Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Quality Assurance

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...

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...

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....

“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...

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....

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...

It can be lonely at the top. Trying to find other leaders who are having the same problem and issues you have and are willing to take a few minutes and help solve problems is really hard. One solution that Bob Galen has found works well is the "fishbowl" conversation. The fishbowl activity is also great for keeping a focused conversation while in a large group of people. At any time, only a few people have a conversation—the fish in the fishbowl. The remaining people are listeners—the ones watching the fishbowl. The caveat is that the listeners can join the discussion at any moment. In...

When it comes to our day-to-day work interactions, there are many factors that pass us by simply because we’re not used to paying attention to them. The best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice, so join Julie Wyman for a brief introduction to themes and different aspects of interactions to start observing, followed by small group exercises to practice observing and to help understand what it feels like to be observed. The exercises will be followed by a debrief and full group discussion about how to observe thoughtfully and share feedback in a neutral, nonjudgmental...

Not every continuous delivery initiative starts with someone saying, "Drop everything. Let's do DevOps." Sometimes you have to grow your practice incrementally. Sometimes, you don’t set out to grow a practice at all—you are just fixing problems with your process, trying to make things better. Join Gene Gotimer as he walks through two case studies, one from the Department of Defense and one from the Department of Homeland Security, that took different avenues to get to agile and DevOps. Learn about the journey each organization took, the tools used to build quality into the products,...

Every one of us has the potential to be limitless in our careers, personal life, and everything in between! Yet most of us—yes, including you—are only achieving a fraction of what you are capable of. We all want more, but we aren’t sure how to go get it. This session will be an interactive and practical guide to breaking through all the things that limit you and will kickstart your journey to a limitless life. Jessica Soroky will introduce activities from the personal development program Limitless by Choice and address the potential all teams have to be high-performing when they start...

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...