Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Agile Engineering & Development

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...

Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop between development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and questions about outcomes or dependencies are documented for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Come ready to participate in a live example...

The dojo is an experiment-rich environment for the team that encourages adding pieces and tools as needed, pushing experimentation, and learning first. What makes this dojo special is how adaptive it can be, considering teams no longer are all collocated. By using simple tools like a good camera, open call, and a free tool to display work, teams can collaborate across the world. The goal of the dojo is fourfold: Improve individuals and interactions, deliver working software, collaborate with customers, and respond to changes quickly. We'll talk about how agility can be applied to various...

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...

Chaos engineering, failure injection, and similar practices have verified benefits to the resilience of systems and infrastructure. But can they provide similar resilience to teams and people? What are the effects and impacts on the humans involved in the systems? This talk will delve into both positive and negative outcomes for all the groups of people involved, including users, engineers, product owners, and business owners. Using case studies from organizations where chaos engineering has been implemented, Matty Stratton will explore the changes in attitude that these practices create,...

Software testing lags behind the pace of features development and digital innovation. Despite recent advancements, testing remains one of the biggest challenges in DevOps. Research shows that DevOps teams have an average of less than 60 percent test automation coverage—and that’s a problem. To scale DevOps and agile and realign the entire software release cycle, Eran Kinsbruner believes there needs to be a better solution. To increase test automation coverage, teams need to match software testing deliveries with the right testing tools, skill sets, and personas. Eran will explain...

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,...

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 release date is a week away. Development is complete. The code works, and everything looks good. Marketing is ready with the media blitz. Our customers are waiting to get their hands on the new features and are sure to give us good feedback. The only step left is to get the security group to scan the application and give us the approval to release. Cross your fingers- let’s hope we get the green light! Otherwise, I don’t know what we are going to do. DevOps, and more importantly, DevSecOps, promises to do away with rolling the dice at the end and hoping we are allowed to release what...