Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Concurrent Sessions

The product owner role was introduced in Scrum in 1993, so the role has been around for more than twenty-five years. Yet we still struggle with the nature of it. Is it simple or complex? Is it inward- or outward-facing? It is about backlogs and stories, or something more? And is ownership the whole point? Bob Galen will share his 4 Quadrants model for what "good" product ownership looks like in the real world. It will start with balance, because the role is so broad and deep in its nuance. There are product, project, analyst, and leadership parts to the product owner role, and we’ll...

As an agile coach, ScrumMaster, or product owner, you interact with technical teams every day, even though you may not have a technical background yourself. You hear and read about DevOps all the time, but the truth is that you’re not really sure what DevOps is or exactly how it can help your company. You also have a feeling the executives in your company may be questioning whether their massive investment in agile is paying off. Lee Eason will help nontechnical agile practitioners understand exactly what DevOps is and why it’s valuable. You will leave understanding the background, key...

State Farm adopted an innovative approach to a common problem many organizations face with agile transformation: How do you influence, nurture, and support a whole scale culture of agility? How do you move from doing agile to being agile? The solution was to institute a continuous delivery dojo. State Farm is going on its third year of supporting delivery teams at scale in enhancing agile maturity and establishing a continuous delivery culture. The dojo represents a dedicated place to work with teams to change mindsets, skill sets, and toolsets. It also represents an opportunity to...

Come get your questions answered by an agile expert! We won't have an actual fireside, but Linda Rising will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss the topics that are most important to you. Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. And she wants to discuss whatever interests you. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.

You're thinking about modernizing your database development process ... someday. You have directories full of SQL files you use to build your application. You know unit tests should be included as part of your build process, and you are going to start adding them ... maybe next week. Does this sound like you? If you think modernizing your dev process will be difficult, time-consuming, and expensive, you may be surprised at how easy and cost-effective it is to get started. Blaine Carter will explore how to manage your database application in a continuous development pipeline. He will talk...

Testing is shifting left. Developers want instant feedback on the quality of their code, and testers want to incorporate tests earlier in the pipeline without slowing down development efforts. Testing in full browsers is great when you’re near the end of the pipeline and need to confirm cross-browser compatibility, but for the scale and speed required for these early pipeline tests, there is a need for a more effective solution. Enter headless browsers, an emerging trend that allows you to run your early pipeline tests at scale. Headless offers a lightweight option that gives developers...

Lean practices teach us that small batch sizes optimize flow of value to market. Small batch sizes also help organizations focus on building quality into systems by enabling the power of continuous integration, encouraging faster feedback cycles, increasing our ability to debug, emphasizing a focus on simplicity, decreasing lead and cycle time, and discouraging "snowplowing" testing efforts. These practices are critical for building quality into our products. In the government sector, it also enables the alignment of traditional cost accounting methods, such as earned value...

Here is a question we should all ask ourselves when building new software: Am I building in small chunks? Thinking and actions around the minimum viable product (MVP) are vital in creating a shift to full team and organizational agility. Agile methods work great when building, testing, and learning in small, discernible, discrete pieces is the norm. If there is not a shift to smaller increments or even an understanding of how to do that, the agile transformation is going to be in trouble. Jim Grunder will show how to move team and organizational planning approaches to fundamentally smaller...

As W. Edwards Deming wrote, "It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to—that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated." To build and lead an agile organization, it’s crucial that senior leaders develop a new mindset and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization. Join Reha Malik Gill as she discusses how to introduce the practices of design thinking, decentralization, and empowerment to assist you with transforming an agile organization. It...

The days of writing software and throwing it over the proverbial wall to operations and production support teams are over. It’s time we, as software development teams, become more accountable and take pride and ownership in what we do. The results will be better transparency, more autonomy, and reduced risk (among other things). Join Sean and Suresh as they walk through how Capital One tackled one particular project by leveraging DevOps and forming their "you build it, you own it" principles. You'll gain a better understanding of how to improve quality within your agile teams and how to...

Microservice, Monolith, and Serverless are some of the three architectural styles that have recently gained popularity. Some engineers swear one over the other, but in reality, there is no black and white: there are advantages and disadvantages, depending on each use case. For example, if the flow of your services are dependent on another and each service doesn’t need to scale independently, is it worth increasing the development power it needs to maintain infrastructure? In this talk, Michelle Hodges will provide the pros and cons of going one way versus another, providing real life...

One of the biggest problems facing organizations that are moving to an agile mindset is leadership alignment across the concepts, principles, and tactics. On the face of things, every leader says they understand agile and that they’re aligned. But saying it is one thing and being it is quite another. On top of that, it seems like feedback between the leaders has become nonexistent. Mary Thorn faces organizational misalignment nearly every day in agile coaching journeys. She has come up with an approach to detect, discuss, and realign organizations cross-functionally around their agile...

Liberating structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone, enabling groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Discuss them with peers and experts in this fishbowl discussion, where the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of the chairs in the "fishbowl." When you want to join as a speaker, you enter the fishbowl and sit in the empty chair, and one of the other speakers will voluntarily leave so that one chair...

