Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to follow a specific track or to explore various topics throughout the conference in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
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Wednesday, June 5
Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams
The tools and technologies our teams rely on to build solutions are changing faster every day. New frameworks, new tools, transformations to DevOps, and migrations to public cloud are all putting strain on our teams. These changes drive a natural entropy as key-person dependencies form, hurting quality and throughput and leading to morale issues and attrition. Lee Eason has been watching this happen over the past several years and has developed a tool and an approach to address it. You will learn practical approaches to help you build a culture of continuous learning within your teams in...
What's That Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code
We are often reminded by those experienced in writing test automation that code is code. The sentiment being conveyed is that test code should be written with the same care and rigor that production code is written with. However, many people who write test code may not have experience writing production code, so it’s not exactly clear what is meant. And even those who write production code find that there are unique design patterns and code smells that are specific to test code. Join Angie Jones as she presents a smelly test automation code base littered with several bad coding practices...
The Essential Product Owner: Partnering with Your Teams
While the Scrum product owner is arguably the most crucial role within agile teams, we often hear horror stories about POs who aren’t available to their teams, change their minds incessantly on business priorities, or ignore quality requirements and technical debt. Even the best POs struggle to meet the demands of their “regular business-focused job” while providing sufficient team guidance. Bob Galen shares real-world situations where he’s observed product owners who deliver truly balanced value for their business stakeholders. Find out how story mapping and release planning set the stage...
Engaging the Other Half of the Room
Do you often attend meetings or events where participation is left to only half the room, while the others sit quietly, waiting for it to be over? Organizational habits across the globe have unintentionally implemented tactics that exclude people and are anticollaborative. Join Todd Miller to explore as a group the use of liberating structures as an answer to this problem. Learn different ways to facilitate events so that the outcome involves every mind in the room. Come prepared to participate in this interactive session to learn ways of getting everyone engaged.
Fantastic Outcomes and How to Measure Them
Do your metrics track what matters most to your organization, or do they merely quantify your adherence to a process? Is that process a good proxy for real results? In your environment? How do you know? Discover where to look for elusive, real outcomes. Join Cheryl Hammond to learn how to study indicators for your important metrics so you can recognize them when you encounter them in the wild. Understand how to monitor the health and relevance of your outcomes, and commit to the constant care needed to keep them vibrant. You'll take back a renewed appreciation for the beauty of a wild,...
DevOpsing Your Greenfield: Cultivating New Growth
Your project sponsor presents a golden opportunity with a brand-new project, saying, "I want to do some DevOps on our new agile project!" Sigh. Your response: "How about we be agile and adopt a DevOps approach to structuring our teams, designing our architecture, and leveraging automation to rapidly deliver value to our customers?" There—we've set the mood. Greenfield projects provide a unique opportunity for us as DevOps professionals because they don't come with baggage. But where you do you actually start? Unlike legacy projects, new projects don't have a set of pre-existing challenges...
The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps
Do you know teams that are merely doing "cargo cult DevOps"? Near the end of WWII, the Allies had airstrips on many islands in the south Pacific. The natives on these islands noticed that when the Allies put the "coconuts" on their ears and spoke into the "banana," the gods would send down a magical flying creature with food and supplies. When the war ended and the Allies left, the natives put the coconuts on their ears and spoke into the banana, and they wondered why the gods failed to bless them, too. They didn't understand headphones or radio transmissions or that someone must be...
Escaping the 9 Circles of Agile Hell
PreviewDoes it feel like you're toiling away in agile hell? Fear not—you don't have to be confined there for all eternity. Dave Bujard and Chris Stemen will describe the nine circles of agile hell, each an example of a problem that exists in many programs. They'll discuss the underlying issues that often are the cause and how to deal with them. Bring your smartphones—during the first five minutes, Dave and Chris will ask the audience to prioritize their pain points via an interactive app. During the presentation, they will focus on the six agile hells closest to participants' experiences...
Who Owns Quality in Agile?
What do you mean, who owns quality? The quality assurance team, of course—the kings and queens of quality, the masters of the tests, the lords of the sign-off. People often used to look down on quality assurance as less technical, the last to get their hands on the code, and the first to be blamed when things go wrong, but of course, agile adoption has changed the industry. These days we have cross-functional teams and develop test automation. But we also do "Scrummerfall" and have hardening sprints and stressful deadlines. Despite all of that planning, testing still often comes as an...
