Agile + DevOps East 2022 - Agile & Lean Practices
Tuesday, November 8
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
NewMany 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...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
Wednesday, November 9
A Team is Virtual, Their Fears are Real. Time for a Team Reboot!
Have you noticed lately that something is off with your team's dynamic? Disengagement, unproductive conflicts, siloed work can all be symptoms of a larger underlying problem. Whether you are a Scrum Master, an Agile coach or group's leader, it is never easy to initiate a conversation about the "elephant in the room".
This session will introduce you to three coaching tools ("Fear in the Workplace", Safety in the Workplace" and MinSpec) that can help your facilitate these discussions in a fun, non-threatening way, and lead the group through re-defining their ways of working. You will...
Keeping it Lightweight: Scaling Agile the Easy Way
Far too many scaling concepts require tremendous overhead and turn into something more lightweight than their original intention out of necessity. How can we keep from having to go backwards in out scaling and maintain a lightweight approach from the start? Using [email protected] as the initial framework, many organizations can simply keep their known structures while enjoying increased collaboration and speed to decision-making. As part of this session, attendees will enjoy hearing about how they can start out a scaled Agile approach the easy way while also taking a potentially bulky approach...
MLOps for Agile Data Science at Scale
Agile organizations have been successful in improving collaboration and reducing waste in software development. They have also learned to automate and streamline their software delivery process. But many teams are still struggling to leverage the same agile principles to their artificial intelligence (AI) initiatives. Operationalization of Machine Learning (ML) models at scale is an increasing challenge and a barrier to AI adoption for many companies. Join JL Marechaux as he explores how Data Scientists, ML Engineers, and Operations teams can leverage DevOps practices to deliver machine...
The 4-Quadrants of Product Ownership – Exploring What “Good” Looks Like
Harnessing the Current of C-Level Engagement and Corporate Sponsorship to Attain Superhero Level Invincibility
Without adequate executive buy-in and sponsorship, Agile transformations and DevOps revolutions are largely doomed to fail. When the cards are stacked against you, it becomes increasingly difficult to implement a meaningful strategic campaign. One’s time, energy, and drive all tend to evaporate under the unrelenting drought of support and endorsement.
Buy-in and trust come with a heavy price, though. Patience, persistence, diligence, and diplomacy are all essential ingredients in securing a victory, but so are a grand (even ostentatious) vision, an unrelenting sense of urgency,...
Tips and Tricks for Effective Agile Testing
Taking Great Measures - Quit Measuring and Start Influencing
Using metrics in agile has been an elusive endeavor, and how to use those metrics for good, not evil. Too often we see metrics used to compare agile teams, and question the wrong things. Too often we solution before we understand what the true need is. We took a different approach of not just using the standard agile metrics to help teams with efficiency, but working more closely with our leaders on data needed to help drive decisions around staffing, work prioritization, and value delivered. Through interviews and a focus on educating different levels of business and IT leaders, we were...
Industrial DevOps: Responding to Misconceptions
Industrial DevOps (IDO) extends the original concept of DevOps used primarily in software environments into cyber-physical world to account for complex system of systems, which include hardware, firmware, and software. The intent of IDO is to enable significant cyber-physical systems development programs to be more responsive to changing needs while reducing lead times. It is the application of continuous flow, continuous improvement, and 8 IDO principles to the development, manufacturing, deployment, and serviceability of significant cyber-physical systems.
In this discussion, we...
Test Automation in CI/CD
CI/CD pipelines need quality gates in order to deliver and deploy code responsibility. What does that look like? Why is it important to have a test automation strategy for your CI/CD pipeline? We all hate build times that take hours due to waiting on test automation which is why it is so important to strategically think through your test automation. Join Janna as she does a deeper diver into test automation strategies for CI/CD. She’ll talk about different types of test automation, guidelines around your automated tests, and how it all works together in your CI/CD pipeline. Learn how you...
Defuse the Ticking Time Bomb - Create an SBOM With Every Build
Modern software projects are made up of tens or hundreds of open-source software (OSS) components. While this frees development teams to focus on core business logic, OSS components inject risk into applications. The log4shell and Spring4Shell zero-day vulnerabilities have highlighted the importance of understanding which versions of which OSS components are in use, and whether the included versions have any reported vulnerabilities against them. Without some level of automation, tracking these open-source components is a tedious and error-prone process.
