Agile Dev East 2017 IT Operations Sessions | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile Dev East 2017 - IT Operations

Sunday, November 5

Brian Hicks
Coveros

Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile *SOLD OUT*

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm

This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Upon completion attendees will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile and awarded the ICAgile Professional (ICP-FDO) designation.

Monday, November 6

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
MA

Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Skill with Git and GitHub is now a common requirement for jobs because Git is entrenched in the majority of development and operations organizations. Git gives testers unprecedented visibility into the inner workings of software and configuration code. But Git's intricate commands can be confusing. GitHub collaboration and code review capabilities are revolutionary. New rules are needed to avoid frustration. In this hands-on tutorial, Wilson Mar presents material available nowhere else to clarify the structure of tools, repositories, and GUI programs used by the pros. The culmination of...

Wayne Ariola
Tricentis
Alexander Mohr
Tricentis
MC

Service Virtualization for Faster Development and Testing

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

MJ

Docker Jumpstart: Concepts, Features, and Real-World Examples

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Docker, a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization, is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architecture. Interest in Docker—with its lightweight, portable, “build once, configure once, and run anywhere” containers—is growing. If you want to jumpstart your Docker skills, join Aater Suleman to gain first-hand knowledge to help your organization streamline workflows, speed up product releases, and reduce hardware investments. He discusses the basics of Docker: concepts, terminology, commands, must-know features, and real-world examples of Docker projects. Aater presents and demonstrates best...

Tuesday, November 7

Francie Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
Claudia Marquette
AB2 Consulting
TG

What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Maybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all of the customers who derive value from it, you can make...

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks
Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks
TA

Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
TB

The Architecture of Microservices

Sold Out!
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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TE

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...

TN

The Lost Art of Live Communication

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Have you ever been in the same room with co-workers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? Many people are starting to prefer virtual or instant chat messaging to live conversations, but live communication can get better results at work. As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer shares a toolkit to help you assess your core communication competencies and see how you...

Wednesday, November 8

Stephen Frein
Comcast
K1

Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

The 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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
K2

You Might Be an Agile Leader If...

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces—and even Lean Coffee “meetings.” Channeling comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and the...

Tom Chavez
Splunk
BW3

Machine Data Is EVERYWHERE: Use It for Testing

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are difficult to detect, and cannot be corrected quickly. Tom Chavez presents the four steps that quality engineers should include in every test plan for apps that produce log output or other machine data. First, test that the data is being created. Second, ensure that the entries are correctly formatted and...

Sumedha Ganjoo
National Instruments
DW1

Operations in the Continuous Delivery Ecosystem

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As 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...

Patrick Turner
Small Footprint
DW2

Your DevOps Goal: A Culture Shift, Not Just a Toolset Implementation

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Becoming 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...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
BW5

Leverage Streaming Data in a Microservices Ecosystem

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Imagine a world where operational data is continuously flowing from applications and devices at an extremely high rate. Now imagine services intercepting this data and analyzing it real time. Sounds futuristic? It's not—it's here today. Mark Richards describes what streaming architecture is all about—what it is, when to use it, and how to implement it in a microservices ecosystem. Mark describes the overall ecosystem for streaming architecture—including a brief discussion about the differences in Apache Spark, Flink, and Hadoop—and then explains how Apache Kafka works. Using live coding...

Greg Law
Undo
DW3

Stop Intermittent Test Failures that Slow the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Amir_Rozenberg
Perfecto Mobile
DW4

Make DevOps Work: Practices to Achieve High Quality Apps

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Amir 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...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
BW7

A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Lean software development has been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems...

Bill Roberts
Capital One
James La Spada
Capital One
DW5

The Mass Extinction of Manual Processes: A DevOps Success Story

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Large 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...

T.j. Randall
XebiaLabs
DW6

My Dad Won’t Buy Me a DevOps

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Many 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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
K3

Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Agile Dev, Better Software, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote...

Thursday, November 9

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
K4

Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

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...

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT2

It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA
AT6

Discover Your Team’s Values with LEGO® Serious Play®

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Creating a cohesive team doesn’t require knowledge of dark arts or forbidden rituals. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be fun! Using exercises built around the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) methodologies, Paul Wynia explores techniques that ensure full team engagement and collaboration resulting in more meaningful discussions. Working as teams, discover Team Values using a series of individual and collaborative LSP builds. Once the Team Values are defined, use them to guide your team’s behaviors. These are finally turned into the Team Working Agreement, a powerful tool for...

Anders Wallgren
Electric Cloud
DT3

Microservices and Docker at Scale: The PB&J of Modern Systems

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Logan Daigle
VersionOne
DT4

Measure DevOps for Objective Continuous Improvement Practices

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Logan 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...

Steve Jones
Redgate Software
DT5

Databases in a Continuous Integration/Delivery Process

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

DevOps 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...

Leon Fayer
OmniTI
DT6

A Business-First Approach to DevOps Implementation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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,...

Sumit Kumar
Capgemini
DT7

Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOps

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Chris Parlette
ParkMyCLoud
DT8

Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps Strategy

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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....