Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Concurrent Sessions

We believe that executives must practice what they preach. If they want teams to be transparent and agile, they need to practice themselves and lead by example. This talk will share some Agile & Lean techniques, applied in a new way, to help organizations understand their constraints so they can transparently carry forward their journey to business agility. “Seeing the Whole” includes organizational design, customers, products, demand and applications. Your journey to business agility has to start where you are today, so gaining a deep understanding of your current state is critical to...

We all know that Artificial Intelligence is here and here to stay. Most teams are wondering how to leverage AI for their automation. In this session, Lisette will cover a case study on how to successfully leverage Artificial Intelligence in your automation strategies. Attendees in this session will take away :- Determine if your automation strategy can leverage AI tool- Discuss the learning curve and mindset shift necessary for your QA team to embrace AI Tool- Discuss success case study of using AI tool as part of automation testing- Leverage AI tool in your CI/CD environment-...

Everyone wants to develop software quickly, but there is a valid concern that increasing velocity may decrease quality. At Indeed, we set a company-wide goal to double velocity of our software development without hurting the quality of our releases. To accomplish this goal, we looked at each stage of the software development lifecycle and found which parts took the most time. Deployment and verification in our QA environment was one of the biggest bottlenecks and was due to our historic reliance on human quality assurance testing for each release. To alleviate this bottleneck, we wanted to...

To many people, DevOps is solely about automation. Automation is a huge part of the DevOps process, but there are many other aspects to consider. I’ll be talking about how and why DevOps is important to me, and how automation is a part of each of our DevOps steps. We’ll discuss how automation becomes important to each workday by streamlining tasks and leaving time for the more important (and fun) work. We’ll go over why we automate, what we automate, and how we automate. We will have examples of some of the many tools and processes to simplify automation while noting how important choice...

Software development methodologies often lack the details of how UX fits into projects. Some suggest that a Product Manager describing features is enough for developers, UX should train others to do their specialized jobs, or excluding UX experts solves them being “too siloed” and “not collaborative.” This happens with no other role in software dev; it’s hurting culture, efficiency, and productivity, and creating poor products for customers. Your customer only sees your UX, not 1000 developers or if you were Agile or Lean. Companies are figuring out that UX specialists and the User-...

At Sysco, we have crafted a unique test automation architecture that both supports and accelerates test automation. Enabling reusability, smarter and faster automation is accomplished in any context and the architecture is suitable in both DevOps and Agile settings. Sysco applies a test automation script for functional testing to nonfunctional tests, test data management, and test environment management demonstrating this reusability. Further, this component-based architecture supports both legacy and modern applications test automation.Key Take-Aways from this session will include:• How...

The demands of the modern workplace are changing. Trends like flexible hours, remote working, or “bleisure” travel are being introduced to give employees more work-life balance. Moreover, organisations that are capable of working remotely in an effective manner are more resilient to external shocks, like the recent Coronavirus outbreak showed us. In order to remain effective when workers aren’t in the same place at the same time, teams need to leverage coordination tools. For the case of developers, one of the most important of these tools is the Pull Request. Join Abraham to...

Some engineering managers confuse using data to make better decisions with using data to monitor and stack rank individual developers. I call this the "data-driven trap". Stack ranking is a culture killer but unfortunately lots of great dev leads with good intentions fall into this trap. It is possible to run a highly data-driven engineering organization without measuring a single individual performance statistic. We do it on my team today. In this session I share 17 team-based metrics we use to accelerate delivery, remove process friction and maintain positive team culture. Plus I explain...

“I didn’t know you could do that with Kanban!” This interactive workshop reveals how Kanban systems can help solve the governance and coordination problems that threaten large-scale initiatives. Too many strategic priorities chasing too few resources. Dependencies between teams. Delays due to lack of clear delineations of ownership and responsibility, and a crisp definition of ready. We will explore innovative new Kanban designs that can significantly simplify these difficult problems, ultimately resulting in better outcomes with less stress. We will start by reviewing Kanban board...

Continuous testing is one of the most effective ways of building quality into the continuous delivery pipeline; yet it is difficult to implement in practice. Continuous testing involves more than test automation. Although test automation is a must; continuous risk analysis and optimizing the test suite is critical so that test automation doesn’t become a bottleneck in the continuous integration pipeline. In this presentation, you’ll learn how to implement an effective continuous test strategy throughout the continuous delivery pipeline. We’ll look at real life examples of what works...

Challenge: At Intel each of the various software and firmware teams had independent source code management and CI systems. Consequently the product system integration teams had no consistency from the ingredient software and firmware teams requiring manual over head during system integration. This presentation will discuss how we addressed this by creating a common recipe for the ingredient software and firmware teams to follow. It will discuss what tools from the industry we used (Git, Jenkins, Artifactory) and what tools we had to create (Web Portals, Build Scripts). It will also...

Design thinking is a human-centered process for creative problem-solving that focuses on the people you're creating for, which leads to better products, services, and processes. Utilizing the design thinking approach made popular by Amazon, Apple, and other large software companies, learn how to modify your whole agile strategy and approach around a technique that can speed your time to success and failure. Learn how to get to a proof of concept and prototyping sooner, for faster feedback from customers and buyers. This workshop will explore what the design thinking approach is and walk...

Success in cross-browser test automation relies on many variables. Today’s reality forces practitioners within DevOps/Agile teams to join effort in assuring quality, removing risks, and releasing fast. To meet these goals, business testers, developers, and test automation engineers need to work together with the proper technology stack that matches their skillset. Join Perfecto’s Chief Evangelist and author, Eran Kinsbruner, in this session as he provides recommendations for high coverage, high reliability, and maintainability of cross-browser test automation. In this session, Eran will...

