Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Concurrent Sessions

In this talk, Melissa Tondi will examine the top agile ceremonies and show how they can be retuned to create more value in their present-day practice. Melissa will share her experience consulting with and working for companies that have embarked on their agile transformation. Over the last 12 years, she has seen similarities between companies in their implementation of agile. At some point, a company's approach to agile no longer meets the needs of the teams responsible for delivering so a retune is required to optimize their efficiency instead of using a 'one-size-fits-all' model. This...

In the frantic race to automate everything, one critical fact often gets overlooked…that test automation is NOT testing. Many organizations equate a comprehensive automated test suite with an effective software testing function. However, their definition of test automation is often limited to the automated execution of scripted test steps. Even in the best case scenario, this approach can give a false sense of security, especially when executing automated checks is the only “testing” that’s performed in the delivery pipeline. In this session, Lee will discuss why he sees the craft of...

In the agile space, do you ever wonder why we use words such as "transformation" and "journey"? It's because it's really freaking hard. As an Agile coach, there are days when you move a group one step forward only to realize that they've fallen two steps back. You are part practitioner and part therapist. You experience frequent memory lapses like "I could've sworn we've worked on this anti-pattern before." Or, did you? What day is it again? Now, imagine throwing gasoline on that by condensing a team's journey into six weeks. What breakthroughs might emerge when we accelerate the journey...

As more and more organizations embark on modernizing their enterprise, and join the agile and DevOps bandwagon, it becomes but natural for the IT and Business teams to relook at their age-old legacy IT processes and align them with the modern delivery techniques. One of the first things that generally gets discussed in such a case from a testing standpoint is to implement a culture of shift left and testing in parallel with development. Harshad and Depen will take us through the essence of what that means from a performance testing and engineering standpoint and deep dive on the approach...

In many agile project settings, agile leadership comes from the triad of the Agile Coach, Chief Product Owner, and Chief Scrum Masters. But in the Aerospace and Defense (A&D) community, this agile triad needs to share agile leadership with the Program Management Office (PMO). The A&D style of programs requires additional responsibilities and concerns for agile leadership teams, such as contractual concerns, scope management, risk and opportunity management, proposal development and other issues that arise from a government contract environment. The tensions and commonality between...

A large-scale effort project with multiple teams decided to establish a transition in their development process from the traditional waterfall methodology towards agile development. Then, the COVID-19 pandemic hit. As with any transition, there were stepping-stones and falling points. However, doing so in the midst of a global pandemic certainly did not make it any easier! The program initially was one large organization with a single work area. It since has been transformed into three different work areas within a division, experimented with a number of different processes and tools, and...

DevSecOps techniques give us the power of receiving rapid feedback and the ability to incorporate new information on an ongoing basis. However, challenges arise when the development pipeline must be established without connection to external networks. There are excellent reasons for doing this, including reducing security risks to systems and proprietary data, but a little more consideration is required to provide our teams on pocket networks the same benefits of an end-to-end DevSecOps pipeline implementation for our container application. We will draw on our practical experience...

Cloud computing has become the de facto platform of choice for companies to deploy software that they build. Gone are the days when owning a data center was the only way to host critical, high volume and mission critical systems. As companies adopt the cloud and mature their cloud experience, they are faced with a variety of options to choose from. "Serverless" technology, which is offered by all major cloud providers is one such question faced by anyone who is adopting the Cloud. While it may seem quite attractive at first, there are many considerations to be made before an organization...

In this session, attendees will learn about building, testing, and deploying applications using Github Actions. We will explore diverse ways to trigger builds and test different types of applications. After this session, you'll be able to build, test, and deploy your software from GitHub using GitHub Actions. You will understand GitHub Actions Runners; YAML workflow syntax including workflow triggers, variables, job dependencies, conditionals, matrix builds, outputs; environments; secrets; and deployments including container registries & Azure. By the end of this session, attendees...

In this session, attendees will hear about the application of one of the trickiest agile principles: "simplicity, the art of maximizing the amount of work not done, is essential"! This agile principle is frequently overlooked when organizations or teams create or improve products. Humans love to add to improve. This gets in the way of faster, smoother, and better delivery. Hear about the psychology behind why we do this and how organizations like Discover have utilized dojos and academies to helps teams improve.

A microservices architecture offers the fantastic promise of loosely coupled systems, independently testable and deployable. However, it can also present some significant challenges while conducting integration & exploratory testing. Since a single service will often not do anything valuable without several collaborator services, one typically needs to understand the way many services work together to effectively integration-test the system. This challenge can be viewed optimistically as well. By design, a microservice must at least provide some API interface, often making it easy to...

Agile and DevOps methodologies are designed to foster collaboration, but siloed behavior in upper management can undermine their effectiveness. In this talk, we'll explore how to overcome siloed behavior in upper management and create a culture of collaboration that supports agile and DevOps success. We'll discuss the common siloed behaviors exhibited by upper management, including lack of communication, limited transparency, and resistance to change. We'll also provide strategies for breaking down these silos and fostering collaboration, including building trust, promoting cross-...