Agile Dev West 2017 - Agile for the Enterprise
Monday, June 5
Building Continuous Delivery Pipelines: A Workshop
Although continuous delivery (CD) and DevOps are growing in popularity, not much practical information is available about how to get started. This hands-on technical tutorial is the place to get your feet wet and your questions answered. For this workshop, bring a laptop with the appropriate software installed (see note below), and Ken Mugrage will provide everything else you need. You will configure a complete continuous delivery pipeline from source code commit through deployment. Learn when to run each common type of automated test for the fastest possible feedback and how to run tests...
Agile Risk Management
Software componentization has made software more unpredictable because unforeseen conditions can cause components to interact in ways we hadn’t imagined. Greater complexity, increased user expectations, and our desire to use agile with ever increasing velocity require that we actively manage uncertainties and risks. Classic risk management identifies risks and prioritizes them to determine impact to the project, but how does that differ in an agile project? Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. What about the...
Tuesday, June 6
Lean/Agile Data Driven Decisions Demystified
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...
Wednesday, June 7
Stamp Out Agile and DevOps Bottlenecks
PreviewThe most critical step in the agile transformation and DevOps adoption process is identifying the bottlenecks in the product delivery cycle. So, how do you go about finding and eliminating those dreaded bottlenecks? Tanya Kravtsov shares her experiences along with tools and methods that facilitate the discovery process while encouraging innovative thinking among team members. Join Tanya to explore ways you can use Mind Maps, Innovation Games (Speed Boat, Buy a Feature, and more), Stick Figure Process Flows, and Team Collaboration to identify, prioritize, and resolve bottlenecks....
The Future of Scrum
In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, with more than 90 percent of teams today using Scrum to deliver working software. But, as Scrum starts into its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework that came into the world in the summer of 1995. In an industry that survives on the bleeding edge of trends will there continue to be a role for Scrum, or will its events, artifacts and roles be consumed by other process frameworks? What really is the future of Scrum? Dave West reviews the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from...
Demystifying DevOps Adoption
Many organizations are either talking about DevOps or already working toward its adoption. Books and conferences around DevOps abound, and it seems that DevOps engineers are in high demand. What impact does adopting DevOps have on a company and its people? What does DevOps look like from the inside out? What does a DevOps engineer do? What must you learn and do to ensure you’re not left behind? Adam Auerbach answers these questions, explains the overall DevOps movement, and discusses how DevOps is driving changes to organizational culture and structure. He covers the core principles of the...
Architectural Patterns for an Efficient Delivery Pipeline
Continuous integration has made development faster and more reliable. However, as codebases expand, organizations are finding that their build pipelines slow down dramatically. One of the most common reasons is that we often rebuild parts of the system that don't need to be rebuilt. This can happen when the code structure isn’t a faithful representation of the logical dependencies between the different parts. This prevents the pipeline from detecting which parts of the system are impacted by a change and which ones aren’t. Abraham Marin-Perez describes common scenarios in which the...
Why Agile Works—and How (Not) to Screw It Up!
Agile practices can be the easy part of agile. Getting people into the agile mindset is often a greater 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’s 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 the...
Implement DevOps Like a Unicorn—Even If You’re Not One
PreviewEtsy, Netflix, and the unicorns have done great things with DevOps. Although most people don't work at a unicorn, they still want to combine agility and stability. To close the gap between developers and operations, Mason Leung says his company runs operation workshops, blogs about infrastructure, and experiments with different tools—and are solving the same problems as the unicorns only on a smaller scale. Mason explains that you don't get to millions of requests without going through the first several hundred. Ideas you can take from unicorns include how to use containers to...
Agile Leadership Strategies: Winning the War on Complexity
PreviewDevelopment teams are at war with complexity. A solo programmer's craft is difficult enough, but team development adds more volatility and ambiguity—what the U.S. military calls “the fog of war.” Derek Wade’s background in cognitive science has shown him that humans have innate skills at managing this complexity. But too often Derek sees leaders wasting precious human capital because they don’t understand how these skills work. For the past six years, Derek has explored team science which evolved from studying military, aviation, and clinical teams, for practical insights into how...
From Scrum to Kanban: Our Journey
Two of Scott MacIntyre’s teams expressed frustration upon reaching a “Scrum plateau.” After meeting with both teams and hearing their thoughts, Scott decided to move from Scrum to a kanban-style process. One year into their kanban journey, the teams have moved from only visualizing their workflow to improving collaboratively with a focus on flow. Scott relates his teams’ experiences with adopting a new software development mindset including its successes and failures, and shares a set of practices that ensures as smooth a transition as possible for those teams interested in moving to...
