the steps his organization took to reshape its operations and development teams along with the reasons and the opportunities for making those changes—with tradeoffs and benefits. Any IT Ops team trying...

You’re agile. You talk the talk and walk the walk. Just like the twelfth principle of the Agile Manifesto says—“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”—you have regular retrospectives. So, why are your agile practices, whether based on Scrum or SAFe or even XP, the same as everyone else’s? Brandon Carlson explores another agile principle that often seems to be forgotten: “Simplicity—Maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.” Using a case study example, Brandon shows you...

Requirements elicitation and documentation can be frustrating in an agile process. Some interpret the Agile Manifesto statement “working software over comprehensive documentation” to mean that no requirements documentation is warranted because the code documents the requirements. Others are concerned that if details of requirements are not treated equal to code, they are lost for future program modifications. Ken Pugh does not find this an either-or situation and describes ways to create requirements that are a balance between these two extremes. He shows how to...

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) have been key to increasing the pace at which development teams can deliver value to the business while keeping quality high. However, many teams are finding that their build pipelines are hard to manage, with builds taking so long that they often halt the development process. Abraham Marin-Perez explores the negative effects of long builds and discusses the most common solutions that organizations apply—many of which involve unfortunate compromises that reduce the benefits of CI/CD. In order to fix this...

Agile done well can lead to great successes—rapid delivery of business and user value, high product quality, fast time to market, and engineering productivity. Agile done poorly leads to skepticism of the methodologies, distrust of the principles, and failure to deliver—in essence, a snafu [sna-foo]: a badly confused or ridiculous muddled situation. James Waletzky has gathered a set of snafus (anti-patterns) that pose challenges for organizations adopting agile. Set yourself up for success by understanding where teams go wrong with agile, complete with tips on...

An organization’s ability to adopt a DevOps approach for software delivery often hinges on a cultural transformation that may be more difficult than technology issues. The keys to success are change supported from the top down, combined with people on the front line who are willing to experiment, fail fast, continuously learn, and openly collaborate in a blameless and fun working environment. When done right, the result is a renewed level of trust between the people involved and the organization they work for. Join Al Wagner as he shares how teams can increase...

Imagine you’re on an agile development team—and something feels weird. People disagree constantly, and when they finally do agree, no one commits to deliver the solution. Vocal team members dominate the conversation. You don’t trust your teammates. They don’t trust you. This isn’t a team. It’s just a group of people. Does this sound familiar? Because people are people—not interchangeable robots—building high-performing, self-organizing teams takes specific skills and a lot of work. In his experience working with agile teams, Robb Pieper has often taken on the...

In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, used in some form today by 90 percent of agile teams. As Scrum starts its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework it once was. Yes, it has met—and dealt with—commercial, technical, philosophical, and practical challenges. Dave West discusses the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from more than 200,000 open assessments and 50,000 professional assessments to describe its challenges and evolution. Learn how to: (1) add the development infrastructure for...

Many companies are either talking about DevOps or already working toward adoption. Books and conferences around DevOps abound, and it seems that everyone is hiring DevOps engineers. What impact does adopting DevOps have on a company and its people? What does DevOps look like from the inside out? What does it mean to be a DevOps engineer? What do you need to do and learn to make sure you’re not left behind? Adam Auerbach answers these questions, explains the overall DevOps movement, and discusses how DevOps is driving changes to our organizational culture and...

While Agile has become mainstream at the team level with much research and practical experience, scaling agile to the enterprise is a topic of increasing interest and practice—with some successes and some spectacular failures. As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mariya Breyter shares anti-patterns for scaling agile that you need to recognize quickly and change right away. Most agile scaling frameworks address agile processes and organizational structures. However, Mariya thinks it is time to look at...

As organizations embark on agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are thrown into the Product Owner role after reading a book or two and, perhaps a few days of CSPO training. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team. Alicia Cyrus compares the responsibilities of product ownership and traditional project management—similar roles, same goal of achieving working software (or services) and productive teams, but...

Pushing code into Git and continuously building web applications with Jenkins are only the first steps toward a streamlined development workflow and agile delivery. Canary, Blue/Green, feature flag, and rolling update release strategies help teams deploy with confidence and zero downtime. Cloud Container platforms (Kubernetes, Docker Data Center, AWS ECS) provide automated workload scheduling and release capabilities. By automated environment provisioning with Terraform or AWS OpsWorks, teams can rapidly spin-up and tear-down Dev, Test, and production...

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explores how agile is being used well beyond traditional software development in the Internet of Things. First, Don dives into how agile is being used today in a wide range of development environments. He discusses cloud-based software-as-a-service, large complex mission critical systems, and both mobile software and hardware. Next, he reviews the IoT, describes how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and shares how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Don...

As your organization embraces DevOps practices, you may run into bottlenecks trying to find the infrastructure needed to support automated unit tests, load tests, UI tests, CI builds, automated deployments, and other parts of a continuous delivery pipeline. Esteban Garcia shares ways to use the cloud to remove these obstacles and help your team focus on delivering software. Using Microsoft's Azure infrastructure as an example, Esteban shows how you can quickly create a test environment with a web application and a database, and then use those resources to support...