Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics

The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes, so companies are turning to continuous testing with the hopes that they can automate their way through the testing bottleneck by focusing on automating regression tests. But this strategy is failing. Adam Auerbach will explain why he thinks that is, what true continuous testing looks like, and how continuous testing should be...

Do you have measurement dysfunction on your program? Are you trying to measure teams and extrapolate each team’s status to the program? That doesn’t work. Teams have personal statuses, and you can’t add them together to understand the program state. But you can use a handful of program measurements that help everyone understand where the program is and where it’s headed. Instead of trying to “scale” measurements, take a new approach. Join Johanna Rothman to learn to use and share quantitative and qualitative program measurements that show everyone the program state. It starts with...

Despite thinking that organizations are slow to innovate, innovation actually abounds at many companies. Kodak, DEC, and Xerox did not fail due to lack of new, cutting-edge innovation; they failed because their organizations were tuned to their traditional markets, and a failure to change their business models and organizations led to their eventual disruption. The key to achieving business agility lies in leadership that transforms organizations. Transformational leaders succeed by changing the system, leading with purpose, and steering from the edges. They own their responsibility and...

Your team's been trained to deliver new features in a short time frame. You're estimating your work using abstractions like story points, and the predictability and quality of delivery have clearly improved. However, you still get asked every December to estimate year-long initiatives for annual budgeting. How agile can an organization be when the finance department is still thinking about large-batch projects with fixed cost, scope, and time? Robert Pieper will talk about how to mitigate financial risk and improve return on investment by working in smaller batches. Using financial...

When will you deliver that feature? How much will this project cost? Which features can I have in four weeks? These are all reasonable questions that both management and customers need answered, and traditionally, we’ve used estimates to provide such answers. But estimates can turn into commitments, dollars get spent based on misinformation, features end up misaligned with business needs, and all parties involved end up feeling misled and frustrated. The key question is, can we still make decisions without traditional estimates? Join us as our panel of experts discuss this question and...

As agile methods find more global applicability, we are finding groups outside of IT that have nothing to do with technology or software development demonstrating success with agile methods. But the approach to the solutions they deliver are often catered to their own unique circumstances. The original Agile Manifesto, principles, and supporting frameworks were formed with software development in mind, but from a holistic perspective, a different approach is needed for enterprise solutions outside of IT. Robert Woods will show you how to translate the success seen in agile software...

Open work areas, a focus on collaboration and conversations, and group events that seem to require verbal fluency ... It may feel like the agile ecosystem is designed with extroverts in mind. But science tells us that introverts make up almost half of the workforce, and they may struggle to be productive in an agile environments. In fact, introverts might even shy away from agile opportunities because of the radical collaboration it requires. In this interactive session, Julee Everett will teach you to recognize the traits of an extrovert and an introvert through self-identification....

IT organizations that don’t know their risk factors and exposure are likely to make investments in DevOps that don’t matter. After working with several teams that lost their DevOps funding after making automation investments in areas that were not business constraints, Anne Hungate's “Know Your Numbers” model emerged. Join Anne to learn how to prioritize your DevOps improvements and demonstrate the impact and value you are delivering. After all, DevOps gets traction and funding when teams can show the business impact of doing it, so if you want your DevOps initiative to take off, be...

The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John...

Distributed teams are the norm in Fortune 100 and 500 companies, crossing many time zones and multiple cultures. These teams seldom communicate directly, instead using a point of contact to relay information. While teams don't need to be collocated to deliver significant business value, they must use their DevOps pipeline to their advantage. Through continuous integration and automated testing, stories can be swarmed by distributed teams and completed in a fraction of the time it typically takes. Treasa Overton will discuss how this distributed model allows for faster delivery of business...

Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why...

Agile adoption has changed the corporate landscape in many different ways. And while the change has been mostly positive for the teams, some can see agile and Scrum ideas as a revolt against traditional management practices. If the team is self-organized, then what's the manager's role? Have no fear—managers are not obsolete; their job just looks a little different. Katy Sherman will discuss how agile has reshaped the manager's role. You will see examples of what not to do, such as when managers become a real obstacle during agile adoption, as well as learn how individuals, teams, and...

Far too many agile instances either fail or underperform because the leadership team members don’t sufficiently understand agility and their role within it. They don’t understand the fundamentals or how to map them to effective execution. But the larger problem is that they (and the organization) are unaware of the gaps. In this session, we’ll explore a basic assessment model for determining agile leadership maturity as a means of gauging and improving leadership's understanding and your overall effectiveness in applying agile. You'll break into small groups and assess the leadership...