Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Teams & Leadership

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

DevSecOps empowers engineering teams to take ownership of how their product behaves in production, including security aspects. The primary goal of a DevSecOps initiative is to get development teams to shift their mindset and adopt security practices in their daily activities. However, this can only happen with healthy collaboration and mutual trust between development and security teams. Larry Maccherone can show you how. Larry will discuss how to effectively build trust between developers and security personnel to facilitate a successful DevSecOps program. He will present a proven "Trust...