Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Concurrent Session | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Concurrent Sessions

Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.

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Wednesday, November 17

W2

Unlock the Full Potential of Your Refinement Sessions

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Good refinement makes development more predictable, leads to better solutions, and enables the Product Owner to set the right priorities. Still, many teams fail to unlock the full potential of refinement. Not only is the time spent on refinement often limited, but many of the refinement meetings I join are also inefficient. I meet teams that spent half the meeting watching the Product Owner entering the new backlog items in the workflow system. Although they poker the user stories afterwards, little time is left to discuss the best solution and risks that need to be avoided. I will focus...

julia-pottinger
QualityWorks Consulting Group
W5

Practical Tips to Speed Up Your UI Automated Tests

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Automated UI Tests are at the top of the automation pyramid and are considered slower and more prone to failure than automated tests at the other layers. Given that, how do you increase the speed of those tests to ensure that they are as efficient and provide as much value? In this talk, Julia will go through practical tips that you can implement in your UI test automation to increase its speed and get faster feedback. Key takeaways will include: how to increase the speed of UI tests, practical tips to make your test automation more efficient, and how to make your UI test less flaky and...

Jason St-Cyr
Sitecore
W8

Stepping Up - Becoming a Leader in Your Team

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

One of the most difficult transitions to make is from being a member of the team, to owning your former teammates performance reviews. It is awkward. It is stressful. And you can do it! How do you maintain a trusted relationship with your team mates? How do you employ empathy to help yourself understand your team? How do you gain authority and decision making where previously you had none? How do you make decisions that impact the lives of your team in very significant ways? How do you balance your corporate strategic responsibilities with your desire to advocate for your own team member's...

Derek Ashmore
Asperitas Consulting
W10

Implementing DevOps Automation: Best Practices & Common Mistakes

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

Most organizations adopting the cloud have adopted DevOps automation to some degree or another. The primary reason is that continued manual maintenance isn't possible with the same staffing level and increased demand. In short, DevOps automation and cloud consumption are much more than just technology change. They require a fundamental rethinking about how we do things. It's common for DevOps team members to be negatively impacted by the changes others have made. It's common for team members to cause problems by making changes manually instead of through code. I've seen managers grow...

W11

Using ML to Optimize Automated Web App Testing with Real-World Data

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

Though test automation has made testing faster, quality teams struggle to prioritize end-to-end testing to maximize test coverage. It’s challenging to define the E2E scenarios similarly to unit test coverage, particularly when teams only have a small set of test needs outlined. The issue becomes even more complex when new application features are added since there’s no way to determine where more E2E tests are necessary. This talk explains how a ML engineer built and tested a new feature and how prioritization of E2E testing in Agile environments can be automated. Lauren’s team developed...

W19

Containerizing Tests In Your CI/CD Pipeline

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Managing your continuous integration server is an essential part of practicing DevOps, but it's easy to let it run away from you. Domain-specific languages, plugins, and configurations can result in servers so heavily customized that the test environment ceases to be replicable, and you become locked into your specific choice of CI server. Your CI server might not support the tool you're trying to use. Containerization is a simple way to push back against creeping complexity in your CI server. With containers, you can define configuration as code alongside your test, produce modular,...

Yishai Beeri
LinearB
W13

Dev Team Metrics That Matter

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The truth is, no one really likes being measured, especially devs. But business leaders like looking at numbers, so they grab what’s easily available - # of code changes, agile velocity, individual developer metrics. These types of metrics are unbalanced, exclude context, and hurt engineering culture as a whole.

Measuring should start by answering the question “What is the most valuable outcome?”

Why? Because what you measure is what your team will produce. If you start measuring the number of code changes as a key performance metric, you are going to see coding time, PR size...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
W15

Measuring Long-Term Productivity: The Developer’s Legacy Index

Wednesday, November 17, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Measuring a programmer’s productivity is a problem as old as the software industry itself. Number of worked hours? More productive people should need fewer hours, not more. Number of completed tasks? Not all tasks are equally hard. Number of introduced bugs? Bugs are not necessarily the programmer’s fault, and besides, what constitutes a bug anyway? The closest we’ve ever got to measure a developer’s productivity is lines of code, and this has proven to be a poor metric because not all lines of code are equally valuable. However, if we could measure not just how much a developer writes but...

Thursday, November 18

Hope Lynch
CloudBees
T1

A Team Retrospective on Value Stream Management

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In this session, Hope will be walking through a Value Stream Management retrospective about a team and an organization I worked with a few years ago. This team’s work had an outsize impact on the larger organization due to issues with value streams. Now, Value Streams can seem like a huge topic but they can be very straightforward. I hope today is an opportunity to reframe the concept of a value stream in a more approachable way and provide some insight on how you may be able to take action to improve yours if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

T3

The Steam Drill Initiative: Enterprise Modernization through Lean, Agile, and DevOps

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Transforming heritage enterprises can be challenging and not for the squeamish. Lean, Agile, DevOps methodologies are instrumental in the successful execution of a business transformation. A holistic strategy with clear initiatives that harness the power of these transformation drivers is critical for success. Also, connecting an organization's strategic imperatives to business outcomes increases the probability of sustaining a business transformation. In this session, Gautham tells the story of the SteamDrill Initiative - a strategic framework for enterprise transformations that focuses...