Hunting Sasquatch: Finding Intermittent Issues Using Periodic Automation
In pop culture, Sasquatch (aka Bigfoot) is an ape-like creature infrequently seen in the Pacific Northwest of North America—if he even exists. In the software realm, we have our own version of Sasquatch: that irritating, elusive "intermittent issue." Traditionally, we run automated tests on event boundaries, like when we have a successful deployment; we look for problems when we think they may have been introduced. Logically, points of change are when we expect to have injected issues, so we tend to only look for issues then. This approach alone, however, limits opportunities to reproduce...
Pushing Pennies: Playing with the Principles of Product Development Flow
Most agile practitioners first learn by reading a book, taking a class, or attending local meetings. But learning concepts works best when we can put some concrete examples and practice behind the theory. Being able to talk beyond anecdote and theory and demonstrate why something works the way we think it does is a powerful lesson. Join Bill DeVoe as he leads the audience in a few exercises to illustrate key agile and lean concepts. First, learn about the fallacies of multitasking and how to properly structure our work. Then complete an exercise demonstrating how typical projects work and...
Creating High-Performing Teams at Spotify
In a scaled agile world of practitioners with diverse software development experience, how should leaders and coaches support teams' continuous improvement and ensure they are using best practices in engineering, ways of working, and culture? This is the question Spotify agile coaches Catherine Fleres and Erin McManus asked themselves over the last year. They’ll recount an approach in engaging teams from the start, instead of imposing specifics from leadership. Input was gathered from teams and leaders about what principles and engineering practices they value in order to create an...
Leadership in the Age of Agile
Do you want to grow your organization’s ability to respond to market opportunities, competitive pressures, or opportunities for innovation? Then join Ryan Ripley as he explores how leadership in an agile world has sparked a change in the way we show up as leaders and managers in our organizations. We’ll discuss how leaders enable agile to thrive and grow, while keeping a laser focus on delivering value to customers and stakeholders. Ryan will address your questions and give you practical tips and ideas that you can start using tomorrow. Join us and learn what professional agile leadership...
You Can't Have DevOps if Fear Is Running Your Workplace
PreviewA number of organizations today start their DevOps initiatives with automation. While it may help them grab the low-hanging fruit, it can only get them so far before they run into a big impediment: fear in the workplace. In these organizations, fear can undermine any further DevOps progress. Just like any other change attempted in pathological or bureaucratic cultures, DevOps can even cause more fear and face strong resistance. Join this interactive session to learn and practice recognizing typical fears and fear symptoms, all based on case studies and stories from medium to large...
DevOps: A Journey of Automation That's Worth the Wait
Continuous delivery is really about one thing: quickly responding to market changes. As with many teams, Shareen Gurley and Narasimha Yalamala's journey began with automation, which seemed never-ending. But to be effective with your DevOps implementation, you need to have solid technical and quality practices to ensure your code is always in a deployable state. If you don’t know exactly where you are going, how will you know when you get there? Join Shareen and Narasimha as they share the prerequisites for creating effective development delivery pipelines, integrated with critical...
An Agile Fireside Chat with Bob Galen
Come get your questions answered by an agile expert! We won't have an actual fireside, but Bob Galen will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss the topics that are most important to you. Bob is an experienced agile coach with a broad range of knowledge on almost any agile topic—practices, leadership, or methodologies. And he wants to discuss whatever interests you. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
Sparking End-to-End Agility
Nationwide Insurance had a "Scrummerfall" approach, with long, linear, upfront planning cycles that eventually fed work to agile delivery teams, only to then have the completed work languish in further waterfall steps toward deployment. While IT had been agile for close to a decade, with around two hundred standing agile teams, business partners still struggled with inordinately long lead times for setting up projects, long waterfall requirements development cycles, and especially long funding cycles. In late 2016, the Enterprise Digital group began a business transformation to improve...
How to Avoid Automation Framework Sinkholes
Test automation frameworks are constantly plagued by runaway costs and huge codebases that become maintenance nightmares. Successful automation frameworks are best defined under the “keep it simple, stupid” philosophy—KISS! Test automation needs to be only as complicated as the most complex variation in the system. Laura Keaton will show how to streamline the development and maintenance of automation by integrating it with development, operations, and project management. If KISS is used properly, the maintenance and cost can be relatively straightforward. Join Laura to learn how to...
