Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Digital Transformation

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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.