Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Agile & Lean Practices | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Agile & Lean Practices

Monday, November 4

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
ME

Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level

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Monday, November 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
Bob Galen
Vaco
MF

Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams

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Monday, November 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...

Tuesday, November 5

Coveros
TB

Introducing Docker and Kubernetes to Your DevOps Toolchain

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

As organizations look to improve the speed with which they deliver software, they increasingly turn to microservices and infrastructure-as-code for software architecture and delivery techniques to help leverage value from their DevOps adoptions. Docker, an industry standard containerization tool, facilitates moving processes into isolated environments that can be frozen into images, with an ecosystem that helps developers across organizations build and share these containers. Kubernetes builds on these capabilities and allows a software team to break down their application into small,...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
Bob Galen
Vaco
TE

Creating a High-Performance Agile Team

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tom Stiehm
Coveros, Inc.
TF

Tools for DevSecOps

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is about creating alignment across the value stream for an application, service, or product. DevSecOps integrates security into this process, making the entire team responsible for delivering secure code that works and can be deployed and used securely. But how do you actually do that? What tools do you add to your DevOps pipeline to help make your software secure and provide your stakeholders with a high level of confidence that the software meets all security requirements & standards? In this tutorial Tom Stiehm will explore what security tools you can add to your DevOps...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TG

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TH

The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

TJ

Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us

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Tuesday, November 5, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...

Wednesday, November 6

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AW2

Fixing Your Scrum - Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Broken Scrum practices limit your organization’s ability to take full advantage of the agility Scrum should bring: the development team isn’t cross-functional or self-organizing, the product owner doesn’t get value for their investment, and stakeholders and customers are left wondering when something—anything—will get delivered. Learn how experienced Scrum masters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership, while removing organizational impediments and helping Scrum teams deliver real-world value. Discover how to visualize your work, resolve impediments, and empower...

Dana Pylayeva
Agile Play Consulting LLC
AW1

Journey without Fear: Leading Your Teams to High Performance

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Psychological safety has been identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as a top condition for creating high-performing teams. Yet many organizations are affected by fear in the workplace. It manifests itself in employee disengagement, lack of innovation, a toxic working environment with gossip and rumors, and the best people resigning. How can we start taking the first steps away from the culture of fear and toward a culture of psychological safety? Join this interactive session to experiment with a Fear in the Workplace game and start these difficult conversations in a fun way. Experience...

Bob Galen
Vaco
AW3

What “Good” Looks Like: The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Jennifer Bonine
PinkLion AI
AW4

Where Does Data Come From?

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

With all the tools available on the market, it can be overwhelming to figure out which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best for you to create a high-performing team. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship between the DevOps cycle and your environment, and how a hub-and-spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She'll identify opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to...

Lee Eason
IHS Markit
AW5

DevOps for the Agile Practitioner

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

AW6

Wabi-Sabi Your DevSecOps

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

The ability of DevSecOps to produce secure code requires the merging of two very different cultures: AppSec and DevOps. While AppSec lives in a black-and-white world of secure or not secure that would cause “Hello World” to take six months to release, DevOps knows that the reality of software development is actually shades of gray, especially as demands are increasingly placed on development teams to produce more, faster. Brittany Greenfield will teach you how to apply the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, which accepts imperfections in the things that we create, to DevSecOps, allowing you to...

Lisa Maurer
State Farm
AW7

Continuous Delivery Dojo: From Doing Agile to Being Agile

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Jen Wright
GrayHair Software
Sally Vassalotti
GrayHair Software
AW8

Open Mic: Coaching Up in Your Organization

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

The term “coaching up” traditionally refers to communication with a supervisor or person above you in the organizational chart. Coaching up strategies can be effective for all levels: Have you ever had a conversation with a boss, product owner, ScrumMaster, or leader that did not go well? Is one of your teammates dropping the ball? Often our instincts tell us to go on the defensive, which may result in the blame game. Instead, when difficult situations happen—or, better yet, when you anticipate them—let superiors know in a polite and helpful manner. They will appreciate your initiative....