The Lost Art of Live Communication: Get Connected to Your Customers
Have you ever been in the same room with coworkers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Many people are starting to prefer virtual or chat messaging to face-to-face conversations, but live communication can get better results at work—and with your customers. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer will share a toolkit to help you assess your core communication...
Teaming in Agility: The Art of Excellence
Forming around an initiative to deliver productive outcomes can challenge the strongest of teams. It is even more difficult for individuals coming together during the transition. Often the responsiveness of the needs can be lost in process and system assumptions. Individuals under such a charge are left with a sense of being pawns in a chess match, making them feel less human. Teaming falters. Both the leader and the team member have responsibilities: The leader must unravel the complexity of the process, employ a human-first mindset, and foster safety and collaboration; the team member...
Case Study: An Engineering-Focused, Scaled Agile Rollout at Standard & Poor's
A large company moves to agile, but when the going gets tough, they abandon all their agile processes and revert to old ways—which are now a combination of Scrum and waterfall—and delivery is worse than before they started. Usually, what happens next is the CTO gets removed, and the new CTO comes in and proclaims again that we are all moving to agile to re-energize the organization, and they start their transformation once more. Have you seen this movie before? The agile transformation for Standard & Poor's played out this way twice, but finally, the third time was the charm—their last...
The Lord of the Rings: DevOps Edition
Modern software delivery involves lean principles, DevOps practices, and of course tools. Implementing those elements in harmony will necessitate a change in how teams operate—more specifically, it will require a change in how managers think about teams. If teams truly want to leverage the power of DevOps and become high-performing, how should leaders think about team construction? Using comical analogous reasoning, Joseph Ours will discuss the fellowship in The Lord of the Rings, the roles, the mission, and the skills team to extrapolate what can be learned. Joseph will take artistic...
AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes
Serverless architectures relieve you of hardware and scaling setup concerns, and AWS Lambda functions are used by many organizations for serverless application development and automating DevOps tasks. But many teams start using AWS Lambda and uncover problems such as running into resource limits, debugging nested Lambda defects, managing code change across dozens of AWS accounts, and many more. Derek Ashmore will provide tips and tricks to make your AWS Lambda functions usable in different contexts and easier to develop and support. He will show you how to mitigate common problems teams...
Panel: What's the Next Big Thing in DevOps?
Are you comfortable with what DevOps is now but wondering what you will have to worry about next? Or just curious about what our experts think will be the next big thing in DevOps? Come listen to our panelists as they answer questions about the future of DevOps—or at least some possible futures. This panel is looking to answer your questions about where the industry is headed, so be ready to participate.
Thursday, June 6
Mobbing, Pairing, Soloing, and Pipe Fires: A Personal History of Collaboration
Pair programming: the practice you love to hate! Twenty years after being introduced as part of Extreme Programming, the collaborative practice is still a thing. And if you thought pairing was nuts, now there's mobbing, where the entire team works together on one thing at a time. Yet we often hear teams say, "We go faster because we are mobbing." In this anecdote-heavy session, you'll hear Jeff Langr's history of working through various models for collaboration (or not) across the past several decades, including solo programming, pairing, and mobbing. He'll show you his office blueprints...
Postmodern Testing
If you want to speed up delivery while maintaining quality, this is the talk for you. Jason’s move from Microsoft to Google’s agile and DevOps-driven world was a shock. Today’s agile teams have ten times more builds, ten times faster releases, ten times fewer testers, ten times quicker bug fixing speed, and … similar or worse software quality. Jason shares his lessons learned from being a tester on high-quality teams such as Google Chrome and Search. Jason also has experience managing software quality in the roles of director of engineering, director of product, and now startup CEO. He...
Iterative versus Incremental: How Your Backlog Makes or Breaks Agility
Agile is an incremental and iterative approach to delivering value to our customers. But too often, we assume that both approaches are fundamentally equivalent. However, there is a crucial difference, and getting the balance wrong frequently results in projects and teams that are AINO—agile in name only—often without even realizing it! Mathias Eifert will discuss how to differentiate between incremental and iterative approaches, their strengths and weaknesses, and why you really need both. He will explore how iterative thinking shapes the core of agile practices, helps us manage today’s...
Exhaustion Is Not a Status Symbol
We set out to transform the world of work with agile, yet we've heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel,” an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that developers cannot escape. Join Melissa Boggs in a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive culture and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be accidentally responsible for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and...
