Agile + DevOps East 2023 - Product Owner
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2023 experience with sessions for product owners.
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...
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
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
Thursday, November 9
Smooth Sailing: Navigating Release Management in the DevOps Landscape
Embark on an illuminating voyage with me ( Priyanka Halder) as we delve into Release Management's uncharted territory within the DevOps era. As a Quality Engineering Leader, I invite you to explore the synergy of agility and stability for triumphant software deliveries. We'll uncover strategies that steer us through challenges, nurture collaboration, and embrace evolution in this dynamic sphere. Unravel core DevOps principles, cultivate collaborative cultures, and refine robust release processes. Discover the pivotal role Release Management plays in bridging the agility-stability divide,...
Generative AI in Quality Assurance
The need for a new test automation model has been an imperative over the last 10 years as we have moved from waterfall to agile and agile to DevOps. Moving from test coverage to application coverage and reducing test time from months to an hour or less has created a substantial pressure for full success. Now AI in test is a reality. The first generative AI offerings in QA became available in 2018 and since then marked improvements have been made in outcomes. This has changed QA teams' focus, tasks, and work effort. With the ultimate goal of AI finding all our bugs, the advent of...
Transforming User Requirements to Test Cases Using Model-Driven Software Engineering and Natural Language Processing
Testing continues to be the main approach to ensuring software quality during development. Although there have been many attempts to automate the generation of test cases from user requirements (formal or informal), creating test cases continues to be mainly a manual process. However, many studies have shown that automating the generation of test cases from requirements can substantially reduce costs and improve the efficiency of the testing process. Test automation has also been proven to show positive effects on software quality. With the advances in Model-driven Software Engineering (...
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...
Elevating IT: A Journey Towards Engineering Excellence
In the fast-paced and ever-evolving landscape of Information Technology, the pursuit of Engineering Excellence has become not only a competitive advantage but a necessity. Join Adam Auerbach, a leader in Engineering Excellence, for an insightful journey as Adam delves into the strategies, principles, and real-world experiences that can empower your IT organization to embark on a transformative path towards Engineering Excellence. In this talk, Adam will explore the critical components that constitute Engineering Excellence. Adam will talk about the journey of transformation, from...
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...
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....