Agile Dev East 2016 - IT Operations
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...
Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning
Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an...
Tuesday, November 15
Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps
DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to...
What DevOps Means for Testers
DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle....
Wednesday, November 16
Lead Teams that Deliver the Goods
In software development—and in many life activities—success often depends on how well we collaborate with our team and our stakeholders. Yet getting a group of people to truly work in partnership—let alone self-organize—is a daunting challenge. And we’re often left with lingering tensions, anxieties, and sub-par performance because teams are made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge, skill, and commitment. Although we need our team focused on delivering a great outcome, sometimes egos, personalities, and agendas get in the way. Andy Kaufman asks you to...
From Ops to DevOps—and Beyond
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 to...
Fear and Loathing in Systems Administration
Harold “Waldo” Grunenwald hears it all the time—DevOps doesn't work. Sometimes it's from people whose “DevOps transformation” consisted of a team rename or from operations people who scoff at the idea of letting development teams deploy to production frequently. Waldo demonstrates why placing the blame on DevOps practices and tooling is missing the point. He offers practical solutions to the problems of historically poor relations between operations and development teams, describes why delegating authority is the path to freedom, and shows why cross-functional...
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...
Make Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline as Fast as Possible
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...
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...
Evangelize for Your Project, Team, or Cause—No Matter What Role You Play
Whether you’re a developer, tester, ScrumMaster, CTO, or CEO, you know you have to listen to the needs of your customers and team; accept the fact that they are going to change their minds; and respond, adapt, tap dance, iterate, raise your voice, stand up, and delight your audience in order to ship out the best software of your entire life. Can I get a witness?! Jonathan Silva shares evangelizing strategies that can help you inspire at any level—whether a Fortune 500 company or a startup software company. These approaches include developing your point of view,...
DevOps and Continuous Delivery: What’s It All About?
It seems like everywhere you look someone is telling you to implement continuous delivery (CD) within a DevOps framework. Although there is a lot of talk about what you should do, there’s precious little about why or how. Ken Mugrage starts with the business issues that resulted in CD being formalized and how these issues can be made better with CD practices. He moves on to discuss the DevOps culture movement and clarifies the differences between CD and DevOps. Ken shares some useful ways you can start applying these concepts and practices. Throughout the...
Transform Organizational Culture for DevOps Success
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...
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...
Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist
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...
Testing and Measurement in DevOps: Find Solutions—Not More Problems
The promise of DevOps is to deliver new features faster following today’s best practices. However, blindly automating the delivery pipeline by installing Jenkins, Chef, and Docker without adapting test approaches will cause a great number of deployments to fail. While the tester’s role and testing are critical for the success of DevOps, the tester’s objective changes—from finding more defects to understanding the patterns that make deployments fail. Then, the job is to automate the detection of these patterns through quality gates into the pipeline. Using...
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...
Managing Agile Software Projects under Uncertainty
In chasing velocity, we often ignore or don’t understand the uncertainties and associated risks in our processes and their results. Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. But shouldn’t we also be thinking about and mitigating the uncertainties that are unique or even introduced by using agile? Phil Lew suggests that our problem is that we sometimes carry assumptions which either cause us to spend too much effort on things we can’t control or give us unfounded comfort and reassurance. If we can’t...
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...
Demystifying DevOps: Capital One’s Journey toward Continuous Delivery
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...
Optimizing Performance across the DevOps Lifecycle
The world of DevOps moves fast and substantially impacts application development quality, costs, and customer confidence. Giving your operations and development teams an effective performance process from an early stage means quality is a priority throughout the development lifecycle. A “test early and often” approach improves your chances of on time/on budget application release and meeting your customer’s performance and quality expectations. Successful performance across DevOps relies on the use of proper processes, performance tools and solutions, and...
Teach by Doing: Conversation-Driven Development with ChatOps
Despite the proliferation of tools and processes aimed at lowering barriers and reducing friction across teams, do you still find yourself struggling to make sense of the information hairball, constantly asking—How's the deployment going? Who's responding to that incident? Is staging green? It’s time to STOP! Raj Indugula and Robert Brown introduce the essential concepts and benefits of ChatOps, discuss the anatomy of a chat application/robot, and demonstrate how to leverage ChatOps to help team culture through automation and sharing. ChatOps can improve your...
Continuous Integration of Innovation and Quality
High-performing DevOps organizations deploy hundreds of times more frequently than lower performers, so it is no surprise that high performers are known for their innovation and quality. Low-performing DevOps teams fail to achieve continuous delivery due to limitations in their testing process and strategy and thus miss the opportunity to continuously test their ideas and integrate feedback. Stacy Kirk describes how to start or optimize quality in your DevOps lifecycle for continuous delivery of innovative applications. Stacy explains how to foster a culture of...
Take Control! Managing Your Time and Commitments
One of the most consistent concerns expressed by project teams everywhere is: We don’t have enough time! The stress of having too much to do and not enough time to do it is overwhelming. In this interactive session, Andy Kaufman shares practical lessons to help you get a better handle on what it takes to more successfully manage your time and commitments. Topics include understanding the importance of taking care of yourself (including getting more sleep and exercise), factors that drive procrastination (with approaches to overcome them and help you manage your...
Integrate DevOps Release Automation with Cloud and Container Management
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 Tester’s Role in a DevOps World
A DevOps approach to software development provides value to the business with incremental and frequent releases of new functionality to meet the demands of its customers and users. In this new world, the level of software quality directly impacts a company’s success or failure. If software quality is key to success, why do testers often feel ignored during the development process only to be blamed for defects escaping into production? Marianne Hollier explains how the tester’s role, now more important than ever, fits into a DevOps approach to software development...
Don't Ask "Can You Hear Me Now?" Start Listening Instead
Most of us believe we are good listeners. However, we often overestimate this skill and are hard-wired to short change it by making assumptions, providing answers, and jumping in when we think we know what people are trying to say. In doing so, we rob ourselves of the chance to encourage growth, build trust and respect, and promote ownership. Listening is about more than hearing the words; it is about tone, body language, and so much more. But wait … listening well can be learned, so join Judith Mills to understand and practice this underutilized skill....
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...
Friday, November 18
Leaders at All Levels
Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, and heroics. These definitions might have been sufficient in another time. However, organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader. Join Esther Derby to explore a new definition of leadership—the ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problems.