Agile + DevOps Virtual 2020 - Consultant
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Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2020 experience with sessions for consultants.
Monday, November 9
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
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,...
An Agile Coaching Practicum in 360 degrees
Let’s face it, agile coaching isn’t for the timid or faint of heart. In most companies, it’s an incredibly challenging and nuanced role. And an important part of it is having the ability to coach in 360 degrees: downward—across your teams, outward – across managers and peers, and upward—towards those pesky leaders. Oh, and did we say that virtually EVERYONE is an agile coach? In this workshop, join Mary Thorn and Bob Galen as they share tools and experiences coaching in all directions. They will review three different coaching models from the X-Wing, to Powerful Questions, to 9-Stances, to...
Tuesday, November 10
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...
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
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...
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...
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...
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...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
NewMany 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...
Wednesday, November 11
DevOps Culture – A Transformational Component for Rapid Value Delivery in the Government
PreviewFor government agencies, value generally flows through layers from the agency itself to various contractors and vendors, and eventually into the hands of the users. For meeting agency missions in a timely manner, it is imperative we build a culture of shared responsibility based on the foundations of DevOps and Lean Agile Leadership to transform how we’ve traditionally delivered products, solutions and services. This cultural transformation fosters a “badge-less society” where value driven collaboration becomes the core for delivering faster and with higher quality. This culture...
Thursday, November 12
Measuring Success in DevOps Transformations
At the highest level, a successful DevOps implementation is meant to reduce the time between a developer’s commit to source control and that commit being available in a production environment, while maintaining quality. DevOps is a performance enhancer for Agile. While the measure of success for an Agile team is working product, the measure of a successful DevOps implementation is speed. Including DevOps in the process allows the team to deliver working product more often and with greater confidence. A team’s DevOps implementation should improve over time. There are several components to...
Partnering Up – Giving Leaders the Limelight of Transformation
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...
Things We May Never Get Right
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...