Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Containers & Serverless
Monday, November 6
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
How to DevOps Your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...
Tuesday, November 7
Prioritizing Like a Pro: Designing and Executing Defensible Ordering Strategies
Effective prioritization is critical to wring the most out of agility. When you’re just delivering once, ordering matters little. However, when the option to release on a regular basis is available, what you do sooner rather than later can have huge impacts on value realization, risk mitigation, and more. However, prioritization is much easier in theory than in practice for most organizations. Arlen has been a practicing agilist for over two decades. Working with hundreds of clients and teaching thousands of students how to effectively prioritize is one of the most frequently raised topics...
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...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
Based 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...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Approaching Conflict Productively
When it comes to high-performing teams, conflict is inevitable and necessary. The very essence of gaining the best value outcomes is a result of leveraging the wisdom of various perspectives and experiences. Those variances will generate conflict. Yet, this is only a negative if we are unequipped with the knowledge and tools to embrace and approach conflict. In this tutorial, expect to unpack the differences and the relationship between conflict and drama. Discover tools for helping all voices be heard. Plus, have fun practicing skills in preparing how to react to conflicts productively...
Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings
Many teams have been following the same few patterns for facilitating sessions such as Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and backlog refinement events for decades now. However, while these well-trodden approaches can be good starting points, there are ways to make them tremendously more effective with minimal effort. You will learn to design agile meetings that account for your particular circumstances and goals while wasting as little time as possible. First, Arlene will cover Exploring the True Purpose of Agile Meetings – Is the Daily Scrum more about status or planning? Is...
Wednesday, November 8
Implementing DevOps Automation: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
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 of 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. Derek has seen managers grow...
DevSecOps in a Bottle—The Care and Feeding of Pocket Pipelines
PreviewDevSecOps 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...
Thursday, November 9
Building Hyper-Scalable and Cost-Effective Solutions with Serverless Cloud Technology
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...
Testing Your Way Out of Microservices Hell
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...