Linda Rising
Independent
AW16

An Agile Fireside Chat with Linda Rising

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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.

Allison Pollard
Improving
Amit Bansal
Improving
AW15

The Nitty-Gritty Practices of Agile Coaching for DevOps

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

How do you coach a team from showing progress every two weeks to delivering multiple times a day? Challenging the status quo, running experiments, and forming learning communities may be part of the answer. Research has shown that using the right kind of metrics can promote a generative culture, creating a space where people want to continuously improve and innovate. These metrics that drive culture also can help us know if our coaching is effective. Allison Pollard and Amit Bansal will blend their stories with an interactive workshop to teach you agile coaching practices you can...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group
AW13

Story Mapping Forward and Backward with DevOps

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

User story maps capture the journey a customer takes with your product, including activities and tasks needed to make that journey a successful one. Typically they begin from the point where the customer has a problem and continues until the feature solving that problem is built. However, rarely do we see the story map include DevOps themes such as release and configuration management activities, or even feature activation. Join Catherine Louis as she guides you through the anatomy of a user story map, including DevOps aspects. You will create a story map from problem discovery to...

Thomas_Haver
Designer Brands
AW11

Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Kimberly Davis
ASRC Federal
AW10

Small Batch Sizes Enable Everything—Even in the Government

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Steven Granese
AgileThought
AW9

The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

Many leaders want to transform their organization to become more agile, adaptive, and responsive to the market. However, most do not deeply understand how to lead their organization through such a massive change. They install prescriptive scaling frameworks and send employees to training, but discard the elements of true transformation that are difficult. When the inevitable failure ensues, they switch frameworks, fire people, and revert back to what worked for them in the past. What these leaders fail to recognize is that the mindset they used to build their organization conflicts with...

AW19

The MVP Mental Model

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Christina Ambers
Thomson Reuters
AW18

Enter the Agile Dojo

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Reha Malik Gill
Fannie Mae
AW17

Engaging Leadership: The Missing Piece for Enhancing Agile Adaptation

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Wednesday, November 6, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Thursday, November 7

Julie Wyman
Excella
AT3

KonMari Your Backlog: Tidying Up Those PBIs

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Have you tidied up your personal life with Marie Kondo and are now wondering how to achieve the same effect in your work life? Do you have the feeling that the most valuable product backlog items (PBIs) are getting lost under a mountain of old stories, bugs, and tasks? If so, join Julie Wyman to learn how to adapt the KonMari method to tidy up your product backlog. Julie will share a short quiz you can use to gauge the current state of your own backlog and walk through five easy steps you can take to get started in your tidying process. She'll also share real-life examples, call out...

Mark Kilby
Sonatype
AT2

Agile Actions for Facilitating Distributed Teams

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 10:00am

Facilitating distributed team meetings can feel like having one arm tied behind your back and one eye covered. But you can free yourself of these constraints using other agile practices. We struggle with meeting tools and keeping people engaged online, but what if we collaborate with our teams to get the most value out of meetings? If we leverage pairing, mobbing, and other practices, we can facilitate successful outcomes with our teams. Mark Kilby will describe a few distributed team patterns, explain how you can adapt the concepts of pairing and mobbing to help support your facilitation...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
AT1

A Festivus for Leadership Alignment

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

AT5

The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Eran Kinsbruner
Perfecto
AT4

Stabilizing Continuous Testing in DevOps

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Melissa Benua
mParticle
AT11

Continuous Deployment for 'Mature' Codebases

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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....

Leslie Lowman
AvidXchange
AT12

Legacy Code and Testing: Let's Energize It!

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Do you want to apply test automation to decade-old spaghetti code but aren't sure where to start? Many teams talk about needing automated tests in order to deliver faster, better quality but don't know just how to get there. Their code was created without a lot of the tools we have today or may have automation that centers on slow, record-and-playback methods. Join Leslie Lowman for an in-depth look at examples of this situation. She'll give some prerequisites, like instituting a solid testing model that focuses on automation, and show how to apply the testing model to older code,...

