Agile Dev West 2017 Project Manager Sessions | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile Dev West 2017 - Project Manager

Monday, June 5

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
MA

Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Git clients and the GitHub cloud have achieved an enviable adoption rate. Major corporations as well as open source projects now host their code on GitHub. Developers, DevOps, and non-technical writers alike now use Git to work with text files in a way that enables them to go back to specific versions at any point in time. Websites at GitHub.io are proliferating. Job interviewers look to GitHub to gauge each individual's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Join Wilson Mar in this hands-on tutorial to become immediately productive with these vital tools. Wilson has...

Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton & Associates
MB

Great Product Design with User Story Mapping

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the 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 and user...

Ken Mugrage
ThoughtWorks
MC

Building Continuous Delivery Pipelines: A Workshop

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
Jake Calabrese
Agile For All
MD

Facilitation Skills for All: Create Engaging Meetings

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Are you looking for techniques that will foster collaboration within meetings? Are you recognizing that meetings have become painful experiences where people struggle to achieve the purpose of the meeting and question the value of meetings? Tricia Broderick and Jake Calabrese recognize that most facilitators understand the basics of the role, such as creating a meeting goal and agenda. Unfortunately, this alone does not guarantee a meeting’s success. Join Tricia and Jake to challenge the typical ways meetings are planned and conducted. Discover alternative techniques in dealing with common...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
ME

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MF

Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
Moss Drake
Dentist Management Corporation
MG

Agile Risk Management

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

MH

IoT Testing Workshop

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

The Internet of Things now has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. The IoT is no longer something talked about as a futuristic concept. With the proliferation of connected devices, connected appliances, connected cars, and even connected clothes, the stage is set and IoT apps are here to stay. Our testing, product management, and development teams need to be preparing to address how to develop and test in this new world we live in. The explosive growth of the IoT market has had a major impact on mobile testing and testing in...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MI

Acceptance Test-Driven Development

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
MJ

Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tuesday, June 6

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TC

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around 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 team’s performance, accountability, and engagement. Investigate...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
TF

Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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,...

Larry Maccherone
Independent Consultant
TH

Lean/Agile Data Driven Decisions Demystified

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks
Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks
TA

Stop Saying DevOps and Start Applying Continuous Delivery Principles

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). How is your organization implementing efforts in agile, Continuous Delivery, and now DevOps when they appear to be selling the same dream? Max starts with disambiguating DevOps and understanding our need as software engineers and practitioners. We still demand the same output: improved time to market through the incremental delivery of quality software. Next he shows how to conduct your own Value Stream Mapping exercise—a crucial tool ThoughtWorks uses to identify waste and...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TE

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering 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...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
TB

The Architecture of Microservices

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Tuesday, June 6, 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, a lot of complexity comes coupled with these benefits. 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 guide you in making the right architecture and design decisions for your organization. Mark discusses the core...

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are unfortunately still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on a...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
TG

Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX): Keep Your Users Coming Back

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TI

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
TM

Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster—ready to take on the world. Then reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from What is management’s role on a scrum project? to How do we manage dependencies...

TJ

Docker Fundamentals Jumpstart

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Docker, a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization, is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architectures. 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 Ali Hussain 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. Ali presents and demonstrates...

TL

Leading Change: Even If You’re Not in Charge

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ken Johnston
Microsoft
Eun Chang
Microsoft
TN

Statistics in Big Data Analysis: Beyond Counting

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Do you have data—lots and lots of really big data? Do you know what it’s telling you? Maybe your organization is stuck in dashboard mode, counting how many of this or that. And since you have big data, perhaps you even calculate an average every once in awhile. Therein lies the problem: Organizations don’t advance their use of big data. They just spend more time and money processing more data so they can count it just a little better. Ken Johnston helps you go beyond counting and into statistical relevance. This statistics primer is designed for those with no prior experience or those...

Wednesday, June 7

Tanya Kravtsov
Audible
K1

Stamp Out Agile and DevOps Bottlenecks

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

The 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....

Neal Ford
ThoughtWorks
K2

Modern Evolutionary Software Architectures

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later.” Modern advances in architecture have shown that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. Neal Ford describes a family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, how we can build evolvable systems, and how to retrofit existing ones. He discusses three key concepts that support evolutionary architectures. Incremental change covers engineering practices to support continuous delivery and DevOps. Neal explains how fitness functions build...

