Agile Dev West 2016 - Developer
Sunday, June 5
Certified ScrumMaster Training (2-Day)
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2–Day)
Monday, June 6
Configuration Management: Robust Practices for Fast Delivery
Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous application build, package and deployment to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore. Bob Aiello presents an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change...
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model,which helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer’s and user’...
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...
Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in Charge
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your...
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Lean software development has often 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...
Essential Test-Driven Development: A Hands-On Workshop
Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles. The developer first writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code until the test passes, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete—and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates...
Planning to Learn and Learning from Delivery: Scrum, Kanban and Beyond
If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce...
Avoid Critical UX Mistakes to Delight Your Users
Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you do that? With a UX that...
Tuesday, June 7
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 implement DevOps using...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement. Investigate...
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 agile environment, learning...
Getting Things Done: What Testers Do in Agile
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for teams...
High-Performance Product Development
Large organizations often struggle with the software part of product development when they attempt to create innovative services and products, Obstacles they face are often related to organizational culture and project/program management paradigms that do not take advantage of the unique characteristics of software. In this tutorial session—designed for directors of IT, program/project managers, and software professionals—Jez Humble describes how large—and small—organizations can take a lean approach to developing new products and run large scale product development programs. Jez shows how...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Producing Products and Coaching Agility: Making Agile Practices Matter
Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns on their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides you through the rest...
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
We attend conferences, read books and articles, and discover new ideas we want to bring into our organizations—but we often struggle when trying to implement those changes. Unfortunately, those introducing change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. These approaches, strategies, and patterns are useful in many different settings—not only to change your...
Mob Programming Workshop
All the brilliant people working on the same thing, at the same time, in the same place, and on the same computer. Mob Programming is a cost-effective, collaborative, and fun way to get work done—together. It's a whole-team approach to development, where coding, designing, testing, and working with the “customer”—partner, product owner, user—are all done as a team. In this workshop, led by Mob Programming pioneer Woody Zuill, experience Mob Programming hands-on while learning the mechanics of how...
Wednesday, June 8
DevOps and the Culture of High-Performing Software Organizations
The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of culture in creating high-performing teams. However, often perceived to be subjective and intractable, culture is often neglected in favor of more concrete drivers such as tools and processes. And this is a major failure mode in organizations attempting to achieve substantially improved performance through implementing agile and DevOps. Jez Humble takes a practical, data-driven approach to culture, illustrated with examples from large, successful enterprises. Learn how to measure culture and examine what a generative, high-performance culture...
The Power of an Agile Mindset
Linda Rising, co-author of Fearless Change and the recently published More Fearless Change, has wondered for some time whether much of Agile's success has been the result of the placebo effect—that is, good things happened because we believed they would. The placebo effect is a startling reminder of the power our minds have over our perceived reality. Now cognitive scientists tell us that this is only a small part of what our minds can do. Research has identified what she likes to call “an agile mindset”—an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for...
Three Things You MUST Know to Transform into an Agile Enterprise
The farther we go down the path of scaled agile transformation, the more we learn that adding process and complexity can only take us so far. At some point, size and complexity are going limit our ability to be truly agile, and we must move toward greater organizational simplicity. The challenge is that large organizations are often complex and usually anything but simple. Most agile transformations start by either ignoring the complexity inherent in the system or by wrapping complexity in planning constructs that may help in the short run but ultimately doom your business agility. Mike...
Slay the Dragons of Agile Measurement
Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers eight tools to slay the dragons of agile measurement. The #1 Dragon slayer—Use measurement for feedback rather than as a lever. What's the difference? Feedback is used to improve your own behavior; a lever is employed to change someone else's behavior. The distinction is subtle but critical. If you think what gets measured gets done, you are already venturing into “thar be dragons” territory. But it's not too late. Larry shows how to create a culture where...
Mobile App Testing: Planning, Priorities, Execution, and Reporting
When testers transition from web to mobile testing, they often miss the most important issues. The biggest challenge in mobile testing is knowing the mobile-specific issues—knowing what to test, in which order, and how. Jason Arbon shares his learnings from manual and automated testing of thousands of apps, and tips from working with top app teams. How do you balance functional with performance testing? Which, if any, tests should you automate? Should tests be executed on real devices or emulators? How do you best leverage your on-site, vendors, beta testers, and app store feedback? What...
