Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Teams & Leadership
Monday, November 6
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
Organizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Facilitating Team Decisions
One of the agile manifesto principles is “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Tricia Broderick wishes this principle was written to say, motivated teams. Because leaders giving the environment and support for individuals to make team decisions is anything but trivial. Achieving effective decisions goes beyond bringing people together for consensus. This approach may lead to groupthink or repeating decision meetings. Instead, leaders facilitate collaboration by building and tapping into the co-...
Getting Unstuck: Playful Techniques for Agile Coaching Effectiveness
Do you ever feel stuck with your current agile coaching style? Ready to expand your coaching range and amplify the impact of your coaching? Join this tutorial to experiment with sprinkling more playfulness into your agile coaching growth wheel! Drawing inspiration from Co-Active coaching, ORSC, and Liberating Structures, this session will guide you through a number of powerful and playful ways to generate new insights, coach leaders, and help your teams effectively navigate conflicts. Already using cards, games, or Lego in your coaching? This workshop will offer you five new playful...
Leveraging Generative AI for Software Productivity
Executive leaders across the globe have been asking a relatively simple yet profound question: Can we leverage generative AI to transform our business, enterprise, or industry? For software-based companies, focus has either been on differentiating their product and service offerings using this new technology. But how about leveraging generative AI to improve team productivity and efficiency? This may be possible but how do you measure its success? What are some of the key use cases within business analysis, development, and testing that software teams can use? Are there any pitfalls...
Product Ownership 2.0: Navigating the New Demands of Agile Leadership
Many Agile organizations wildly misunderstand the crucial role of the Product Owner. Historically the role focused on being the voice of the customer for a development team. However, the exponential pace of the digital age requires today's Product Owners to be genuine product leaders by maintaining continuous alignment with broader groups of stakeholders while utilizing sophisticated techniques that solicit rapid feedback. This interactive tutorial will explore tools for communicating with the Product Owner's three primary constituents - Leadership, Customers, and Development Teams. First...
Tuesday, November 7
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...
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...
Wednesday, November 8
Lead Without Blame
Hopefully, no leader is walking around asking "who can we blame today?" Yet, the blame experienced in today’s fast-changing VUCA—and, let’s be honest, crazy world—is only escalating in the wrong direction. In the quest to deliver results, leaders rely on old habits, like building cooperative environments or attempting to hold people accountable. But, in the end, everyone keeps experiencing the frustration from disappointing outcomes. Tricia Broderick, the co-author of Lead Without Blame and leadership advisor, knows this never-ending battle doesn't have to continue. Join Tricia to explore...
Agile Hell II: Post Apocalypse Agile Hell...And How to Escape
In this session, the Dave's are ready to share their ideas and thoughts, including how to ESCAPE agile Hell. Combined, the Dave's have half a century of experience in government, ranging from technical to agile contracting, and yet they are hopeful and optimistic! The agile hells they've escaped include no transformation hell, too fast hell, technical hell, no trust hell, product owners hell, too big hell, collaboration hell, stove-piped hell, and leadership hell. For each agile hell, they will focus on successful techniques to escape from these common dynamics. Unlike other talks, the...
'Redefinement' of Refinement & Other Quips on Retuning Agile Ceremonies
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...
Exploring Non-ChatGPT Ways to Use AI in Testing
Artificial intelligence and machine learning tools like ChatGPT are bringing AI to the public. The goal and purpose of code generation and refactoring tools like GitHub’s Co-Pilot are evident. However, it may not be as obvious to tell which tools are specifically tailored for testing and quality engineering. Join Carlos Kidman as he compares multiple AI/ML tools and practical applications that testers and quality engineers can use right now. You’ll discover AI for functional testing solutions and tools for test data management. While not all of these tools are free, this session will give...
Tales of Dojo Coaching—Insights for All
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...
AI in DevOps for Improving Engineering Team Productivity
AI and machine learning continue to be hot topics everywhere. The majority of discussions on AI/ML are focused on how generative AI and large language models (LLMs) will change the world. However, LLMs like ChatGPT, Bard, and Llama only represent one area of modern advances in the AI/ML space. Considering the bigger picture of new AI technologies, Chris Navrides has been investigating ways to enable entire new areas of opportunity within the DevOps lifecycle. By leveraging AI in DevOps, he believes teams can improve developer productivity through better code authoring, debugging, and...
AI-Powered Agile + DevOps: The Future Starts Now!
Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) is disrupting industries worldwide, everything from automotive to manufacturing, finance, healthcare, and more. Interestingly, GenAI is transforming the very process used to create the software systems it embodies. Just like in video games, AI is giving the software development lifecycle (SDLC) some much needed power-ups in the form of increased speed and enhanced capabilities. But are these power-ups true force multipliers or simply the essentials for progressing to the next stage? Are they temporary or permanent? Join Tariq King as he travels...
Agile Leadership and the Agile Program Office
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...
Transitioning to Agile: Changing Processes in the Pandemic
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...
Thursday, November 9
Chasing Predictability with AI: The Model of You Outperforms You
Usually, the first question a client asks about software development is: "When will it be done?". Traditional methods to answering this question are fraught with errors. The most common errors include heavy reliance on estimates and the use of averages to give a deterministic answer. What goes through your mind when you try to answer this question? Now imagine that we could take the same process that your mind goes through and model it? Get rid of the biases that we as humans have by using the data our systems already track. Advances in AI, combined with the rapid growth of data across...
Agile and Earned Value Management
The Agile Earned Value Management (A-EVM) approach provides effective scope variance analysis, comprehensive performance reporting, and predictability that aid in keeping the program on time and on budget. A-EVM is an adapted implementation of the traditional EVM method. In A-EVM, we use the Agile framework artifacts as inputs, use traditional EVM calculations, and Value Delivery is expressed in traditional EVM metrics. CGI specializes in translating traditional Project Management Institute (PMI) Earned Value Management concepts to fit an Agile Delivery Framework. The A-EVM approach...
The Art of Getting to Less—Embracing the Agile Principle of Simplicity
PreviewIn 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.
AutoOps: Harnessing the Power of AI-Augmented Testing with Generative AI
In the rapidly evolving landscape of software development, Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) have emerged as pivotal methodologies for delivering high-quality software at an accelerated pace. To ensure the reliability and robustness of software releases in such an environment, the marriage of cutting-edge technologies becomes imperative. Incorporating Generative AI into business process automation seemed daunting just a few years ago. However, the availability and popularization of OpenAI/ChatGPT and other AI/ML technologies have made it a closer reality, and now it...
Breaking Down Silos: Overcoming Upper Management Behaviors That Hinder Agile and DevOps Team Collaboration
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-...
Agility for Ops: Maximizing Efficiency & Adaptability of Non-IT Teams
Agile principles are a natural fit for software development teams. We can get them scrumming, prioritizing product features, and working in sprints. However, when it comes to embodying these same tenets in volatile teams, such as operations, sales, accounting, and people & culture divisions, the approach will vary. How do we modify a concept initially engineered for software development, to fit teams that deal with client acquisition, checks and balances, and human resources? In this talk, Sheyinka will explain how to apply agile principles to maximize the adaptability, efficiency, and...
How to Build High Performing Product Teams
Many organizations have embarked on their lean-agile transformation journey with the aim to benefit from business agility advantages such as faster responsiveness to changing customer demands, higher customer satisfaction, improved employee engagement, or stronger collaboration between Business & IT. But most of those organizations struggle to capture the value of the transformation, they fail to realize a holistic cultural shift, and/or their teams operate way below their potential. In this talk, we focus on how to build up high performing product teams and why it really matters....