AW2

The Future of Scrum

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Jeff Howey
Leading Agile
AW3

Storytelling Techniques for Better Requirements

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Do you struggle with making your ideas clear and understandable to others? Does it annoy you to sit in requirements sessions for hours only to leave with more questions than answers? As human beings, we’re made for storytelling. It is a natural form of communication. So, Jeff Howey suggests that we use some of the same techniques we use talking to friends and family when trying to share our complex ideas and define software requirements. Whether you are a product owner or a traditional business analyst trying to make your approach to requirements more lean and nimble, join Jeff to explore...

BW1

From Monoliths to Services: Paying Your Technical Debt

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Ever since distributed software became popular, developers have been choosing whether to use monolithic architectures or service-oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier. David Litvak describes how a monolithic application—due to its ever increasing technical debt—can become too big to support. He explores how to gradually reduce the size by extracting its components into smaller services, so ultimately the application is decoupled and highly...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
BW2

Mobile Testing: Challenges and Solutions

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Now that we’ve gotten beyond the initial shock and prevalence of mobile applications, we’ve come to realize that it’s not just about making apps work. In chasing the mobile market, we often don’t really understand or choose to ignore the differences in the mobile platform when it comes to designing and building a successful app. Of course, the mobile platform is smaller, but what else do you need to consider? To be successful, you need more than just “it works.” Phil Lew explores the top mobile quality challenges, and discusses how to approach and solve them. Some of these challenges...

Tanya Kravtsov
Audible
BW3

Notes from the Test Management Battlefield

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Are you a new, aspiring, or experienced manager tasked with building a team of stars? Do you manage a team that needs to be motivated or re-energized? Join Tanya Kravtsov as she shares stories, tips, and tricks on hiring, on-boarding, and managing test engineers and turning your group into a Dream Team. From the experience of building teams in new organizations, managing test teams from five people to fifty, both onsite and onshore, Tanya shares lessons learned and successful processes that she adopted. The talent and level of commitment of individual team members, as well as their...

Adam_Auerbach
Lincoln Financial Group
DW1

Demystifying DevOps Adoption

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
DW2

Architectural Patterns for an Efficient Delivery Pipeline

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Perry Reinert
Independent Consultant
AW4

Why Agile Works—and How (Not) to Screw It Up!

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
Josh Anderson
Broadvine
AW5

Football and Agile: Like Peanut Butter and ?

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Is there symmetry between agile and football? Software development methods and one of the more physical sports. You would think the answer is no—nope, surely no similarities there. Nor can agile folks learn much from this grimy sport. Well, just as Scrum has its naming roots in the sport of rugby, perhaps there is some symmetry to it. Join Bob Galen and Josh Anderson as they explore American football and look for similarities, lessons, metaphors, and tactics that align and amplify our agile team practices. Bob and Josh explore making game time adjustments, the importance of tempo,...

AW6

Finding the 'Seams': Making User Stories Smaller

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

When we adopt agile practices and a lean mindset, we make great promises to ourselves but we often encounter difficulties in creating user stories that are of high quality and utility. Mitch Goldstein describes why user stories and their value are the currency of agile and lean software development. Mitch illustrates why making smaller and more nimble stories significantly increases the likelihood of a story's completion and success. What do we look for in user stories that tell us they need to be split? Are there certain words or phrases that identify stories as good candidates...

Julie_Gardiner
CA Technologies
BW4

The PM's Guide to Team Dynamics

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Jerry Weinberg once said, “No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.” In the past, the challenges for any team leader, regardless of specialty, were basically the same when it came to people issues. Now, with the popularity of agile and its cross-functional teams, leaders have another factor to consider in addition to people―their different specialties. How can our leadership approach help us achieve great results and a happy team? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents a communication model that can be used to help motivate every team member—and minimize personality/...

BW5

Shave Mobile Development Time and Cost with Xamarin

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

By shaving time and cost to build and maintain your app by half, Xamarin—a free, open source framework offered by Microsoft—can revolutionize your mobile application development. Most app development approaches result in building the app twice—once for iOS and once for Android—or producing a sluggish app that has an inconsistent HTML-driven user interface. Xamarin lets you write C# code that’s compiled for each operating system to leverage each platform’s native UI, API access, and performance. Create an app that feels and performs like it was custom-built for that device, while sharing 90...

Anshul Sharma
Emmi Solutions
BW6

Move Your Selenium Testing to the Cloud

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

What is the most challenging aspect of running automation tests? Anshul Sharma believes it is covering multiple browsers and cross-device testing combined with faster execution of tests. The conventional way to do this is by distributing the tests on Selenium Grid, but that comes with a substantial burden of managing and maintaining the infrastructure. Now that cloud-computing resources are available and affordable, many organizations are leveraging cloud services. Anshul says that moving over to cloud from your own selenium grid places your focus more on automation rather than maintenance...