At USCIS, we’ve set the standard for government agility with hundreds of daily deployments, rich SecDevOps practices and an increasingly data-driven culture. But it’s been a tough road, particularly for QA and change management. Presenter Ken Moser helped guide USCIS’s Delivery Assurance Branch from waterfall to agile governance, using data to governance policy uniquely focused on outcomes. We’ll detail how data on program performance and health powered a revolution at USCIS. We’ll identify which metrics proved useful at USCIS, what recurring challenges we found collecting data, and what...

The rules of the game have changed! Studies indicate that by the year 2030, half of jobs will be ones that do no exist today and half the jobs of today will no longer exist. The volatility, uncertainty, and ambiguity ushered in by this age of accelerations extends not just to our environment, politics, and communities, but our organizations as well. In response, organizations are undergoing a massive transformation in technology, structure, culture, and values - fundamentally changing not only what we work on, but how we work, and who we work with.

Where does this leave our careers?...

As agile coaches, we feel the frustrations with teams and leaders, we see the pain points in the organization, and we want to lead people to a more lean-agile future. Moreover, agile coaches may put the weight of the entire transformation on their own shoulders. At times, our own egos can get in the way of our effectiveness by limiting our ability to partner with others and share the limelight.

What would it mean to share the burden of transformation—and the limelight—with leaders?

How can an agile coach enable them to be the face of the change and motivate others to think and...

This talk will explain the relationship between Agile and DevOps and the mechanisms of DevOps that require Agile or Agile activities with DevOps techniques (such as Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery/Deployment and Continuous Feedback) . Collectively, we will discuss and seek an answer to Agile and DevOps relationship. I will also share the lesson learned on DevOps adoption and how it relates to Agile to setup required processes. And then list Agile principles including 12 principles and common agile techniques. I will also talk on common principles DevOps principles a map those...

The concept of digital transformation was introduced to us a few years ago and is now a wishful thinking for many companies. But do you really know what is Digital Transformation? And how do we go further in this transformation? The answer is easier said than done: through automation. And how to start our automation journey? In this talk, Larissa will explain briefly Digital Transformation, how it correlates to automation and then proceed to the concept and types of automation, and detail how to embark on this exciting journey! After understanding what automation is, we will learn how to...

Organizational alignment will make or break your agile transformation, but how confident are we on what organizational alignment really means? How many people can accurately describe their company's top three initiatives? How many people understand their role and how they can best contribute to them? What happens when we hit a new change curve with newly defined outcomes? How has knowing you are "blue" helped with those efforts so far? In this interactive session, we will explore the ways an individual, team or organization can dramatically increase the likelihood of success. How? By...

When there's no clear right way to solve a difficult problem, how do you avoid getting frozen in indecision?  How do you know if you made the right decision?  How do you know when a decision that used to be the best one isn't any more, and it's time to try something else?

We're part of a global marketplace developed and operated by multiple squads.  We consider ourselves a mature DevOps organization, but there are several things we've really struggled with over the years, and we've even reversed direction at times.  For example: Should designers be assigned to one squad for months...

Since 2015 we at Dynatrace experienced 3 waves of transformation bringing us from DevOps (Speed), via NoOps (Stability) to what we call AI-Supported Autonomous Cloud Enablement (Scale). While DevOps and our approach to NoOps resulted in 1h Commit to Production and a 93% reduction of end user impacting production issues we had a hard time scaling speed and keeping our quality promise as we went through a 10x growth in size of engineering over the past 5 years. We forced ourselves to leverage and enhance our deterministic AI engine by integrating it into every phase of our software...

Are you ready for the Cloud? An application is an idea that has code, data and infrastructure, and choosing whether to build a conveyor belt or to put up guard rails for that path is important in maintaining velocity to the cloud. In this session we show the core tools available in Azure for creating and enforcing governance rules and infrastructure, including Azure resource template technologies, policies, blueprints, as well as DevOps processes you can use to ensure your cloud journey is predictable, secure and compliant. We'll see how the tools work and share best practices for maturing...

So you and your teams know that healthy conflict is a hallmark of high performing teams, right? Yet you find yourself struggling to actually live this reality. You’re likely caught in the same vicious cycle of trying to change other’s minds and being locked in heated debate with no end in sight. Whether you are a team member, coach, or manager, this session will give you practical models and techniques for understanding and navigating conflict, rather than micro-managing or ignoring it. You will learn how to help teams identify, understand, and have productive disagreement that leads to...

Test automation. Great concept and easy to do, right? Not so fast... There are many different ways to fly off course. Join me as we explore the not-so-obvious ways that we waste time and money on failed test automation attempts. Learn how to recognize and correct early missteps. Discover solutions that keep you from going in the wrong direction regardless of whether you are an Agile or traditional organization. Understand how to erect guardrails for your organization that keep test automation between the lines. Take away proven strategies for dealing with test automation pitfalls...

When I joined our Developer Experience team, we had very little visibility into how we were serving other engineers with our CI tools. We had no hard-evidence to back up any claims. We identified what we could and should measure. Then we established SLIs/SLOs to formalize those concepts and conducted an experiment to improve Buildkite stability. In the end we reached our goal on stability going from ~95% to 99.5%+ of builds that didn't fail because of something we had control. Now that we have hard data around the job we are doing, we don't have to make a decision about when to...