Conference Schedule

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...Read more

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...Read more

Liberating structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone, enabling groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Discuss them with peers and experts in this fishbowl discussion, where the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of the chairs in the "fishbowl." When you want to join as a speaker, you enter the fishbowl and sit in the empty chair, and one of the other speakers will voluntarily leave so that one chair...Read more

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...Read more

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....Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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,...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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,...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more