Mason Leung
Grand Rounds
DW3

Implement DevOps Like a Unicorn—Even If You’re Not One

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Etsy, 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...

Hasan Yasar
Software Engineering Institute
DW4

Integrate Security into DevOps

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Software security often evokes negative feelings among software developers because it is associated with additional programming effort, uncertainty, and road-blocking activity on a fast release cycle. Secure software developers must follow a number of guidelines that, while intended to satisfy regulations, can be very restrictive and difficult to understand. Hasan Yasar believes that the Secure DevOps movement combats this negative view by shifting the paradigm. Rather than blindly following required security practices and identified security controls, Secure DevOps developers learn how to...

Derek W. Wade
Kumido Adaptive Strategies
AW7

Agile Leadership Strategies: Winning the War on Complexity

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Development 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...

Scott MacIntyre
Capital One
AW8

From Scrum to Kanban: Our Journey

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Chris McKenzie
Parametric Portfolio Associates
AW9

Software Craftsmanship in an Agile Environment

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

In the past two decades agile has become the popular development methodology. Businesses have been rushing to adopt agile processes because it promises to save money and deliver working software more quickly. However, for many businesses, software quality has not improved—and often has gotten worse. In response, some software engineering leaders found it necessary to create the software craftsmanship movement. Why has agile failed to deliver on its promise of higher quality software? What can be done about it? What solutions do these craftsmen offer? Chris McKenzie explains that the core...

Lisa Calkins
Exadel
BW7

Is Your Project Doomed from the Start?

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

When we think of planning, we often think about requirements planning. We get the initial features and functions down, and then see where agile takes us. Lisa Calkins claims that less than a third of software development projects are successful. Regarding this lack of success, process experts focus on the lack of planning early in the project. However, Lisa believes that all too often teams jump directly from “idea” to “feature sets” without any long-term product or business strategy. Software projects should be value-driven rather than focused on specific requirements or features that may...

Michael Durrant
Independent Consultant
BW8

Improving Profitability through Accessibility

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Michael Durrant has found that paying attention to basic usability and accessibility guidelines can make millions of extra dollars for his company. He describes his uphill journey to improve accessibility and usability for users purchasing car insurance through their website. Michael shares many factors to consider and barriers to overcome—from those who thought it wouldn’t make much difference to their customers, to those who pointed out that it had been tried before and not made any money, to those who didn’t have knowledge of or even agree with some of the basic principles of usability...

Ken Johnston
Microsoft
BW9

Drive Product Improvements with Telemetry

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Do you want to know how real users are interacting with your product? Do you want to know which features they don’t use? Would you like to understand how your product works internally under real operational conditions? Then you need telemetry—the instrumentation of your product to record this information and transmit it back to you for analysis. Windows 10 implemented this capability. Today, there are more than 450 million devices running Windows 10 providing constant feedback on its operation. Ken Johnston says Microsoft learned a lot about what they did right for that launch—and what...

Ken Mugrage
ThoughtWorks
DW5

You Can’t Buy DevOps … You Have to Sell It

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Avantika (Avan) Mathur
Electric Cloud
DW6

Microservices and Docker: Foundation for a New Generation of Applications

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

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...

Lee Copeland
TechWell Corp.
K3

Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 4:00pm to 5:00pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Better Software, Agile Dev, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists 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, June 8

Ken Johnston
Microsoft
K4

Big Data: The Magic to Attain New Heights

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

There is magic in Big Data. There are also goblins, fairies, and rainbow-colored unicorns. The problem is to take all that data and turn it into magical insights that help make your software products better and help the business grow. Ken Johnston has been employing data for decision-making for years in service operations, cloud development, A/B testing, and recently with business intelligence. Ken shares examples of building big data infrastructures, using telemetry to predict and react to service outages, deploying A/B experiments to drive post sales monetization, mining text data for...

Francie Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
AT1

The Agile Dojo: Shiny Toy or Best Idea Ever?

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Remember 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....

David Bernstein
To Be Agile
AT2

Five XP Practices for Agile Development

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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....