Adam Sandman
Inflectra
T4

DevOps Dance - Shift Left, Shift Right - Get It Right

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 10:00am to 11:00am

As more organizations move towards continuous delivery with DevOps pipelines becoming the norm, where is the right place to do different kinds and levels of testing? In this presentation, I will provide a blueprint for test managers in how to think about shifting left and shifting right while keeping the overall QA picture and goals in mind. Firstly, Adam Sandman will outline how you can improve the testing being done during development in CI by adding early testing for functionality, usability, performance, security and accessibility (shift left). Then, Adam will outline how you can...

T10

Leave the Bottleneck on The Bottle: Removing Security Friction in Your DevOps Pipeline

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Enterprises embark on Agile and DevOps journeys to improve time-to-market and overall operating efficiency. However if security is not a part of your journey, no transformation is complete as it will continue to drag on productivity and create bottlenecks. Yet despite support from both Development and Security for a shared-services model for Application Security, teams have failed to effectively integrate security into today’s rapid development processes leaving organizations open not only to cyber risk, but overall business risk as they play AppSec roulette when shipping their products...

T11

Creating Test Stability To Achieve Continuous Delivery

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In our company, our automated tests were taking 30 minutes of execution time and the occurrence of flaky tests was just multiplying this time and reducing the confidence in the results. Our automated tests were maintained by various team members and some of them were not following leading practices - I needed to find out the root causes. I started my investigation and found the common issues were because of the environment, locators, coding practices, and a lack of knowledge sharing and code reviews. I improved our locators, coding practices, debugging, and simultaneously the developers...

Stuart Clark
Cisco Systems
T12

Instant and Automatic Network Configuration: As Easy as A-B-CI/CD

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

The network used to rely on manual configurations, siloed and separated groups, and slow provisioning processes. Thanks to technology advancements, companies can now deploy code hundreds of thousands of times per day, quickly and accurately updating their network configurations and security policies. They can even instantly provision private circuits and SD-WAN from the branch/edge to cloud - and everything in between. NetDevOps automated continuous integration and continuous deployment (CI/CD) allows the testing and validation to take place. SD-WAN is NetDevOps, agility, speed and...

T14

Agile Transformation : Managing the Devout and the Doubters

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

You are leading an Agile transformation. There will be some people who resist, who doubt, and you’ll need to care for them. There will also be some people who are very supportive—perhaps too supportive. They will need some attention too, or they can actually damage efforts to mature your organization’s transformation. As part of the leadership team in an organizational transformation effort, you are a pragmatic prophet. There are truths and principles to get across to your people, but also, there is reality and pragmatic considerations to manage. While the principles should hold fast, the...

Robin-yeman
Catalyst Campus for Technology & Innovation
T15

Create an Intentional Culture Architecture to Support Your Agile Transformation

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Moving towards Business Agility in large organizations is a major undertaking. Such an initiative builds on the foundational practices of Agile teams while encouraging the organization to take a deeper look into underlying principles, behaviors, and beliefs as part of its culture. While traditional management have largely focused on top-down controls we understand that organizations need to behave differently about the organizational structure and to align to deliver value to our customers. We must look at actionable steps that enable responsiveness of an end-to-end value stream. This...

Eran-Kinsbruner
Perforce
T17

Building a Winning Cross-Browser Testing Strategy with Selenium, Cypress and BDD

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Digital channels are at the core of every business, however, with the growing technologies around web including progressive web (PWAs,), Responsive web and mobile, teams are required to build continuous testing into each and every build and within the cycle. Advancements in leading frameworks like Selenium and Cypress together with BDD (Cucumber) that supports both are positioned high in the priority of organizations as part of their shift-left of testing. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner will walk through the key benefits of both these frameworks, the main uses cases per persona and...

Chris-Riley
Splunk, Inc.
T22

Measuring DevOps Success with Pipeline Analytics

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 4:15pm

Do you understand the value of “good” in DevOps? The software delivery chain is the app of apps. If your delivery chain is not up, running, and performant, nothing gets deployed. But how do you measure success? Do you actually know how well your DevOps automation is contributing to your company's bottom line? Chris Riley, DevOps Advocate from will explore the practice of pipeline analytics and demonstrate how tools like Dora and Flow metrics are tools for measuring the performance of your SDLC and the impact of DevOps on your business success.

Join to learn:

How pipeline analytics...
Debbie-Levitt
Delta CX
T23

Improving Agility by Using Customers’ Definitions of “Quality” and “Done”

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

“Quality”… velocity, productivity, and efficiency? Improved performance? Few or no bugs? Meets stakeholder requirements? “Done”… we did what we planned? Fits business objectives? Coded, tested, documented, and deployable? Remember our customers? The people paying our salaries? Their satisfaction is supposed to be our *highest* priority. But we fall in love with assumptions about users. We burn weeks coding, testing, merging, and releasing product guesses. We move to the next project, interrupted later when we learn that customers aren’t finding much value or quality in that last release....

Nicolas Fränkel
Hazelcast
T24

Zero-downtime Deployment on Kubernetes

Thursday, November 18, 2021 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Kubernetes allows a lot. After discovering its features, it’s easy to think it can magically transform your application deployment process into a painless no-event. For Hello World applications, that is the case. Unfortunately, not many of us do deploy such applications day-to-day because we need to handle state. Though it would be much easier to have stateless apps, and despite our best efforts in this direction, state is found in (at least) two places: sessions and databases. You need to think keeping the state while stopping and starting application nodes. In this talk, I’ll demo how to...