Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Developer

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...

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...

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 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...