Mary_Thorn
Ipreo
AT3

The T-Shaped Scrum Team: Get in Shape for Your Future

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Today, agile teams are being asked to do more than ever before. The notion of a T-shaped person, created by Tim Brown (CEO of IDEO) in the 1990s, describes a new breed of worker—one who goes beyond the standard, assigned role. Mary Thorn believes that the roles of team members can stretch to include other aspects that intrigue them and keep them interested. Mary’s team members are writing product documentation, are ScrumMasters, are building infrastructure to support rapid release, are taking ownership for security and compliance to standards, are presenting the development process to...

Melissa Tondi
Disrupt Testing
BT1

Finding Efficiencies in Your Development Lifecycle

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares...

Steven Woodward
Cloud Perspectives
BT2

Application Resiliency: Keys to Planning for IoT and the Cloud

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The technology storms continue to form and merge. The Internet of Things, software-defined everything, blockchain, and cloud computing are combining and recombining in new ways. To provide and consume trusted and resilient services, solutions must be defined and designed to accommodate failure. Although the term resiliency is seldom defined, clarified, or used in a meaningful context, it is often used to describe applications. However, this vagueness leads to rework, cost overrun, frustration, and most importantly, solutions that do not provide the resilience required by the...

Stacy Kirk
QualityWorks Consulting Group, LLC
DT1

Continuous Delivery of Innovation and Quality

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

High performing DevOps organizations deploy 200 times more frequently than lower performers. So, it is no surprise that these organizations are known for their innovation and quality. Low performing DevOps teams miss the opportunity to continuously test their ideas and integrate feedback. Many organizations fail to achieve continuous delivery due to limitations in their testing process and strategy. Stacy Kirk details how to start or optimize quality in your DevOps lifecycle for continuous delivery of innovative applications. She explains how to foster a culture of innovation that will...

Michael Hackett
LogiGear Corp
DT2

Continuous Testing in DevOps

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Achieving continuous testing is a daunting task for many test teams still struggling with combining agile, test automation, and increased speed. We know that change is rarely easy. Fixing or getting rid of some practices is tough. However, one-step-at-a-time change can take you far and fast. To jumpstart your team, Michael Hackett shares learnings from four LogiGear clients in various stages of continuous integration, continuous testing, and continuous delivery. Failures in one organization ranged from naively thinking that automating every manual script was a good thing to...

John Krewson
Sketch Development Services
AT4

Experience Agile Emergence through Sketch Comedy

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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

Nichole Vanderlaan
Amway Corporation
AT5

Visual Management Gone Wild

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

A visual management system is a low-tech tool with a simple mission—to visually represent the work that the team is doing. When used regularly and correctly, it can be a project acceleration tool. However, teams often go wild with visuals, decorating every inch of free wall space with gridlines, Sticky Notes, and project stats until it looks like the arts and crafts store vomited all over the office. Nichole Vanderlaan refers to this as “wallpaper,” which is often static and fails to provide much benefit. She highlights common failure modes that result in wallpaper such as not huddling...

BT4

RAMP: Requirements Authors Mentoring Program

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Industry data indicates that untrained and inexperienced requirements authors commonly inject thirty to fifty major defects per page of text. With many requirements specifications reaching several hundred pages, potentially thousands of defects are injected into the software development process. John Terzakis says training and mentoring of authors by a requirements coach is effective in reducing defect densities by an order of magnitude—when each coach is assigned only a few authors, they are collocated and, most importantly, experienced requirements coaches are available. So what...

Max Guernsey
Net Objectives
BT5

Six Ways to Improve Class Design for Better Software

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Decomposing a system design into small classes with narrow responsibilities is essential for creating a maintainable software product. However, without guidance, it can often be difficult—especially for new software developers—to see how a large class might be broken down into smaller pieces. The problem usually isn’t knowing how to make a change, it’s knowing what change to make. Max Guernsey shares six techniques that can ease the burden of identifying smaller design elements. These include direct examination of code qualities, modeling real-world entities, responding to code smells,...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
BT6

The #NoEstimates Movement

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When will you deliver that feature? How much will this project cost? What can I have right now? All of these are reasonable questions that both management and customers want answered. The problem is that when developers try to answer these questions, often more harm than good results. Estimates turn into commitments, dollars are committed based on misinformation, and all parties involved end up feeling cheated and confused. Ryan Ripley explains that the #NoEstimates movement is a critical look at how estimates are used in the software industry. Are estimates needed at all? Is getting...