End-to-End Quality Approach: 14 Levels of Testing
In 2015, the Standard & Poor’s Ratings IT team set out an ambitious objective—to tighten the process and controls around the quality of code deployed to production. Based on internal cost of quality assessments, and supporting agile and waterfall internal engineering processes, distinct testing levels were identified to help push quality left and root out the underlying causes of defects as early as possible. The ‘14 Levels of Testing’ were defined to collaboratively span organizational functions, establish quality expectations, and help track towards the goal of eliminating defects....
Integrate Regulatory Auditing with Agile
When attempting to audit agile in regulated enterprises, auditors all too often hear “We are agile, so we have no evidence for you to examine.” For a profession rooted in plan-driven methodologies—from validating software development to documenting audit work papers—agile presents a unique conundrum for auditors. Join Chong Ee as he explores ways for agile teams to develop and sustain an open dialogue with auditors on internal controls. From updating age-old mindsets such as segregated development and testing phases to employing the agile artifacts of user stories and burndown charts,...
Agile Metrics: Measuring Outcomes and Results
When organizations move to agile approaches, two very common metric anti-patterns surface: (1) The organization doesn’t change its metrics at all and simply continues to measure as they always have; or (2) The organization throws out every metric and just focuses on velocity and trying to increase it. Both of these anti-patterns lead to metrics dysfunction and disastrous results. Bob Galen explains that agile organizations should be developing their measurement strategies early. He explores unhealthy metrics (for example, velocity) and the drives behind measuring them. Then he describes...
Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without the Wires
Are you looking for insight into real-life companies and how “going mobile” has changed the roles for developers and testers in their organizations? Jennifer Bonine and Rick Faulise share strategies that have worked—and not worked—for organizations. What do you, as a developer or tester, need to think about when you move into mobile web and mobile apps? It is important to understand the changes required in your skillset and to keep up to date on what organizations are looking for in their resources as they embark on their mobile strategies. Jennifer and Rick explore the state of mobile...
Continuous Integration as a Development Team’s Way of Life
Continuous integration (CI) is a buzzword in software development today. We know it means “run lots of builds,” but having a continuous integration pipeline opens up opportunities well beyond making sure your team's code compiles. What if this pipeline could improve everything from the quality of code reviews to how often and safely you deploy to production and how you monitor your product in the wild? What if CI could provide insights into how automated tests are performing and how to improve them? Melissa Benua describes how to set up a basic CI infrastructure and then transform it into...
Why Agile Works—and How to Screw It Up!
Agile practices can be the easy part of agile. It’s getting people into the agile mindset that can be a real challenge. Do you have a team member who doesn’t quite support agile or someone who’s playing along but not really committed? One step toward obtaining real commitment is a better understanding of why agile works, why it is different, and when it is the right approach. In this fast moving session, Perry Reinert provides a fun look at some of the theory that gets to the core of why agile works. Yes, we really can use the words fun and theory in the same sentence. Combining parts of...
Architecture vs. Design in Agile: What’s the Right Answer?
Is architecture the same as preliminary design in agile? It shouldn't be. Do we create architecture up front, then do iterative development after the architecture is done? That is edging back toward waterfall. Can you explain the purpose of the architecture in just two or three statements? Anthony Crain says that when he asks that question, he gets either verbose answers or blank stares. So Anthony shares an elegantly simple two bullet explanation of what an architecture does. Explore the models architects and designers should produce and learn why these models are so important to keep...
Improvisation for Agile Skill Development
In today's economy, the Creative Economy, businesses face a disrupted, highly competitive, and constantly changing landscape. Robie and Jody Wood say that to thrive in the Creative Economy, team members, managers, and executives need to become and remain agile. Improvisational theater provides a proven model for developing agility skills since the characteristics of “being agile”—engaging people, learning, making decisions in the midst of uncertainty and ambiguity, and adapting—are the very skills that improv artists work to develop with every exercise they perform. This session is about “...
