Conference Schedule

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...Read more

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....Read more

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...Read more

Automation has been touted as a way to speed up release delivery, improve quality, and reduce testing costs. However, what if there is a different side to this story? Come hear an opposing view to automation—and why it may actually cost your organization time, resources, and even quality. Kevin Pyles discusses why automation projects continue to fail, why automation checks should take a backseat to manual testing, and why the cost of automation is just too high. Kevin suggests you “just say no” to automation. But with pressure from your manager and great industry marketing hype,...Read more

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...Read more

“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...Read more

As more and more companies and teams transform to agile, the challenges become more diverse and affect how teams execute and the personal careers/ambitions of team members. Agile transformation poses challenges that span product architectures, products modularization, execution velocity, timelines, release management, and the roles of product, project, and engineering managers. Nir Szilagyi has led teams in multiple companies through the storm of agile changes and experienced first-hand the pitfalls that these changes can bring. Nir shares both his personal story as a quality engineering...Read more

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,...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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,...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more