Dan Petit
ServiceMaster
DT3

Pipeline as Code: A Model for Scaling CI/CD

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Many companies begin their journey into DevOps by using open-source tools to stand up simple but effective continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD) pipelines for one or two small, leading-edge teams—as a proof-of-concept. These early successes are often followed by an overwhelming demand for more—more teams, more functionality, more traceability, and faster turnaround. DevOps teams may soon find that their initial effort, as effective as it was, does not scale consistently or quickly. After all it was only a proof of concept. This inability to scale slows the...

Manoj Pahuja
GoDaddy
Daniel Clayton
GoDaddy
DT4

Scaling Automated Tests: Choosing an Appropriate Subset

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Automated testing of an application with many dependent services can be challenging. Achieving continuous deployment across these services can be even more so. Managing, coordinating, and scaling deployments of services can become overwhelming and error prone over time. Ensuring that you are able to detect important defects before customers do can be difficult. Executing only relevant tests after each code change rather than always running everything (boiling the ocean) can be a formidable task and might not scale well as the size of the app increases. Manoj Pahuja and Daniel Clayton...

Sarah Harper
Cerner Corporation
AT7

Agile Release Planning: The Middle Time Frame

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Lean and agile development methods, which emphasize planning on five different levels, can generate amazing high-level vision and long-term plans to achieve business goals. These methods also can produce plans for lower-level detailed iteration and daily planning. Yet when it comes to release planning—the middle time frames—lean-agile methods often degrade into a best guess by the team, architect, or project manager. Sarah Harper demonstrates how to use your team’s historical data to accurately predict and plan releases. In addition, she shows how you can use Monte Carlo methods to...

Don MacIntyre
Scrum Etc.
AT8

Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Angie Jones
Twitter
AT9

Include Automated Testing in Your Definition of Done

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Even though most teams appreciate the benefits of test automation, it is commonly viewed as too time-consuming to be included as part of an agile sprint. This results in automation being done in isolation, typically months after the user story has been completed. This can lead to several problems including automation team members being disengaged and missing key aspects of the requirements, as well as teams going through a period where new features are being introduced but no regression testing is occurring. Angie Jones provides agile-friendly approaches to test automation that allow teams...

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions
BT7

Improv(e) Your Requirements

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created spontaneously, in the moment. Successful improvisers learn and use a variety of skills and techniques which allow them to better extract ideas, expand on them, and make them meaningful and manifest. Now, reread the previous sentence but replace the word “improvisers” with “analysts.” In many ways, improv is a great analogy for requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In this highly interactive session, Damian Synadinos uses his extensive experience with improv and...

Matti Klasson
King Digital Entertainment
BT8

Happy and Productive Teams: A Divine Saga

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Matti Klasson believes we live in a world where our social networks and relations are becoming more important in everything we do—and this is reflected in our work environment. Social relations and networks within the organization will supersede traditional hierarchical structures. We need to support the new paradigm of networking and socially connected organizations where teams are enabled to deliver value to the customer as fast as possible. A new agile leadership is needed to create and maintain an environment where people can be highly creative and innovative. This is the story of how...

Gajan Pathmanathan
Quicken Loans
DT5

DevOps: The Key to Quality-Driven Development

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Rapidly evolving business demands and competitive environments pose challenges to increase the speed of delivery and do better with less. This often results in sacrificing quality and failing to understand that a minimum viable product must be “viable” to the customer. When organizations realize this, they often turn to DevOps practices that are rapidly becoming the new norm. Gajan Pathmanathan discusses how to ensure quality-driven development through DevOps while maintaining delivery speed. He focuses on the transition an organization needs to make to ship “quality” software frequently,...

Bill Dickenson
CAST Software
DT6

Metrics to Assess Risk in DevOps

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

 

As software development becomes more value-focused, the need for a fluid production process emerges. That process is DevOps. However, when the number of release cycles rises, so does the risk of disruptive code entering the system and eroding the value that development creates. Traditional risk assessment techniques create a false sense of security. Risk is not a simple “go or no-go” decision; it is an input to an informed decision that requires extensive risk analysis. As the velocity increases and the focus on user acceptance and functional validation increases, the...

Ebenezer Ikonne
Cox Automotive
AT10

Guiding Cultural Adoption of Agile at Scale

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Tina Rusnak
First Class Agile, LLC
AT11

Setting and Measuring Individual Performance in Agile Teams

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

When software development teams work in waterfall environments, traditional performance management programs can help encourage personal development and innovation. However, Tina Rusnak says that when organizations move to agile, measuring performance takes on a new form that often causes confusion. If you're an agile developer, the days of receiving a high performance rating for writing the most code are over. Why? Agile is all about creating value, not writing code. If you're an agile tester, the days of receiving a high rating for finding the most bugs are over. Why? Agile...

