Conference Schedule

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...Read more

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...Read more

In the financial industry, investment in modernization can take a long time to gain support which slows down momentum for change. While the industry focuses on the next hottest technology, many of us simultaneously continue to own, run, and operate legacy systems. How do we adopt a DevOps culture around a legacy system? How do you evolve the legacy mindset to embrace modernization? Modernization is not solely an application evolution; it is a mindset as well. Embracing a DevOps culture is not technology dependent, it is people dependent. Teaching people the right tools and...Read more

To reinvent the wheel is to attempt to duplicate, most likely with inferior results and technical debts. Within a large-scale organization the true cost of CI/CD is the toil involved when effort is repeated to create the same or similar pipeline functionality. What Prashant and March discovered during a CI/CD journey is that the key to creating powerful and efficient CI/CD or automation testing pipelines is in not writing pipeline logic at all. The formula that was unlocked is in focusing on the atomic level of the reusable code within pipeline stages. By harnessing the power of creating...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

Large Language Models continue to grow in popularity as people experiment, applying them to problems and pushing new code into production applications. Growing along with this popularity is an engineering approach that advocates outsourcing more and more of an application’s functionality to these LLMs. But what seems like an advantage on the surface masks different costs and risks. Ultimately, you may end up with less reliable code that’s harder to troubleshoot and fix, accruing technical debt along the way. There’s also the potential increase in attack surface from integrating LLMs into...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

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...Read more

Performance, a cornerstone of delivering high-quality software, is poised to undergo a seismic shift, and artificial intelligence (AI) is at the helm. Yet, as with many technological evolutions, there's a haze of misconception surrounding AI's role in this domain. Is AI merely an advanced tool, or can it redefine the entire engineering paradigm? Join Kaushal Dalvi as he demystifies AI's transformative role in performance. Drawing from real-world experiences and case studies, covering AI's potential in auto-generation of performance tests and predicting bottlenecks. Engage in interactive...Read more