You Can’t Buy DevOps … You Have to Sell It
In an industry where fads come and go, people you work with probably think that DevOps is just another flash in the pan, another techno-management fad. You, however, know adopting a DevOps culture will help your organization, and you need to be able to convince the rest of the organization. Since DevOps is mostly about culture, it’s critical that you have organizational support to implement it. Ken Mugrage shares peer-reviewed research, stories from real companies, and other solid evidence that you can use to make the case for adopting a DevOps culture. Unfortunately, pure logic and...
Microservices and Docker: Foundation for a New Generation of Applications
Docker has matured and expanded from its primary use in the build/test stages into production deployments. Similarly, microservices are expanding from use mostly for greenfield web services to use in the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolith to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says that running microservices-based applications in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—for both build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. Docker and microservices are natural companions, forming the foundation for a new generation of...
Thursday, June 8
The Agile Dojo: Shiny Toy or Best Idea Ever?
PreviewRemember your first two weeks on a scrum team? It was fantastic and miserable all at the same time. And when things got difficult, your team teetered on the edge of the waterfall. What if there were a way to help teams gel more quickly and accelerate their agile learning by immersing them in it? What if there were a place where they could practice what they’ve learned in training, without interruption? This is the agile dojo, a real experiment happening in a large, complex organization. Francie Van Wirkus shares her insights and learnings of creating and sustaining an agile dojo....
Five XP Practices for Agile Development
Five development practices compose the core of Extreme Programming (XP)—automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical disciplines are proving to be essential for sustained success with agile development. However, many teams haven’t been exposed to the benefits of these practices or understand how to use them effectively....
Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explains how agile is being used in Internet of Things systems—often combined with mobile and cloud technologies. Don reviews how agile is successfully being used today in a wide range of development environments, including software as a service applications, large and complex mission critical systems, and for both mobile software and hardware. Don looks closely at IoT, examines how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and explores how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Learn which...
The Rise of the Purpose-Driven Multi-Cloud
Cloud adoption rates are skyrocketing in the enterprise with some 65 percent of organizations already using more than one private and/or public cloud. Cloud, mobile, and social media are driving demand for new applications to meet ever changing business process capabilities. Brad Schick says that as a result, more enterprises are discovering that clouds built for a specific purpose generally have less over-provisioning and often out-perform generic multi-purpose one-size-fits-all solutions. How can we breathe new life into existing applications to support richer scenarios and meet user and...
Guiding Cultural Adoption of Agile at Scale
Many approaches to implementing agile focus primarily on the adoption of common practices at the team level. While this focus on practices is important, recognizing that agile is a set of overarching values and principles is also important. Adopting agile “at scale” in organizations often means a culture change needs to take place. To facilitate change, we must understand culture, its levels, and how we can influence it. Agile transformations often stall because those leading the transformation fail to view it through the lens of a cultural change. Ebenezer Ikonne shares agile culture...
Sprint Zero on Your Enterprise Cloud Journey
If the cloud is supposed to eliminate infrastructure concerns and create an instant-on environment, why do DevOps teams commonly spend six to twelve months bootstrapping their first cloud environment? How can teams reduce the time and effort required to establish a cloud network topology, layer security controls, automate cluster provisioning, and lay a DevOps pipeline? Chris Haddad describes the typical enterprise cloud journey and how to accelerate value by adopting road-tested worksheets, patterns, and templates. After sharing how teams assess infrastructure prerequisites with a legacy...
DevOps and Regulatory Compliance—Like Oil and Water or Peanut Butter and Jelly?
DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organizations. DevOps enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. Regulatory compliance ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws that appear to require adding burdensome processes and controls to your software development lifecycle. Brandon Carlson acknowledges that at first glance these two ideas seem incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut...
DevOps in an Embedded and Regulated Environment
Working in embedded environments greatly restricts the tools available for a DevOps pipeline. A regulated environment changes the processes a development team can use to deliver software. This combination results in a highly restricted environment that forces the team back to first principles, searching for a process that actually works, and tools to help foster iteration and rapid feedback. Arjun Comar describes the options, identifies a set of useful tools, and discusses the challenges facing any team working on DevOps in necessarily unfavorable environments. Together, examine Arjun’s...