Borrowing Best-of-Breed Software Delivery Techniques for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the landscape of the traditional consumer electronics market. More and more electronic devices—from lightbulbs to thermostats to wrist watches—are now capable of being monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world. The increasing market demand for cloud-connected IoT devices is encouraging cohesion within traditionally disparate cloud- and hardware-oriented engineering organizations. While cloud-oriented organizations are well-suited to rapidly or even continuously delivering cloud-based software, hardware-oriented organizations historically...
Using DevOps to Drive the Agile ALM
Many organizations struggle to implement sustainable processes to drive their software and systems development work. This leaves their 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. Based on his new book Agile Application Lifecycle Management: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement, Bob Aiello explores how to use DevOps principles and practices to drive the entire application lifecycle management process including establishing agile...
Five Critical Elements for Successful Agile Data Management
In the past few years we’ve used cloud technologies to improve pre-production flexibility and solve many problems that previously prevented us from delivering high quality apps to production. However, one problem consistently prevents full test coverage prior to deployment—the lack of comprehensive test data. As we try to get faster and leaner in our agile development processes, the problem with data becomes even more difficult to solve. Robert Kelman describes the evolution of DIRECTV’s (now AT&T) Agile Test Data Management program. He explains the five critical elements—centralized...
The Issues Agile Exposes and What To Do about Them
Before the short iterations in agile, projects were segmented into large blocks of work taking many weeks or months. If problems emerged, it was relatively easy to hide them. Now, with agile, many of these problems and issues can’t be hidden for long. Lee Copeland exposes these issues—trust, organization, work, measurement, and change—and explores solutions. Leaders often distrust their teams; teams often distrust their leaders. Learn the symptoms and solutions to these trust issues. A key organizational issue is that organizations cannot give up their previous team structures. Explore...
Command Query Responsibility Segregation at Enterprise Scale
As organizations grow, they find themselves looking for opportunities to enhance the rate at which features can be delivered while minimizing negative business impact. Carlyle Davis believes that we are responsible for creating an system environment that provides simplicity and resiliency as complexity increases. Various non-functional qualities lead us rethink system architecture more deeply to satisfy the often ignored dimensions of scalability, auditability, and performance. The Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) and event-driven architectures are potential solutions to...
Project Estimation: Myths, Taboos, and Inconvenient Truths
Too many of us continue to suffer through schedule-driven crunch mode and cost overruns. We all know the usual suspects, including bad estimates and changing requirements. But what if we set aside myths and embraced reality? Estimates are uncertain, but that doesn’t make them bad—only inconvenient. We can’t manage away the uncertainty, but we can choose where it lands. Robert Merrill believes that our longing for stable requirements tells us where the uncertainty wants to be—in the scope. What if we stopped fighting it? What if we broke the taboo and said we’re done with crunch mode, with...
The Challenges of Testing a Wearable Banking Application
In many ways, the rapidly evolving mobile banking application industry is challenging for testers. Adding a wearable device brings new challenges, new user behaviors, and untested devices. To ensure a well-tested product, what changes and adaptations do you need to make to your test approach? Carl Johnson shares his hands-on experiences going from testing a mobile banking application to testing a wearable “watch-bank,” an application that makes it possible for customers to see balances and transactions on their smartwatches. Carl presents examples of his learnings—tools that could help you...
Identify and Exploit Behavioral Boundaries for Unit Testing
Whether writing unit tests after coding or using test-driven development (TDD), developers often ask themselves—How much testing is enough? Or too much? Or not enough? Rob Myers helps answer these questions using the techniques from his experience doing and teaching TDD. Look for those tests that cause us to write code, look for unique behaviors and code-paths, and strive to narrow in the boundary conditions. This gives us pinpoint accuracy when something breaks. Rob demonstrates what this approach looks like using graphs, tests, and code. To answer “What needs to be tested?” Rob...
Thursday, June 9
How to Do Kick-Ass Software Development
Software development is hard― keeping developers, testers, designers, product managers and other stakeholders in sync and working on the right things at the right time. Building the systems that customers care about and delivering high-quality code fast are challenges every development team faces. Just being agile isn’t enough; we need to actively think about how we can improve software development processes and techniques. Sven details Atlassian’s coding practices and team dynamics, which include: collaborating fast to develop ideas, helping QA with testing, avoiding meetings to get...