Lynn Winterboer
Winterboer Agile Analytics
Cher Fox
Fox Consulting
AT12

Agile Test Automation for Data-Centric Applications

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Test automation is one of several key technical enablement practices that allow teams to be more successful in their agile journey. Although there are many test practices and automation tools available for software development teams to leverage, few are targeted to data-related development and testing. This lack of data-centric testing tools leaves teams working on data warehousing, business intelligence, and other data-centric applications thinking they can't possibly automate their tests. Why is test automation important to agile data teams? Why aren’t they automating their tests...

Mathias Eifert
Excella Consulting
BT10

Impact Maps: Let Your Goals Drive Your Product Features

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to combine quantified business goals, direct traceability from goals to features, surfacing of value assumptions, cause-and-effect analysis, design thinking, and visual facilitation in a single approach? Mathias Eifert says there is! Impact maps support multiple stakeholders in gaining consensus on which features or actions are most useful in helping an organization achieve its goals. In the process, stakeholders agree what needs to be accomplished, create shared understanding of possible solutions, decide which user groups or personas to target...

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
BT11

Your Resume is Now What You Do on GitHub

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Increasingly, recruiters are looking at GitHub accounts to identify candidates who demonstrate a proven history of work over several years with specific technologies. Rather than looking at your résumé, employers prefer looking at your GitHub account because it’s verifiable. Anyone can analyze your GitHub history to see what you have been working on, when, with whom, and with what technologies. They can see how “technical” you are by what type of files you changed. Wilson Mar helps you create your own GitHub account, your personal website available from anywhere in the world, with keywords...

Chris Haddad
Karux, LLC
BT12

Sprint Zero on Your Enterprise Cloud Journey

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Brandon Carlson
Lean TECHniques, Inc.
DT7

DevOps and Regulatory Compliance—Like Oil and Water or Peanut Butter and Jelly?

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

DT8

DevOps in an Embedded and Regulated Environment

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Janelle Klein
Open Mastery
K5

Identify Development Pains and Resolve Them with Idea Flow

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in software development is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos? Janelle Klein presents a novel approach to...

Friday, June 9

David Hussman
DevJam
SMT1

Impact over Progress: Learning from Evidence over Following the Process

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Friday, June 9, 2017 - 8:45am to 10:15am

All too often, David Hussman finds that teams are overly certain that “following a process” equates with finding success. For many of these teams and organizations, their focus is on progress over product, running the risk of getting the wrong thing done faster. Expect to be challenged by examining whether you are leading process adoption rather than impact produced. Explore how leaders can support the practices that are working, challenge the practices that are not working, and convert team goals to make real change for the organization in the form of better products, better user...

SMT2

The Triumph of Simplicity, Discipline, and Clarity

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Friday, June 9, 2017 - 10:45am to 12:00pm

As a leader it can be difficult—whether in times of change or in times of relative stability—to stay centered and focused on what is important. The “noise” around you can be deafening and the pace can make your head spin. Paul Hammond has tried many approaches, both for himself and for his teams, to manage this sensory overload. A number of tactical methods have helped, but he has found he always returns to and relies on three core evergreen principles—simplicity, discipline, and clarity. Join Paul to gain insight into what each of these means to him with examples of situations where...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
SMT3

Leadership Coaching Dojo: A Chance to Practice What You Preach

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Friday, June 9, 2017 - 12:45pm to 2:00pm

A recent Harvard Business Review article referenced a survey in which 70 percent of leaders reported being uncomfortable with employee conversations. And these were simple conversations—not crucial or pivotal conversations. It is no surprise that most leaders really struggle as they engage in difficult conversations such as individual employee or team performance improvement discussions or those challenging leadership assumptions. Bob Galen says that these are the very conversations you need to have as you envision, engage, and guide your teams through the changes toward a successful agile...

Todd Holden
Tennessee Department of Transportation
SMT4

Agile Leadership in the Public Sector

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Friday, June 9, 2017 - 2:30pm to 3:30pm

Less than a decade ago Gartner reported that 75 percent of large-scale government IT projects resulted in failure. In 2014, government software project failures such as Healthcare.gov again called national attention to this continuing problem in the public sector. To become more responsive, many federal, state, and local agencies began using agile software delivery methods. Yet, public service leaders still struggle to embrace new ways of thought or challenging long-term processes to instill agility into the public sector culture. Todd Holden examines what he sees as a fundamental thought-...