Dan Neumann
AgileThought
AT10

Agile Assessment: Helpful Remedy or Harmful Toxin?

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Tori Wieldt
New Relic
AT13

DevOps without Measurement Is a Fail

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

The primary goal of DevOps is to provide velocity and quality through improved collaboration. However, without a tailored measurement framework to direct efforts to the problems that matter to the customer and the business, these goals are meaningless. DevOps teams must outline relevant KPIs to measure the impact of their efforts. While keeping the end goal of a DevOps transformation in mind, it’s important to have a canonical source for the relevant metrics that is visible and understandable to all stakeholders. Focusing on success metrics empowers organizations to determine if...

Lee Barnes
Utopia Solutions
AT14

Effective Test Automation in DevOps

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Owen Gotimer
TechWell
AT16

A DevOps Fireside Chat with Andy Glover

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

You've got DevOps questions, and we've got Andy Glover to answer them for you. He won't really be sitting by the fire, but he will be on hand to talk about all things DevOps. From his experiences building the Spinnaker continuous delivery platform to writing the open-source BDD framework easyb, Andy wants to talk about the things that worry you or thrill you about DevOps. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.

Tim_Guay
AgileWorks
AT15

A Fool with a Tool: The Dangers of Ignoring Culture by Overfocusing on Tools

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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,...

Bharat Nagpal
Capital One
AT9

The Evolving Role of Manager in an Agile Environment

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As teams become agile, are managers still relevant? Companies adopting agile are faced with many challenges, not the least of which is redefining some of the traditional roles. Bharat Nagpal will share his views on how the role of people manager needs to evolve as teams move toward agile. The concepts he presents will equally benefit new as well as seasoned agilists and managers. The session will start off by defining the role of people manager, then we'll discuss new practices that a people manager needs to learn as their teams adopt agile, as well as provide real-world examples of how...

Owen Gotimer
TechWell
B1

Agile+DevOps Feud!

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:00pm

Join us for a game of Agile+DevOps Feud, where two teams of thought leaders compete to name the most popular responses to survey questions to win bragging rights and to share their experiences. Questions and voting will be in the TechWell Hub leading up to the conference, where community members will name their greatest concerns, best practices, etc. Our two teams of panelists, will do their best to guess the community’s viewpoint, and the winning team will get to explain how they deal with those concerns. Our panelists are competing...

Allison Pollard
Improving
Barry Forrest
Improving in Dallas
AT24

We Inflicted DevOps on Our Business—Now What?

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

It seems that everyone is aflutter with DevOps, the shiny new panacea for all of our software ailments. What technical goodness can DevOps bestow upon us? What riddles does it unlock for us as technologists? How do business goals align in order to wring the true value from DevOps? Delivering value faster is a desire of many business and IT leaders, and it often looks like a win-lose proposition to achieve it. Metrics and edicts seem to have competing interests, like the car racer being told to both "go faster" and "save fuel." Barry Forrest and Allison Pollard will share their experiences...

Guy Herbert
Atlassian
AT21

How DevOps and Agile Fit with Compliance Obligations

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

DevOps and agile are designed to help you be adaptable and move quickly. But meeting your compliance obligations tends to slow you down and make processes rigid. However, by using key components of agile and DevOps and approaching compliance obligations from a different angle, you can meet your obligations while being adaptable. Guy Herbert will show examples of how his company structures their CI/CD processes to include compliance and how they have changed their compliance approach to be able to better meet the needs of the DevOps teams. Guy will also discuss the cultural implications of...

Derek Zell
Criteo
AT20

What's Next for QA?

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

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...

Bala Lakshminarayan
Leading Financial Services Company
AT19

Build a Healthy Product Backlog with User Story Mapping

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Successful agile software development depends on a healthy product backlog. Too often, teams attempting to adopt an agile methodology for a project with a new product owner struggle in their transition due to a sparse product backlog. Bala Lakshminarayan will show how user story mapping can let a product owner quickly build a product backlog for the team, leveraging the subject matter experts in the organization from development, QA, UX and design, product management, sales, and marketing. Bala will thoroughly explain user story mapping and personas through a hands-on workshop...

