Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Software Quality & Testing
Monday, November 5
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Tuesday, November 6
Take Your Test-Driven Development to the Next Level
PreviewTest-driven development (TDD) is a powerful discipline that combines testing, coding, and software design to ameliorate defect rates and facilitate future enhancements. TDD has been around for some twenty years, so why isn’t it more prevalent—and more popular? For one thing, TDD is not easy to get right! And, it seems expensive. In this mostly hands-on tutorial, Rob Myers will explore these concerns by diving straight into the deep-end. Rather than starting with theory and working toward practice, Rob is going to reverse the tutorial recipe. Come prepared to spend the first half of...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver 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...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...
Wednesday, November 7
Continuous Testing Is Not Test Automation
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...
Frequent Releases for Enterprise Mobile: Make It a Reality Without Losing Your Sanity
As companies continue to embrace the mobile-first strategy, many are grappling with a formidable challenge: how to release mobile updates more frequently given the painful and archaic app publishing process. Beyond brute-forcing release cadence, there need to be cultural, technical, and infrastructural changes to make frequent releases a reality. Stacey Yan and Alex Cabanilla will explore these dimensions in depth and provide practical insights on how to boost build infrastructure and reduce build time, improve code quality and merge process and guard against bad code, manage mobile...
Modern Security with Microservices and the Cloud
It's great that you've moved to microservices, but how are you handling security and distributing secrets? Traditional architectures use perimeter-based security, but you can't exactly wrap the cloud in your own personal firewall. Many organizations are practicing "lift and shift" to leverage the cloud, but then find themselves at the end of failed compliance audits. Seth Vargo will highlight the new security challenges associated with using cloud technologies and microservices, then showcase techniques for solving those challenges. Using HashiCorp Vault, a free and open source secrets...
Enabling Continuous Testing with Docker and Kubernetes
Quality assurance frequently lags behind the development of new features. One common cause is the difficulty of getting software into a deployable state for testing. Join Arjun Comar as he discusses how Docker containers and Kubernetes can be used to solve this challenge. Arjun will talk about his experiences on recent DevOps efforts where Docker and Kubernetes enabled rapid deployments, and you will learn how to set up short-lived test environments that can shift testing left and permit testing to be performed even prior to developers merging code into the mainline, allowing continuous...
Creating Chaos: Engineering for the Unexpected
Every day we deal with complexity in our systems and multiple layers of dependencies. This complexity makes it difficult to predict when one service or dependency might go rogue for a specific circumstance during a delivery workflow. That's where chaos engineering comes in. Chaos engineering creates these "random" scenarios on purpose and builds resiliency into a system while increasing the velocity at which value is delivered to consumers. Shahzad Zafar will discuss his company's journey into chaos engineering, the principles behind it, how to plan for introducing chaos, and why a culture...
Optimize Performance Engineering with an Integrated Docker Framework
When an e-commerce platform is going through a digital and cloud transformation, the DevOps and performance engineering team has various responsibilities: prepare the workload, execute tests, measure and analyze performance KPIs, baseline, and store performance-related data. Current tools and process often impact the speed and quality of delivery, as most of the steps require manual intervention. Join Safi Mohamed and Aftab Alam as they walk through how they built a Docker-based integrated performance engineering framework using AWS, JMeter, Docker, Jenkins, Python, and Splunk to automate...
Climbing the Mountain of Continuous Deployment
Trying to reach continuous deployment (CD) can feel like scaling a gigantic mountain full of sheer faces, icy passes, and incredible dropoffs. When a company doesn’t take the proper precautions on its journey to CD, it can result in an overworked engineering organization and high-risk issues reaching the end-users. Join Michele Campbell as she discusses key insights about the journey to CD her company is on right now. In just three short months, the organization has managed to double its number of production releases, without overwhelming teams or causing the quality of the program to...
Thursday, November 8
Shift Left: Continuous Performance Testing in the CI/CD Pipeline
“Fail fast and fail often” is a key tenet of DevOps. It places great emphasis on continuous testing to deliver software with confidence and ensure a positive user experience. As teams embrace the “shift left” methodology, they need to transform the traditional approach that relegates performance testing to later stages of the delivery process. By shifting the performance testing left and conducting it continuously, teams can quickly detect and gain insight into software performance degradations earlier in the lifecycle. Gajan Pathmanathan will discuss the transition a team needs to undergo...
A Personal History of Collaboration: Soloing, Pairing, Mobbing, Cube Farms, and Pipe Fires
Pair programming is the practice you love to hate! It's been nearly twenty years since Extreme Programming promoted pair programming as a collaborative practice, and it's still here. And if you thought that was bad, now there's mobbing, where the entire team works together on one thing at a time. Does that seem nuts? Yet we often hear teams say, "We go faster because we are mobbing." In this anecdote-heavy session, you'll hear Jeff Langr's history of working through various models for collaboration (or not) across the past several decades, including pairing, solo programming, and mobbing....
Future-Proofing Testers in the Age of AI, ML, and Bots
We're all hearing the buzzwords of AI, machine learning, chatbots, and next-generation testing. Does this mean that the days of traditional testing as we know and practice it are over? Eran Kinsbruner doesn't think so. Join him to learn about the clear transformation happening toward smarter testing techniques and tools. These approaches will drive better pipeline efficiency and release velocity with high quality, and Eran thinks this means good things for the testing practice and practitioners. You'll discover the key trends that are happening around AI, machine learning, and bots in the...
Create the Self-Directed Team of Your Dreams
You've read dozens of books on agile and hundreds of articles, but no one actually told you how to build the team of your dreams. Josh Anderson brings the real-world experience of growing a team from zero engineers to thirty while shipping five products—and he did it is less than a year. Learn how to build a team from scratch or transform your existing team into a mystical self-directed team, and understand how leadership operates in a world of self-directed teams. You'll be able to take these lessons home and hire, grow, and support self-directed teams, then start changing the world.
How Design Thinking and Agile Can Be Friends
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...
DevSecOps in the Age of Containers
As IT shops look to move their workloads into containers and the cloud, their initial concerns often center around the security implications. Containers do force us to change how we think about securing our application, but they also offer exciting new opportunities. Curtis Yanko will explore the security concerns that come along with containers and take a deep dive into container composability and how modern tooling makes it possible to automate security and compliance concerns across the entire application stack. Curtis will share a project via GitHub that has a reference Jenkins...
A DevOps Team's Journey Toward Behavior-Driven Development
PreviewDevOps teams struggle to ensure quality in multiple daily deployments. Traditional testing approaches have often failed in this context, but there are exciting new ways to test. Laurent Py and Vincent Prêtre will explain how, at Hiptest, DevOps teams combine behavior-driven development (BDD) techniques with business metrics analysis to continuously assert the quality of their product. BDD scenarios align teams to a common goal, and users provide feedback to ensure their needs are met. The team transforms usage scenarios into tests that enable developers to deliver the functionality...