The Hard Part of Every Agile Transformation
When it comes to an agile transformation, going through the motions of adopting a new set of attitudes, processes, and behaviors at the team level is easy. The hard part is building the enabling structures that allow agile to thrive, aligning the flow of work, measuring progress based on outcomes, and achieving communicable results that will resonate with stakeholders. This talk will cover the hard part. Mike Cottmeyer will explore the economic rationale behind going agile, considerations that will drive your organization’s change approach, what the fundamentals of an agile ecosystem look...
5 Common Types of Mobile App Bugs Found Using AI
Among all mobile apps, the current error rate is believed to be at 15 percent. With a thousand new apps launching daily and a constant increase of mobile devices, there’s a need for a scalable solution to create and maintain high-quality apps, without hassle. Thanks to artificial intelligence, exploratory testing is advancing and proving to detect mobile bugs at scale. Join Sandy Park as she examines the five most common types of errors found through more than ten thousand hours of AI-powered testing, with actual samples. She will introduce the challenges of each type and explain how the...
Using Component Testing for Ultra-Fast Builds
A best practice of software architecture is to design your applications into independent modules or components, with a published contract for interaction between components. This is a principle of the microservices style of architecture, but it also applies to components created in a large monolith. If we can test the functionality of the component independently, and apply a level of trust that those components work, this opens the door to rethinking our continuous integration and continuous delivery strategy, potentially reducing the need for long test suites and many environments. It...
Fishbowl Discussion: How Much Automation Is Enough?
These days, everyone knows some automation is a necessity. More usually feels better. But when are you done? Or when do you stop for now? How can you tell if adding automation is no longer helping, or is even distracting from the real issues? Because the answer is "It depends," you'll want to listen to the wisdom of others who are on the same journey. In a fishbowl discussion, the audience members sit in a circle of chairs in the middle of the room. Several brave souls will fill all but one of the chairs in the "fishbowl." When you want to join as a speaker, you enter the fishbowl and sit...
Brainwriting: The Team Hack to Generating Better Ideas
Brainstorming has long been held as the best way to get ideas from teams. The purpose is to solicit large amounts of ideas in a short timeframe. By putting a collective of creative people in the same room, better concepts should be the outcome. Sounds very agile, right? However, science has shown several times that brainstorming is not the best way to generate ideas. It’s cumbersome due to all of the interdependent activities happening, and you often spend more time thinking about others' ideas than your own. Maybe it's time we try something new. Brainwriting is similar to brainstorming,...
Hacks to Becoming a Mindful Agile Tester
PreviewHave you ever felt like you've been working on multiple tasks all day long, but at the end of the day when you review your work, you realize you haven’t accomplished anything concrete? After years of working in the tech industry, Raj Subramanian realized he was not able to accomplish any task with complete focus and attention. So in 2017, he started a six-month journey of self-exploration and discovery. He read books; listened to podcasts on mindfulness, productivity, leadership, and self-motivation; and tried to apply various concepts learned from this journey in his daily tasks...
Intro to Design Thinking: Experience Human-Centered Design in Action
PreviewAre you curious about design thinking? Hungry to experience it for yourself? Don’t just watch from the sidelines—come give it a try! This is a hands-on, experimental session that will be a fun and engaging experience with design thinking tools. You’ll learn some of the core values of design thinking, including how human-centered design, empathy for the people you are designing for, and feedback from users are fundamental to good design. You'll learn that experimentation and prototyping are not simply a way to validate your idea, but an integral part of your innovation process....
Distributed Scrum Teams Whack-a-Mole: Creative Solutions to Common Obstacles
PreviewTaking a newly formed distributed Scrum team from mediocre to high-performing has its share of challenges, including differences in language, culture, and time zones; a misunderstanding of Scrum; and the "us versus them" mentality. Join Kimberly Andrikaitis as she walks through her journey of challenges she's experienced in building team relationships, shifting the agile mindset, a lack of focus, and sad ceremonies. She has created an extensive toolbox to share with attendees, containing various ideas to bridge these gaps. You will leave with real-world strategies for how to...
You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Bridging the Gap Between Dev and Ops
Getting quality software into production quickly and efficiently is a major priority for organizations of all types. Yet many find that development teams’ focus on “innovation and experimentation” conflicts with Ops’ mandate to mitigate risk and increase predictability. This cultural and organizational mismatch puts transformation success at risk and generates a constant state of “release anxiety.” However, breaking down these silos and implementing new trends in organizational structures, value stream mapping, and pipeline monitoring and tracking can help get development and operations...
Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline
Decreasing the time to market has become critical for many organizations. This heightened focus on speed has fundamentally changed the way software is designed, developed, released, and tested. Not long ago, it would have been common to see release testing efforts that took weeks or even months. Today, in many instances, QA instead only has days or hours to complete their testing efforts. Stepping up to this challenge is not easy, but it's essential. Troy Walsh will talk about adding quality to your release pipeline, starting by looking at what a release pipeline is and how it works....
Making the Jump from DevOps to DevSecOps
PreviewOrganizations are moving to DevOps to build and deploy software more rapidly. But as they break down organizational silos to bring together testing, development, and operations, they often avoid or exclude security in their transformational efforts. Leaders in highly regulated organizations are often left wondering, where does my traditional security organization fit into this new DevOps world? How do I know that my applications are becoming more secure, while still getting the advantages of rapid, incremental deployment? Alan Crouch will talk about his experiences with financial,...
A DevOps Fireside Chat with Nathen Harvey
You've got DevOps questions, and we've got Nathen Harvey to answer them for you. He won't really be sitting by the fire, but he will be on hand to talk about all things DevOps. From his experiences building communities at Chef to being an advocate for developers at Google to being a huge part of the DevOps Days conferences, Nathen wants to talk about the things that worry you or thrill you about DevOps. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
People Operations in a Teal Organization: Tools and Techniques from a Real Journey
PreviewThe Lithespeed team first read Frederic Laloux's "Reinventing Organizations” in 2015. We immediately said ‘Hell yes, we are doing this - we should never work any other way!’ Fast forward 4 years, a couple conference presentations and a lot of trial and error. On our journey to Teal, we have undergone many transitions. We will share some of our challenges moving towards a deeper teal culture and our goal of developing tools for creating a system of organizational development and self-management. We will share our real-world experience using distributed decision making and...
Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects
Many agile teams rework previously deployed stories, even after plenty of in-sprint testing. Even well-groomed, refined stories, framed with typical, alternate, and error scenarios and gracefully described in well-formed Gherkin, continue to encounter all sorts of bugs. Software engineering consultant Rob Sabourin sees rework in over 20 percent of deployed stories, but he can show you how agile teams can drive rework down dramatically, often achieving near-zero rework after a story is done. Rob teaches teams to identify and implement relevant testing activities above and beyond those...
Minimum Viable Product: Deliver with Vision, Simplicity and Focus
To build good software, teams (and businesses) need to have a laser focus on all three of these items. It is virtually impossible to keep the effort focused on building to the needs of the customer if you don't start with a solid vision from the product owner/sponsor. When the focus isn't on just what is needed by the customer, that leads scope creep and feature bloat tends to set in and impact the products ROI. Whether you are focusing on a minimum viable product, minimum viable prototype, or a minimally viable package of code; leveraging the few simple principles allows teams to keep...
ScrumMasters: The Struggle Is Real
PreviewAre you a new ScrumMaster who is trying to figure out what the heck to do each day? Or have you been a ScrumMaster for a little while now but still find it difficult to set aside time to continue to grow your team’s knowledge of agile best practices? Do you struggle to improve the team dynamic or the relationship with your product owner because you are too busy removing roadblocks all day? These situations have become all too familiar. Courtney Wilkinson knows because she has successfully overcome many herself. As a former ScrumMaster and current agile coach, Courtney can tell you...
Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking in Agile Adoptions
When teams self-organize, they need an effective ecosystem that enables them to collaborate, communicate, and work effectively. Creating such an ecosystem is management’s responsibility. Lean thinking tells us to focus on these systems where people are operating. We can do because we trust our teams to be motivated and do their best. Lean thinking provides a holistic view for the work done in an organization, which is even more important when a company doesn’t already have an agile culture. In this case, management must consider that it’s easier for people to work their way into a new way...
How to Prevent Catastrophic Doom on Your Next Federal DevOps Project
Trying to achieve real continuous deployments into production is hard for everyone, but it’s especially hard for highly regulated or government projects. These types of challenges range from client-specific, such as a set of manual checks and validations that need to be performed, to more generic problems, like how to version microservices and promote potentially breaking changes. Join Ryan Kenney as he discusses ways that he and his team have overcome obstacles to reaching continuous deployment. First Ryan will give an overview of the project and some of the problems they’ve faced. Then...