Jim Collins
CUNA Mutual Group
Amanda  Palovcsik
CUNA Mutual Group
AT18

Using Lean XP to Supercharge Your Agile Delivery

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

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,...

Scott Weiner
NeuEon
AT17

Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 3:30pm to 4:30pm

Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. Scott Weiner will detail an approach in depth, including working with leadership to create transparency and space for the team to experiment and learn, adopting a retrospective process and using it as an engine for change, educating the team on agile’s value while focusing on a small set of goals, and building trust and shared understanding by problem-solving collaboratively. We’ll discuss...

Robin Foster
Coveros
AT25

Maximizing Agile Benefits through Understanding Learning Styles

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

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...

Jagdish Karira
Ciber Global, LLC
AT26

Agile Metrics: Let NUM8ERS Tell the Story

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

Agile and DevOps metrics and dashboards enable agile teams and their leaders to measure time to market, quality, productivity, predictability, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. But the key focus of these metrics should be on the value delivered to customers. Instead of measuring what or how much we are doing, we have to look beyond vanity metrics and measure actionable metrics. Jagdish Karira will provide a practical approach for collecting metrics that enable transparency and help product teams transform their processes. He'll describe twelve metrics in detail, with...

Derek Ashmore
Asperitas Consulting
AT30

AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

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...

Dave Karow
Split
AT29

Feature Flagging: Proven Patterns for Control and Observability in Continuous Delivery

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

Are you moving faster than fast? Congrats! Chances are you already use feature flags to decouple code deployments from feature rollouts. Whether you use a roll-your-own feature-flagging solution (with a few quirks) or a feature-flags-as-a-service solution, hopefully you post feature flag rollout changes to something like Datadog so that when a flag rollout lines up with an obvious spike, you know whom to have a talk with. It's a solid start, but that’s just the basics. What do data-driven CD ninjas do? They build in observability to every feature release, so when they push a...

AT28

Contract Testing with Pact: A Different Approach

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

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-...

Cory Bryan
Taiju Consulting LLC
AT27

The Inner Game of User Stories

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

When agile teams are working, the all-important stories stay on the wall (or, worse, in a tool). They sometimes get seen, touched, and loved only once a day. Why are the stories not the focus of the work? Why do we take our eye off the ball and allow distractions to take over? Is there something more important than value? Inspired by the book The Inner Game of Tennis and the impact it's had on athletes' mindset for more than forty years, we'll look at some ideas for getting out of your own way so you can let the best story emerge and focus on what is really important. Join Cory Bryan to...

AT31

Agile and DevOps Transformation in the Telecom Industry

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Thursday, November 7, 2019 - 4:45pm to 5:45pm

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...

Friday, November 8

Andrew Glover
Netflix
SMT1

From Startup to Netflix: Leadership Lessons Learned

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Friday, November 8, 2019 - 8:45am to 9:45am

While leadership styles may change when moving from a startup to a Fortune 500 company, leadership practices do not! Join Andrew Glover as he discusses his DevOps leadership journey, starting with his own company and ending at Netflix. Learn what works and what doesn’t from someone with hands-on, practical experience leading Agile and DevOps initiatives and teams. Hear Andrew’s lessons learned and how to overcome leadership obstacles during change. Take home valuable tips for leading Agile and DevOps change within your organization.

Jeff Gallimore
Excella
SMT2

Decoding Culture: How Culture Can Improve Performance and Increase Joy

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Friday, November 8, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We’ve all heard culture is vital to creating and sustaining a healthy organization. It was even Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2014! We also know culture is notoriously hard to describe in a meaningful way. Even harder than describing culture is demonstrating its contribution to organizational performance. We know culture is important. But for all its importance, we’ve had few tools and limited research to describe or quantify culture. Join Jeff Gallimore as he explores the critical aspects of culture and discusses how a strong culture can improve corporate performance while keeping...