Agile Dev East 2017 - DevOps/ Continuous Delivery
Sunday, November 5
Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile *SOLD OUT*
Monday, November 6
Service Virtualization for Faster Development and Testing
An agile development mantra—Test early and test continuously—is rapidly becoming the mantra for DevOps as the business demands frequent releases of compelling functionality. As testers, our efforts to “shift left” and support continuous integration with automated (and manual) tests are disrupted by a number of factors. Access to constrained system components is one of the greatest challenges. Research has found that an application under test interacts on average with more than fifty separate components—less than half of which are reliably available when testing. So, how can we ensure that...
Tuesday, November 7
Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices
DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you so, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). Agile, continuous delivery, and DevOps all promise the same dream—improved time to market through incremental delivery of quality software. So where should you focus? Max Griffiths begins by distinguishing DevOps from the other approaches and, rather than wrangling new words for old problems, helps refocus how to measure success. How long does it take you to commit and deliver code? Max shows how you can measure this through Value Stream Mapping, a crucial tool used to...
The Architecture of Microservices
Sold Out!Microservices—one of the latest software architecture styles—promises to deliver benefits such as fast and easy deployment, ease of testing, fine-grained scalability, architectural modularity, and high overall agility. Unfortunately, these benefits are coupled with a lot of complexity. In this product-agnostic architecture tutorial, Mark Richards provides you with an understanding of the microservices architecture style and what hybrids and alternatives exist. This helps you make the right architecture and design decisions for your organization. Mark discusses the core concepts of the...
What DevOps Means for Testers
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver 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. However, when DevOps is done...
Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development
Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams by combining test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection,...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. If you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get the most out of them—we...
Wednesday, November 8
Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software
PreviewThe machine learning age is well underway. Today’s software can see novel patterns that humans are unable to see and improve task performance based on experience. Learning algorithms are widely used for varied purposes, including loan approval, intrusion detection, fraud prevention, risk analysis, and online sales optimization. Yet, like the proverbial cobbler who left his children shoeless, software practitioners have been slow to apply the benefits of machine learning to their own work. Join Stephen Frein for a tour of the current machine learning landscape and its most popular...
Creative Disruption: A Guide for the Perplexed
Fire the project managers … do DevOps … hire plenty of agile coaches. Agile leadership books, guidance, and carnival barkers abound. However, with much hype to sort through and little guidance, how can you separate the snake oil from the real thing? How can you develop a North Star to guide you through agile, DevOps, and organizational transformation? Roland Cuellar shares lessons based on two decades of experience consulting with leading executives worldwide. Rooted in a foundational philosophy of self-management that evolved into a cutting-edge approach, Roland shares an essential...
Measure Anything: The Quality, Productivity, Predictability, and Engagement Model
Measuring software development is difficult. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of complex initiatives (such as adopting agile) is even more difficult. One department at IBM struggled to reduce a list of 150 metrics down to a top twenty to use in consulting engagements. Through the years, nearly every one of Anthony Crain’s clients has asked him for help in proving that their teams were “getting better” at development. Nearly all of their measures were “adoption” measures showing how teams were doing agile. However, none of the metrics was focused on whether the development was...
Operations in the Continuous Delivery Ecosystem
PreviewAs development teams move toward a more agile development process coupled with continuous delivery (CD), the role of operations has evolved from a support organization to an integral part of the product delivery ecosystem. Today, operations organizations need to be agile in their feature delivery, but as requests come from different stakeholders, operations must balance their investments in support tasks, urgent tooling requests, and strategic projects. Sumedha Ganjoo explains why it is important for an operations organization to move toward CD and identifies process, tools, and...
Your DevOps Goal: A Culture Shift, Not Just a Toolset Implementation
PreviewBecoming a DevOps shop isn’t just about hiring DevOps engineers and implementing a new toolset. It’s about changing the culture of your organization. Patrick Turner believes that your focus for DevOps should be to bring a cultural shift throughout the organization—up to the business team and down to product delivery. Focusing on the culture shift of DevOps creates faster innovation. And all of this enables transparency in this process for those who have not had visibility in the past and encourages transparency for those who have worked behind the curtain of complexity that has...
Stop Intermittent Test Failures that Slow the Continuous Delivery Pipeline
Intermittent failures ruin the whole premise of continuous delivery (CD). In fact, they undermine any software QA process, since they break the fundamental assumption that if your test suite passes, you are good to deploy. Automated testing can run orders of magnitude more tests than manual testing but may result in an ever growing backlog of tests that fail intermittently for reasons that aren’t understood. Whether this is embarrassing, annoying, or scary depends on your sensitivity to risk. No matter the level of your pipeline’s sophistication, you need to reproduce the defect before you...
