Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Half-day Tutorials
Monday, November 4
Test Design for CI/CD Delivery
PreviewImagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key...
Focus on the Customer to Build the Right Thing
Preview NewProducts creators who are passionate about delighting their customers know they need to solve their users’ true needs. But instead of building the right thing, many of our software practices just have us building the wrong thing faster. Catherine Louis will walk you through some techniques for discovering what you should be developing, including design thinking, build-measure-learn loops to validate assumptions, and user story mapping. In this half-day tutorial you’ll learn by doing, navigating from initial idea to validated prototype, so you can leave with a toolkit designed to...
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...
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...
Applying AI to Real-World Development Problems
NewIntegrating AI into your development activities can be intimidating, but in reality, it is pretty easy—it just takes some work. Learn how to directly apply AI to real-world development problems and get some hands-on experience using AI with a testing focus—without needing a Ph.D. in computer science. Jennifer and Jeremias will share a wide survey of all the different ways AI is applied to software today. Whether you are just AI-curious or you want to reap the benefits of AI-based software approaches today, this workshop is a must to get an understanding of where software is headed in an AI...
Scaling Agile: Having It Your Way
NewThere are way too many agile scaling frameworks today, but none of them really works so well out of the box, and each has some distinct challenges. Join Bob Galen and Mary Thorn in this interactive workshop where they will dive into each of the leading frameworks: SAFe, LeSS, [email protected], Nexus, and DAD. They’ll explore patterns from each that they’ve personally used and found high value in, as well as share what hasn’t worked for them—no fluff, just working patterns for the real world. Then they’ll help you analyze your scaling context and select the patterns that might work best for you...
Continuous Testing with Containers
Preview NewContainers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...
Unleash Your Organizational Superpowers With Liberating Structures
NewUnleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine and Jeremias Rößler as they share a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. They will explore a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how...
Tuesday, November 5
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Sold Out!Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Tools for DevSecOps
DevOps is about creating alignment across the value stream for an application, service, or product. DevSecOps integrates security into this process, making the entire team responsible for delivering secure code that works and can be deployed and used securely. But how do you actually do that? What tools do you add to your DevOps pipeline to help make your software secure and provide your stakeholders with a high level of confidence that the software meets all security requirements & standards? In this tutorial Tom Stiehm will explore what security tools you can add to your DevOps...
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...
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
PreviewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
Sold Out!For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...
Just-in-Time Software Testing
NewAn approach to generating great test ideas as part of agile team planning and preparation. This dynamic workshop through a series of small group activities teach delegates have to identify a rich variety of testing ideas and then filter through them to find those relevant to stakeholders Agile teams must get their product to a done in a "potentially" shippable state as new requirements are progressively integrated. Turbulent development projects experience frequent requirements changes, user interface modifications, and the continual integration of new functions, features, and technologies...
Busting Myths around Organizational Change
NewYou're smart, and the people in your organization are smart. So making an organizational change should be easy—simply craft a transition plan and transparently explain the benefits, and it will all go smoothly, right? Not quite. Linda Rising will tackle this assumption and other organizational change myths. Learn about patterns for introducing new ideas and some useful tips for helping you grow any innovation step by step, starting right when you get back to the office.
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...