Building the Blocks of Trust in Automation
PreviewWhen moving toward automation, establishing trust in the automation test suite is important to unite the team as a whole. Once trust is established in the process and the tests, it becomes crucial to the overall software development lifecycle. Join Sneha Viswalingam as she shares the journey of how her team of manual test engineers contributed to automation, the steps they took to build clean automation and win the confidence of the organization, and how they came to believe that the automation effort has their backs. She'll outline the strategies used to make the tests reliable...
Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations
PreviewAre you in a large, plodding enterprise that's beginning, in the midst of, or considering a move toward DevOps? Unsure how or even if it will work, but know you have to make a move anyway? Do you want to hear from your peers about how they've managed so far? A pyramid discussion starts as a series of one-on-one conversations between the participants. After each pair hashes out their thoughts with each other, they join another couple to refine their points and hear pros and cons. After a while, those four join with four more, and so on until there is only one discussion, with...
Leading in an Era of Constant Change
Change is a good thing. Being a leader in an era of constant change can be frustrating. Putting a company through a significant transformation is a serious process that takes a lot of people, time, and money. However, if your organization doesn't innovate and change by market-driven needs and demands, it will fail—it's just that simple. So, how do you do it? This interactive workshop will introduce five key factors to successful change management. You will experience techniques to get everybody actively involved in transformation, from top-level executives and stakeholders to the team...
Getting to Continuous Testing
Max Saperstone tells the story of how a healthcare company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to capitalize on a greenfield test automation opportunity, and in the span of 12 months, develop over 2,000 test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily re-used by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he walks...
Get Your Poker Face On: How to Effectively Use Planning Poker to Slay Project Estimations
PreviewHow long will that take? It’s a question we’ve all either asked or been asked, and it can be a challenge to answer accurately. How long will it take to get that feature out the door? How much time would you need to build this kind of software? How many developers would we need to get this project done in three months? Join Laura Janusek as she explores the tools and strategies to effectively use Planning Poker — the agile, consensus-based estimation technique — to generate accurate, data-backed responses to those questions. Attendees will gain insight into the process with real-...
What Japanese Shinkansen Trains Can Teach Us about Agile
Have you ever been to Japan and noticed that their railway system is incredibly efficient? As places like Tokyo continue to expand and the cost of living rises, more and more people rely on trains that start hours away from the city to arrive on time. This allows passengers to make their connections to other trains networks and metros that will take them to their final destination. In 2017, over 420 million passengers boarded Shinkansen trains that had an average delay of only 24 seconds! Not to mention that in the 55 years of operation, the Shinkansen has had no injuries due to collision...
Follow the Money: How to Talk to Executives about Agile
PreviewWhen agile transformations fail, many agilists blame their executives for not caring about or understanding agile. However, few people focus on the different languages that IT and business people speak, and the different outcomes that both sides desire. Rather than blaming each other, what is needed is more empathy for the results that others care about and more understanding of the languages that others speak. Steven Granese will share his stories from working with executives while leading their agile transformations. He will describe how to explain agile using the language of...
A Successful DevOps Initiative Starts with Knowing Your Numbers
IT organizations that don’t know their risk factors and exposure are likely to make investments in DevOps that don’t matter. After working with several teams that lost their DevOps funding after making automation investments in areas that were not business constraints, Anne Hungate's “Know Your Numbers” model emerged. Join Anne to learn how to prioritize your DevOps improvements and demonstrate the impact and value you are delivering. After all, DevOps gets traction and funding when teams can show the business impact of doing it, so if you want your DevOps initiative to take off, be...
See the Forest, Not Just the Trees: Improving Quality and Flow in a Continuous Delivery World
There are many companies today implementing agile and DevOps practices, usually enabled by a microservices architecture. Most of them are focused on continuously delivering value to their customers within the boundary of a time-bound sprint. If you work at one of these companies or want to move in that direction, how does the quality delivered by your team today compare to in the past? Has it improved, stayed the same, or gotten worse? Are you actively using that data to improve quality? Join Ashwin Desai as he reviews how his company implemented a lean-based approach that allowed them to...
Encore Session
BRAVO! It's back by popular demand! Did you have a hard time selecting which session to attend? Wished you had participated in a great session you heard about? Talked with someone at lunch or a happy hour about a great presentation and you wished you could have been there? Your wish has come true! We know it's a challenge to cover all the great sessions at our conferences, so on Thursday afternoon, we will feature a repeat of one of the most talked about sessions from Wednesday. We want to hear from YOU which session you would like to have presented again. Drop by the TechWell Experience...