Implementing Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment
Developing medical devices that are subject to FDA approval has traditionally followed the waterfall methodology, largely due to the structure of the regulations that govern development practices. But we know from myriad case studies in different industries that agile methodologies are far superior in providing the highest value to customers in the shortest time to market. Neal Herman shares how one developer of complex medical devices embraced agile software development practices and proved that it could not only develop software faster with higher quality but also meet all regulatory...
Continuous Discovery: The Path to Learning and Growing
Software development is a process of continuous discovery. When writing software, we create ideas, we try them in code, we learn what works and what doesn’t—and that steers us to a better solution. And sometimes we do this all day long! Woody Zuill says that this same process of continuous discovery works for making improvements for our teams, and in our workplaces and organizations. With continuous discovery we do numerous micro experiments that guide us along the path to a better future. If we follow the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto, which provides us a powerful...
Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Through the years, Linda Rising has given presentations about the use of stories instead of science in the industry, so in this session she has decided to be more helpful and talk about experiments. There's an increasing emphasis on experiments as a part of being more innovative but sometimes Linda says we need a nudge and some examples to help us get going. No, this is not too rigorous! Rather than talking about statistics, she is going to explore cheap, easy experiments—what to do, what to be aware of, and our own cognitive biases, including the confirmation bias that does its best to...
Docker Containers in the Enterprise DevOps Journey
As technology moves from being a cost-center to a revenue generator in nearly every business, technologists are expected to deliver more with fewer resources. DevOps enables this efficiency through improved collaboration between product management, development, release management, quality assurance, information security, and operations. However, Aater Suleman says that the challenge of incorporating DevOps into a business is no small task. Improving this collaboration requires cross-functional technologies that benefit all departments. By this definition, Docker may well be the most...
Playwriting, Imagination, and Agile Software Development … Oh My!
Agile practitioners are constantly striving to improve their processes and delivery to gain a competitive edge. To become a cross-functional T-shaped rock star, you have to be open to learning from other disciplines and adapting quickly. Tania Katan knows a little about crossing disciplines and adapting at a breakneck pace. She is a playwright by training who recently made the audacious leap into software. Tania helps you find your inner “T” so you will have the breadth and depth to take on the unpredictability of software development with the imagination and insights of a playwright....
Building Mob Programming Teams Using Lego® Serious Play®
In recent years the idea of Mob Programming has begun to attract the attention of those looking for new ways to take advantage of the genius that can be found in a focused, cross-functional, and unified agile team. But how, in practice, do these teams actually work? Paul Wynia, a Lego® Serious Play® facilitator and agile coach, worked closely with the originators of Mob Programming to develop a fun and simple Lego® game that incorporates the basic concepts, approaches, and roles found in an effective Mob Programming team. Using a test-driven development framework, each Mob team tests,...
Managing a Software Engineering Team
You’re a senior engineer who decides to switch to management for experience in leading a team. How is your work going to change? What challenges are you going to face? How are you going to keep up with new technologies? Are people reporting to you going to see you as a leader and follow you? Sebastiano Armeli asked himself all these questions when he became a manager. See what he found it and learn how you can bring this information into your work. While management varies greatly by organization, Sebastiano explores leadership and management behaviors you can apply at your company. At...
The Soft Skills of Great Software Developers
Are you creating clean, high performing code? Are you following the right development practices, but still don’t feel you are getting the recognition or success you deserve? The truth is that working harder and improving your programming skills are not enough. Great developers must demonstrate the human skills—developer practices—necessary to have a strong impact on their organizations. Through conversation and examples, Raul Suarez focuses on behaviors that can help you reach your full potential. He discusses ways to optimize communication, provide and handle feedback, adapt to change,...