Do you know teams that are merely doing "cargo cult DevOps"? Near the end of WWII, the Allies had airstrips on many islands in the south Pacific. The natives on these islands noticed that when the Allies put the "coconuts" on their ears and spoke into the "banana," the gods would send down a magical flying creature with food and supplies. When the war ended and the Allies left, the natives put the coconuts on their ears and spoke into the banana, and they wondered why the gods failed to bless them, too. They didn't understand headphones or radio transmissions or that someone must be...

When starting up a greenfield project, it’s easy to take advantage of the most modern development practices. But what about the rest of us, who are working on codebases greater than five minutes old? How do you take code that’s four years and hundreds of thousands of SLOC, and turn that into a lean, mean, continuous-deploying machine? In this talk, Melissa Benua will walk through what continuous integration and deployment means for teams working on mature code bases, and what the roadmap looks like to get from a release cycle that may take weeks or months to one that deploys on-demand....

Agile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leaders often ask, like: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? Many organizations use assessments to determine their level of agility. Dan Neumann will introduce several assessment approaches and tools that, like medicine, can be toxic when used incorrectly. We will explore the merits, potential uses, and possible downsides of each approach. Dan will help you understand more about your options for framing an assessment that fits your needs...

The ultimate objective of a DevOps approach is to deliver quality products to your customers as efficiently as possible. DevOps shops that achieved this state point to continuous testing as a key contributor to their success. However, QA and testing have become forgotten along the DevOps journey of many organizations. For groups that have incorporated testing, many have a release cadence that resembles something more like waterfall. The culprit is often the inability to incorporate stable automation into their testing practices. Lee Barnes will discuss how organizations can address...

Many organizations ignore culture and overfocus on picking and implementing the right tools. However, these tools have underlying cultural assumptions. If the current culture does not support these assumptions, then automation will only have limited success, or even fail altogether. So how do you address this problem? By recognizing that overfocusing on tools is a problem in the first place. Start by understanding the cultural assumptions supporting the optimum use of the tools, as well as how your organization measures up in relation to high-performing organizations. Finally,...

For any continuously improving organization, certain actions are commonly applicable when going through large amounts of change. Dan Barker walks through the five steps to transformational change that he's found to be crucial for moving to DevOps processes: establish the vision; create shared experiences; educate, educate, educate; find evangelists; and get feedback. Dan will elaborate on each item with methods he's used in real transformations at multiple companies. He'll also describe how these all tie into the DevOps culture, which is really what is being transformed in the company. You...

These days everyone wants to containerize their application, but not everyone understands the best way to go about it. You need a tool to manage your containers, you need tools for image security scanning, you need to completely rethink how your application fits into its deployment environment, and most importantly you need to make sure you’re following good DevSecOps practices. Join Ryan Kenney as he discusses how he has addressed these concerns, among others, for various clients. Ryan will discuss options for container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and its competitors. Then, he...

In today’s ever-evolving world of technology, how can QA teams continue to show value? QA isn't going away, but it is evolving again, and it's primed to continue to add value to companies that are willing to change. Derek Zell will outline how traditional compartmentalized roles are becoming a thing of the past and how to position your team (and yourself) to be an integral part of the latest technical evolution. He will cover what these new roles and functions could be, ways to evolve and grow as a tester, and how to pivot within a given skill set, all using real-world examples and case...

Most teams that do agile development start with Scrum. And why not? Scrum is a proven method for focusing your team, ensuring that work adds value, and minimizing the risk with release. Then, after awhile, Scrum becomes stagnant. There are no more speed increases, and the team focuses more on ceremonies than delivery. At this point, Extreme Programming (XP), and Lean XP in particular, is the next step in agile maturity. Lean XP means developing software at the last possible moment ("just-in-time development") using one-week sprints, test driven development, pairing at all levels,...

The Agile Manifesto says we value people and interactions over processes and tools. Yet when we talk about the agile methods, we usually end up talking about processes. Agilists use timeboxing as a forcing function to draw out resolutions and decisions. What if we just needed a better way to describe our needs and issues? What if we could actually be more effective with our communication? Join Robin Foster as he explores the relationships between learning, memory, communication, teaching, and the agile framework. Discover the cognitive science behind the process of learning new...

AWS Lambda is a serverless architecture that relieves you of hardware and scaling setup concerns. AWS Lambda functions are used by many organizations for serverless application development and automating DevOps tasks. But many teams start using AWS Lambdas and uncover problems such as running into resource limits, debugging nested lambda defects, managing code change across dozens of AWS accounts, and many more. Derek Ashmore will provide tips and tricks to make your AWS Lambda functions usable in different contexts and easier to develop and support. He will show you how to mitigate common...

With the microservice architecture evolving and becoming a golden standard, the necessity of testing the contracts between services appears to be more and more obvious. One of the most interesting solutions here is the Pact tool, which helps with testing and verifying the API contracts in a CI/CD manner and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities. However, the devil is always in the details: the implementation. We need to configure the Pact mock servers, but similar configurations are often needed across all the different parts of testing, from the verification of the providers to end-...

The telecom industry changes rapidly, the competition is fierce, and user experience is the utmost priority. In today's world of digitization and data personalization, effective use of agility and DevOps is the key behind ensuring customer satisfaction. Flawless delivery, optimized time to market, and enhanced customer usability form the backbone of IT to ensure the success of frontline teams in the business. The methodologies adopted in product and feature delivery, the agility adopted in delivering offers and promotions to the customer base, and the steps adopted in ensuring...