In addition, customers are...
Thursday, November 10
Collaborative Modeling - Agile Model-Based Systems Engineering
Agile and DevOps practices drive towards faster delivery and efficient incorporation of feedback, but sometimes struggle to maintain a common understanding of product vision and implementation. Model-Based Systems Engineering helps to frame the architectural underpinnings of a system, tying the implementation back to desired functionality, but when allowed to go stale, the models can quickly lose their benefit and turn the initial modeling effort into waste. Agile and MBSE are sometimes viewed as competing approaches, when in fact they can be used synergistically to support each other....
Tips for Executing your First Agile Transformation
Agile transformation can either be the initial phase of digital transformation or a core part of the digitization process. The Agile transformation is a holistic change and places focus on the people using the technology, the process for work being done, and the overall cultural change that is required.
In this session, you'll walk through: how the team planned and initiated an Agile Transformation effort at a local bank here in Jamaica. Next, how they managed the expectations of our stakeholders and brought alignment to all team members on the ground. And finally, the problems...
API Testing Made Easy With Postman
Application program interface (API) has become the connecting tissue that allows the exchange of data and logic between software products and different layers of an application (data layer, service layer, and presentation layer). Multiple independent systems can be integrated easily with the help of APIs and its specification. Testing these APIs before and/or after they are consummated can greatly improve the efficiency of your test strategy as a whole because the API layer directly touches both the data layer and presentation layer, it presents itself as a good candidate for continuous...
7 Strategies To Build High Performing Teams
If you are a supervisor or a team leader, you know how difficult it is to manage distributed teams with constant pressure to perform and deliver quality product/service on time. This is especially true for offshore teams who are in different timezones, regions, cultures and working styles. If you do not put in effort to come up with effective strategies to manage these teams, it may eventually lead to low team morale, disgruntled employees, and most importantly poor performance. This is the reason why companies are investing millions of dollars in training, organizational and team...
Highly Regulated Industries - Are Agile Approaches Even Possible?
Agile approaches have become mainstream in the 20ish years since the manifesto, but many transformation efforts fail or aren't even considered possible, in highly regulated environments. Financial services, insurance, healthcare, and others have necessary constraints in the development and delivery of products and services. These constraints are often considered insurmountable in the context of agile development and delivery, and traditional, legacy waterfall methods are chosen. Other pseudo-agile approaches are also used, often using the language of agile but violating its core...
It’s OK to be UnSAFe – Scale Without Using Someone Else’s Framework
When scaling, many organizations attempt to adopt a framework "from the industry." This often leads to pain and frustration. Instead, scale your agility by embracing your company’s context instead of installing someone else’s framework!
Companies choose a framework like SAFe, LeSS, Nexus, or Spotify not because it’s the BEST for their company, they do it because it’s the SAFE choice (pun intended). This session shares key principles to scaling agile delivery blindly following someone else’s recipe. First, we explore reasons that organizations select an existing scaling framework....
Bridging the DevOps Divide - How to Bring in the Mainframe
Large organizations will have mainframe applications. While DevOps may be very mature on the distributed side, it is often overlooked for the mainframe applications. This can cause unnecessary issues with development timeframes and deliveries. As the applications depend on each other, so do the teams, yet they are often running isolated parallel development. The solution is to bring the mainframe applications, and developers into DevOps. But how? I will describe how this has been successfully done at many sites focusing on a practical 10 step approach. Attendees will leave with a knowledge...
Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?
One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how to scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and...
Engaging the Hive Mind Through Swarm Test Planning
Are you looking for more ways to shift quality to the left? Do you wish your team was more proactive and less reactive when it comes to quality? Do you rely on a single QA or developer to come up with all of the test cases on their own?
We know that from concepts similar to Mob Programming, the collective mind can often be more effective than any one individual. Applying this principle to testing, we introduce the practice of Swarm Test Planning.
In this session we will teach the concept of Swarm Test Planning, using structured brainstorming and heuristic categorization to...