Agile Dev East 2016 - Agile for the Enterprise
Monday, November 14
Creating a Continuous Delivery Pipeline: A Hands-On Workshop
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...
Fostering Sustained Agility
Has your team been struggling to become one of those high-performing teams that you were assured it would be if you started doing agile? Are your teams stuck on the agile transformation plateau? Most organizations start off strong in their transformation toward an agile mindset, successfully implementing team practices such as sprints and stand-ups but often a plateau or even a slip back occurs. Why? Because many leaders do not focus on fostering sustained agility—that is, creating an overall environment that influences individuals and teams to be focused on...
Tuesday, November 15
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common...
Wednesday, November 16
Building Product Development Communities: From Startups to the Enterprise
When we want to produce more product with the same number of staff, we normally think about adding more process. David Hussman believes we don’t necessarily need to do that. Instead of talking about scaling agile, David focuses on scaling product learning—while avoiding process inflation along the way. Topics he addresses are: moving from Scrum teams to product team to focus on product success, mapping teams to product(s), interconnecting product discovery and product delivery techniques, and the challenges associated with cross team dependencies and constraints...
Unconventional Agility: Beyond Dogma
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...
Introduction to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is one of the fastest growing frameworks for large teams doing agile—now second only to Scrum. Scrum helps small collocated teams develop solutions in an agile fashion, and up until now, most teams have had to scale agile for multiple teams and program management on their own. Anthony Crain introduces SAFe, which has quickly become the most popular technique used by very large agile organizations. SAFe targets groups of 50 or more people—and even thousands—on one or several related projects. Anthony assumes you know agile, the...
Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Large-Scale Agile Transformation
A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today, executives are asking their teams how they'll make the transformation. We have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, but executives now demand a greater level of assurance that the plan is actually going to work. Executives are tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Executives want to know how agile is going to help make things better. Mike Cottmeyer begins by discussing the elements of an agile...
Agile ALM: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement
Many organizations struggle to improve their existing IT processes to drive their software and systems development work. This leaves technology managers and teams to use whatever worked for them on the last project, often resulting in a lack of integration and poor communication and collaboration across the organization. Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) is a comprehensive approach to defining development and operations processes that are aligned with agile methodology. Bob Aiello explores how to use DevOps principles and practices to drive the entire...
Thursday, November 17
Solve Everyday IT Problems with DevOps
Some believe that DevOps is only applicable to Internet-based companies with a desire to disrupt existing businesses. On the contrary, DevOps practices can dramatically reduce many everyday IT problems—defects, incidents, waste, bottlenecks, downtime, and infrastructure fragility. Sherry Chang dives into these problem areas and outlines the DevOps tools, practices, culture, and other artifacts necessary to eradicate them. She shares practical tips and hard-learned lessons from Intel IT to arm you with the knowledge and tools you need for DevOps adoption. You and...
Continuous Delivery of Microservices: Patterns and Processes
Tight coupling and interdependence between dev teams slows down development, and environment drift causes deployment problems when promoting applications between environments. The introduction of the microservices architecture expands on the role of SOA by allowing for the looser coupling of endpoints and environments, with more predictability, flexibility, and agility. Anders Wallgren says that microservices have gained attention for their ability to facilitate innovation among dev teams. By architecting applications into sets of smaller services that are more...
Scaling Agile: Remembering Tolstoy’s Unhappy Family Analogy
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...
The Lean Agile Portfolio
Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion...
Use the Cloud to Enable Continuous Delivery
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...