Make DevOps Work: Practices to Achieve High Quality Apps
PreviewAmir Rozenberg describes a pragmatic approach to help your team deliver apps to market faster while gaining insight into their behavior in production. He describes how a major bank, health care provider, and telco crossed the bridge from inefficient delivery processes. Now teams leverage Selenium automation tests to deliver quality applications that reduce churn, require less effort to support, and positively impact customer reviews. Amir details practices to accelerate application optimization by introducing production insight in sprint requirements, ensuring monitoring...
Fail Smart, Not Just Fast: Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
PreviewYou’re a professional project manager or ScrumMaster. Your software development projects never fail because you follow all the best practices. Right? We all know better. Unfortunately, many projects fail, and they fail due to issues outside the team's control. The reality is that we need to reconsider what failure looks like and plan for it when it happens. Rob Keefer introduces a tool—Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)—that has been used in engineering disciplines for many years and successfully applied to software development project management. FMEA shines a light on the...
The Mass Extinction of Manual Processes: A DevOps Success Story
PreviewLarge organizations can be filled with manual processes, and many people feel they are stuck with them. Bill Roberts and James La Spada tell the story of how Capital One used DevOps culture and kanban principles to significantly increase the speed of feature delivery—while lowering risk. Their team took the name Meteor, inspired by the big one that took out the dinosaurs, because they wanted to cause the mass extinction of these manual processes. Work at Capital One was previously completed manually, and many inefficiencies were evident. Bill and James helped drive the...
My Dad Won’t Buy Me a DevOps
PreviewMany IT managers find themselves banging their heads against a wall trying to get upper management to invest in DevOps. Managers see clear opportunities to implement it into their organizations but get a No from senior executives. Many managers are frustrated that, despite all the blustering in their companies about corporate initiatives for transformation, any attempt to implement improvements peters out quickly. T.j. Randall discusses the various stages of the software release pipeline. He offers a detailed demonstration of how to calculate the cost of each stage and suggests...
Thursday, November 9
Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value
For decades, product development has been focused largely on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the true goal—delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value...
Awesome Agile and How We Did It: Halogen’s Journey
Many organizations struggle to achieve predictable, high quality software delivery. However, agile software processes are not prescriptive, and we recognize that processes are continuously evolving to improve delivery, consistency, and quality. Karen Holliday describes the challenges that Halogen Software experienced in the past five years as they moved from waterfall delivery to the agile/scrum development model. Karen shares the strategies implemented at Halogen that have led to a string of five on-time quality releases—including two early releases. Learn how to plan in an agile (ALM)...
Fundamentals of Docker
Docker seems to be taking the IT world by storm. But why all the excitement about yet another virtual machine technology? Because Docker is much more. Korey Earl says that Docker solves many DevOps challenges including process isolation, build once-deploy anywhere, and automated scaling without the resource overhead that comes with virtual machines. Docker can improve resource utilization, infrastructure agility, and the transition from development to operations, allowing IT organizations to support the business rather than holding it back. Join Korey as he reviews the basics of the Docker...
DevSecOps Manifesto and Process Model for Secure Applications
The bad guys don't break in through the highly secure bank vault door; they attack the crumbly bricks and mortar of the vault walls. The same is true for application security. The vast majority of incidents don't target security features like encryption, authentication, and authorization. Rather, the target is vulnerabilities in the boring, non-secure parts of the code. In many organizations, the security function is still largely thrown-over-the-wall, but things are changing. Larry Maccherone believes we cannot prevent the vast majority of incidents with a bolt-on approach to security. We...
Put Agile to the Test: A Case Study for Test Agility on a Large IT Project
PreviewAgile practices, although applicable to a variety of situations, are most commonly applied to IT projects, generally for software development. Can you apply agile methods to just part of a software implementation project? Todd Jones presents this case study where agile techniques were applied to the testing phase of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar IT program that included replacing a legacy system, new software development, creation of a new enterprise data model and document management solution, and complex financial balancing. After briefly describing the challenges faced by the...
Automation Anti-Patterns: Deal with Them
PreviewAutomation is vital to modern testing. But if you listen to what testers complain about, problems with test automation is a recurring theme. We complain about how hard it is to add, run, or change tests. We grumble about how difficult it is to keep up with developers who keep breaking tests and bemoan the number of bugs missed by our automation. Dave Westerveld digs into some of these frustrations and shares real-life examples of automation anti-patterns. These include test bloat and some of the reasons for it, or what happens if we don't leverage automation in the right places....
