Conference Schedule

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 your IT operations partners...Read more

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 continuous delivery; (2)...Read more

Automated UI tests typically suffer from a number of problems: They are brittle, hard to maintain, hard to read, often test only one browser, and are frequently slow. These problems are amplified in agile environments which often have less up-front planning for these tests, contributing to a number of issues affecting their reliability and maintainability. Michael Durrant says that writing reliable, automated UI tests in agile environments requires a development style that emphasizes a standards-based approach and the application of specific practices such as selecting elements, JavaScript...Read more

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 focused, dev teams can more...Read more

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 structure. He covers the core...Read more

“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Most people read this principle from the Agile Manifesto and focus on the self-organization element. What about the concept of emergence? Exactly how do requirements and designs emerge? And how do self-organizing teams enable emergence? Get a hands-on lesson on emergence and self-organization using an unlikely source of inspiration: sketch comedy. John Krewson leads courageous delegates to envision, write, rehearse, and perform an episode of The Waterfall Comedy Hour. Others watch the process...Read more

Are you looking for new ways to invigorate your teams? Do retrospectives seem stale? Do story breakdown meetings feel flat? On the other hand, maybe your teams are humming and you’re looking for additional variety. The research is clear—movement matters, and play stimulates creativity. Join Andrew Smith as he takes you through a series of movement games that are lively and fun, while exploring how these practices can be applied to promote collaboration and creativity within teams. Discover how to use play to shift perspectives and enable new insights within your team. Learn about the...Read more

When creating models of system performance, the primary challenges are where and how to start. Whatever the performance characteristics to be estimated or modeled, we need to adopt methods that are repeatable and able to address both the business and technical needs of the project's delivery. All too often, performance tests inadvertently mix scenarios with little regard for how transaction rates can confound technical recommendations and business decisions. Join Will Hurley as he presents a real-world case study that demonstrates the impact on business decisions, and shows how to use...Read more

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 innovation that quickly adds...Read more

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 very different approaches...Read more

Far too often, organizations focus solely on the development teams and their technical practices as their agile adoption strategy. And then there’s the near constant focus on acquiring development tools. Often the testing activity and the testing teams are left behind in agile adoption, or even worse, they’re simply along for the ride. This is not an effective transformation strategy. Join experienced agile coach Bob Galen as he shares the Three Pillars framework for establishing a balanced strategic plan for quality and testing. The Three Pillars focus on development and test automation,...Read more

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 time and projects), ways to...Read more

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 environments. Chris shares pragmatic...Read more

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 of work. It reduces risk...Read more

Your organization has adopted some combination of agile, lean, and DevOps practices, yet you have a sinking feeling that it’s not working the way everyone hoped it would. You’re wondering if it’s because you work for a very large organization and all this talk about small, cross-functional teams seems to conflict with your organizational charts. Your IT department is organized around functional disciplines such as the PMO, business analysis, Test Center of Excellence, and DevOps engineering. Do we need to blow up these structures in order to have successful agile/lean/DevOps...Read more

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. Experience how difficult it is to...Read more

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 the team's software...Read more

Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers insight into how you can use metrics in an agile environment to make life better. How do you know when you are ready to introduce metrics into the environment? What are the sources for these metrics? What tools and techniques are necessary to make decisions probabilistically? What are the mindset shifts necessary for metrics to help you making better decisions? How do teams and organizations avoid the anti-patterns that so often derail a metrics program? Larry...Read more