Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Business User

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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 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...