Scaling, Spreading, and Succeeding: When to Do What and Why
More and more large organizations are adopting agile methods. As they do, many are adding more process than needed and are not stopping to work out what level of process will actually help their products or projects. David Hussman discusses the use of agile methods on large programs and small teams at large organizations like Disney, Target, Siemens, and others. David uses real-world experiences as examples for teaching concrete ideas about when scale is needed and not, as well as how to generally spread lasting agility that is based on concrete measures of success. Be warned: You will be...
How Far Can You Go with Agile for Embedded Software?
With the proliferation of IoT and consumer demand for smarter homes, appliances, automobiles, and wearables, many traditional product-based manufacturing companies are now becoming embedded software companies. This means that the design and manufacturing of physical products is becoming more complex since it now requires the integration of the physical components of the product, the firmware, and the myriad software components these products contain. Historically, embedded software developers have lagged behind IT in the adoption of agile development practices, largely due to the...
A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively
Are you on a team where people avoid conflict or shy away from saying anything that might sound critical? Reluctance to speak up can block important challenges from being identified, and deny your team and organization the opportunity to learn and improve. According to Lorraine Aguilar, this avoidance is most evident in peer-to-peer communications. Lorraine designed a tool for agile coaches, facilitators, and team leaders who want to make it easy and safe for people to speak authentically during retrospectives and other opportunities for performance feedback and continuous improvement....
Developing a Rugged DevOps Approach to Cloud Security
Your operational tools deliver continuous monitoring and alerting for applications deployed in the cloud. So why doesn’t your security suite do the same? Although no single path to a secure DevOps approach works for every organization, Tim Prendergast offers a set of key principles and techniques that have distinct advantages for delivering safe and secure products in the cloud. Security can no longer be thought of as a separate step in a product’s launch and must be integrated into the overall processes of continuous development and deployment. Implementing continuous security monitoring...
Going Agile at Scale: A Mindset Transformation of Global Proportions
How do you successfully transform 700 people working on one product? The answer: Give them ownership. Value people over process. This requires that leaders learn how and when to step back—and when to step up. In the past eight years, the Veritas NetBackup organization had tried three agile transformations: two unsuccessful and one showing promise. The key difference has been the transformation of the leaders, helping teams take ownership rather than focusing only on artifacts and ceremonies. What did the leaders learn—and how? Julie Urban and Jeff Byron describe NetBackup’s transformation...
Use Feature Flags for Clean Deployments
Software teams want to move faster and deliver features to end users sooner. Continuous delivery and DevOps promise to deploy quickly. However, pushing faster and deploying more often increase the risk of breaking—and subsequent downtime. Edith Harbaugh finds that a feature flagging system of gating features—and being able to quickly turn them on or off—enables development teams to ship more frequently. With feature flags, engineering changes are pushed live to production “off” and then turned on for different users. Feature flags allow developers to separate deployment from rollout,...
Scaling Scrum with Scrum™ (SSwS): A Universal Framework
Scrum is a simple framework allowing a single team, working from a single backlog, to maximize the value it delivers to its stakeholders. Unfortunately, your organization probably has more than one team and more than one backlog—but you still need to maximize the value to your stakeholders. You need Scrum, but how do you scale it for your organization? Dan Rawsthorne proposes Scale Scrum with Scrum™; tie your organization’s development scrum teams together with Leadership Teams and Coordination Teams. These are scrum teams that assure that each development team has a backlog, that the...
Create Brainstorming Commandos for Creative Problem Solving
Agile teams are solving real-world complex problems every day. These problems require creative problem solving by team members. In its truest sense, brainstorming is intended to be a practical approach to this task. Brainstorming entails “using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, with each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective.” In this highly practical workshop, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy introduces you to a variety of brainstorming games that get the creative juices flowing to yield better collaboration and ideas among team members. Delegates...
Internet of Things and the Wisdom of Mobile
The Internet of Things—what many are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution—is shaping up to be a game-changing marvel as great as the Internet itself. With more than 10 billion connected devices and thousands more coming online by the minute, we are undoubtedly more connected than ever before. From your dishwasher to your toothbrush to your dog’s collar, electronic devices everywhere are connected. This phenomenon is drastically increasing demands on APIs, data, security, and software quality, pushing every industry sector to step up its game to stay relevant in the new era of...