Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Product Ownership
Tuesday, November 16
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...
Wednesday, November 17
Building and Managing High-Performance Teams
The COVID-19 pandemic has possibly caused the most significant shift in work culture of our lifetime. It quickly furthered techniques such as working-from-home, digital transformation, diversity, and inclusion and made them become an immediate reality. The next few months and years contain a great deal of uncertainty about how people will work and interact in a global economy that is not yet free of the disease and its enormous impact. So how can companies, tech sector businesses, adapt to this new normal? Alberto Silveira is passionate about ready sharing his proven methodology, insights...
Using ML to Optimize Automated Web App Testing with Real-World Data
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...
Distributed DevOps
Our industry has fundamentally changed over the last decade. Monolithic architectures have evolved into microservices. Applications are distributed on infrastructure across the globe. And an increasing number of companies are moving to a remote-first culture with engineers distributed as widely as applications. Our technical environment and tooling ecosystem have changed radically from the original conditions in which DevOps was created. So what's next? Learn about the next phase of DevOps: a distributed model that emphasizes swift development, observable systems, accountable engineers,...
Thursday, November 18
It Takes a Village: How to Be a Better Transformational Leader
Jack Welch said it well: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” That’s a scary thought when we consider just how quickly the world of technology is innovating and changing. All of us are striving to help our organizations embrace that change and become more innovative, but it’s easier said than done. Legacy technology, leaders with limited experience and perspective, entrenched processes, overworked teams, and rapidly changing regulatory and market conditions all contribute to making transformation incredibly difficult to adopt....
Improving Agility by Using Customers’ Definitions of “Quality” and “Done”
“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....