Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics
Monday, November 4
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
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
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
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...
Wednesday, November 6
What “Good” Looks Like: The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership
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...
Where Does Data Come From?
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...
DevOps for the Agile Practitioner
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...
The Nitty-Gritty Practices of Agile Coaching for DevOps
PreviewHow 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...
Story Mapping Forward and Backward with DevOps
PreviewUser 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...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
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...
The MVP Mental Model
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...
Thursday, November 7
Agile Actions for Facilitating Distributed Teams
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...
The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps
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...
DevOps without Measurement Is a Fail
PreviewThe 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...
The Evolving Role of Manager in an Agile Environment
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...
We Inflicted DevOps on Our Business—Now What?
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...
So You’re Using Docker. Now What?
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...
Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
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...
Agile Metrics: Let NUM8ERS Tell the Story
PreviewAgile 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...
Feature Flagging: Proven Patterns for Control and Observability in Continuous Delivery
PreviewAre 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...
The Inner Game of User Stories
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...