Microservices and Docker at Scale: The PB&J of Modern Systems
After predominantly being used in the build/test stage, Docker has matured and is expanding into production deployment. Similarly, microservices are expanding from greenfield web services to use throughout the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolithic systems to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says running microservices-based systems in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—both for build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. This makes Docker and microservices natural companions, forming the foundation for modern...
Measure DevOps for Objective Continuous Improvement Practices
PreviewLogan Daigle says DevOps has brought about unprecedented changes in the way organizations solve problems and break down silos. DevOps is empowering employees to automate expensive processes and leverage the power of cross-functional teams to benefit development and operations culture. DevOps is helping bridge a culture gap and focuses on providing shorter feedback loops with more responsiveness to failure. But are we missing something here? Do we really know how much all of these process and automation improvements cost? Do we really know if we are improving our products, processes...
Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile Transformation
Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...
Databases in a Continuous Integration/Delivery Process
PreviewDevOps is transforming software development with many organizations adopting lean development practices, implementing continuous integration (CI), and performing regular continuous deployment (CD) to their production environments. However, the database is largely ignored and often seen as a bottleneck in the DevOps process. Steve Jones discusses the challenges of database development and why many developers find the database to be an impediment to the CD process. Steve shares the techniques you can use to fit a database into the DevOps process. Learn how to store database code in a...
A Business-First Approach to DevOps Implementation
DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created,...
Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile Teams
PreviewA hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton...
Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOps
With the recent emergence of DevOps across the industry, testing organizations are being challenged to transform themselves significantly within a short period of time to stay meaningful within their organizations. It’s not easy to plan and approach these changes considering the way testing organizations have remained structured for ages. These challenges start from foundational organizational structures and can cut across leadership influence, competencies, tools strategy, infrastructure, and other dimensions. Sumit Kumar shares his experience assisting various organizations to overcome...
Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps Strategy
Chris Parlette maintains that renting infrastructure on demand is the most disruptive trend in IT in decades. In 2016, enterprises spent $23B on public cloud IaaS services. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach $65B. The public cloud is now used like a utility, and like any utility, there is waste. Who's responsible for optimizing the infrastructure and reducing wasted expenses? It’s DevOps. The excess expense, known as cloud waste, comprises several interrelated problems: services running when they don't need to be, improperly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT....
Friday, November 10
Building an Agile Organization at Light Speed
Everyone loves the idea of explosive growth. Unfortunately, explosive growth often lives up to its name. Everywhere you look, things are blowing up. Josh Anderson shows you how to corral the chaos and provide your company with the growth it desperately needs.
The two key challenges of explosive growth are diametrically opposed: protect and support your existing teams and processes, while simultaneously growing an organization around them. To make that happen, you must walk the tightrope of process evolution as you grow your team. Josh shares real-world strategies you can use to...
Transform a Product Team to Agile—and Live to Tell About It
The idea of transformation can be both exciting and frightening. How do we shake off old ways of thinking? What will emerge when the transformation is complete? How will I know the transformation is finished? These are questions and challenges that many product teams face as they make the transformation to agile.
Kevin Stilwell shares his experience and techniques for shaking off old paradigms and practices to break the organizational “muscle memory” that exists in many companies. What emerges will be a high performing product team—and the reward will be well worth the effort.
The Yin & Yang of Agile Success at Dude Solutions
In this mini-panel discussion Kevin Stilwell and Josh Anderson share their from-the-ground-up experiences building an agile organization and field participants’ questions. From their unique perspective Kevin and Josh share tactics and practices they used to build a high-performance agile organization. They are essentially sharing the “secret sauce” that made Dude Solutions a great example of “agile done well.”
Leverage Big Wall Planning for Truly Aligned Organizational Execution
Love it or hate it, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was found to be the most used framework for enterprise-level agility in Version One’s annual survey. That said, many aspects of SAFe—including effective portfolio management—are difficult for organizations to implement.
Laura Burke Olson shares Big Wall Planning, a technique that Ipreo uses to “seed” their release trains with high-priority, high-value, and balanced portfolio-level epics. Big Wall Planning engages all aspects of company leadership in deciding the product roadmaps. This is a huge challenge in organizations that...
Aligning Toward Business Agility–360° of Freedom
What happens when the product vision is unclear? Simply put, your teams struggle to build valuable features and your customers are not happy. This lack of alignment eats away not only at the value you’re trying to deliver but also at your customers’ good will—and it can demoralize your teams.
Ryan Ripley examines the why behind your current practices and shows you how the agile values, principles, and ceremonies of an agile organization are designed to create and maintain alignment all the way from customers to individual team members. Drawing from real-world examples, Ryan explains...