Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Concurrent Session | TechWell

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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

Lee Eason
IHS Markit
AD1

Building Healthy Agile and DevOps Teams

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Angie Jones
Applitools
AD2

What's That Smell? Tidying Up Our Test Code

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Bob Galen
Vaco
AD3

The Essential Product Owner: Partnering with Your Teams

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

Todd Miller
Itero Group
AD4

Engaging the Other Half of the Room

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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.

Cheryl Hammond
Pivotal Labs
AD5

Fantastic Outcomes and How to Measure Them

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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,...

Richard Mills
Coveros
AD6

DevOpsing Your Greenfield: Cultivating New Growth

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

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The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

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...

David Bujard
Blackstone Federal
Chris Stemen
Blackstone Federal
AD8

Escaping the 9 Circles of Agile Hell

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 10:30am to 11:30am

Does 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...

Katy Sherman
Premier Inc.
AD9

Who Owns Quality in Agile?

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Paul_Grizzaffi
Magenic
AD10

Hunting Sasquatch: Finding Intermittent Issues Using Periodic Automation

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Bill DeVoe
Artemis Agile Consulting
AD11

Pushing Pennies: Playing with the Principles of Product Development Flow

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Erin McManus
Spotify
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Creating High-Performing Teams at Spotify

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AD13

Leadership in the Age of Agile

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Dana Pylayeva
Agile Play Consulting LLC
AD14

You Can't Have DevOps if Fear Is Running Your Workplace

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

A 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...

Shareen Gurley
Capital One
Narasima Yalamala
Capital One
AD15

DevOps: A Journey of Automation That's Worth the Wait

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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...

Bob Galen
Vaco
AD16

An Agile Fireside Chat with Bob Galen

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 11:45am to 12:45pm

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.

Sanjiv Augustine
LitheSpeed LLC
Charles Kennedy
Nationwide
AD17

Sparking End-to-End Agility

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Laura Keaton
Keaton Consulting
AD18

How to Avoid Automation Framework Sinkholes

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Jennifer Bonine
PinkLion AI
AD19

The Lost Art of Live Communication: Get Connected to Your Customers

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Nablia Safdar
Do it Best Corp.
AD20

Teaming in Agility: The Art of Excellence

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Stan Guzik
(S&P) Global Platts
Mary Thorn
Vaco
AD21

Case Study: An Engineering-Focused, Scaled Agile Rollout at Standard & Poor's

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Joseph_Ours
Centric Consulting
AD22

The Lord of the Rings: DevOps Edition

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Derek Ashmore
Asperitas Consulting
AD23

AWS Lambda: Best Practices and Common Mistakes

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Greg Sypolt
Gannett | USA Today Network
Sandy Park
Apptest.ai
Angie Jones
Applitools
AD24

Panel: What's the Next Big Thing in DevOps?

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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

Jeff Langr
Langr Software Solutions, Inc.
AD25

Mobbing, Pairing, Soloing, and Pipe Fires: A Personal History of Collaboration

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Jason_Arbon
test.ai
AD26

Postmodern Testing

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Mathias Eifert
Excella
AD27

Iterative versus Incremental: How Your Backlog Makes or Breaks Agility

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Melissa Boggs
Scrum Alliance
AD28

Exhaustion Is Not a Status Symbol

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Mike Cottmeyer
LeadingAgile
AD29

The Hard Part of Every Agile Transformation

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Sandy Park
Apptest.ai
AD30

5 Common Types of Mobile App Bugs Found Using AI

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Timothy Cochran
Thoughtworks
AD31

Using Component Testing for Ultra-Fast Builds

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AD32

Fishbowl Discussion: How Much Automation Is Enough?

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Chris Murman
SolutionsIQ an Accenture Company
AD33

Brainwriting: The Team Hack to Generating Better Ideas

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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,...

Raj Subramanian
Testim.io
AD34

Hacks to Becoming a Mindful Agile Tester

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Have 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...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group
AD35

Intro to Design Thinking: Experience Human-Centered Design in Action

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Are 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....

AD36

Distributed Scrum Teams Whack-a-Mole:
 Creative Solutions to 
Common Obstacles

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Taking 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...

Anders Wallgren
CloudBees
AD37

You Say Goodbye, I Say Hello: Bridging the Gap Between Dev and Ops

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Troy Walsh
Magenic
AD38

Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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....

Alan Crouch
Coveros
AD39

Making the Jump from DevOps to DevSecOps

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Organizations 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,...

Nathen Harvey
Google
AD40

A DevOps Fireside Chat with Nathen Harvey

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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.

Amanda Geary
Lithespeed
Arlen Bankston
LitheSpeed
AD41

People Operations in a Teal Organization: Tools and Techniques from a Real Journey

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

The 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...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
AD42

Reality-Driven Testing in Agile Projects

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

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...

Brian Watson
Sketch Development Services
AD43

Minimum Viable Product: Deliver with Vision, Simplicity and Focus

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

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...

Courtney Wilkinson
Quicken Loans
AD44

ScrumMasters: The Struggle Is Real

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

Are 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...

Alan Shalloway
Net Objectives
AD45

Lean Leadership and Systems Thinking in Agile Adoptions

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

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...

Ryan Kenney
Coveros
AD46

How to Prevent Catastrophic Doom on Your Next Federal DevOps Project

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

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...

Sneha Viswalingam
Zoll Lifevest
AD47

Building the Blocks of Trust in Automation

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

When 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...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
AD48

Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 3:15pm to 4:15pm

Are 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...

Kim Brainard
Agile Brain Group
AD49

Leading in an Era of Constant Change

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...

Max_Saperstone
Coveros
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Getting to Continuous Testing

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...

Laura Janusek
Modern Teacher
AD51

Get Your Poker Face On: How to Effectively Use Planning Poker to Slay Project Estimations

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

How 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-...

Matt Weinstock
Align Technology
AD52

What Japanese Shinkansen Trains Can Teach Us about Agile

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...

Steven Granese
AgileThought
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Follow the Money: How to Talk to Executives about Agile

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

When 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...

Anne Hungate
Daring Systems
AD54

A Successful DevOps Initiative Starts with Knowing Your Numbers

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...

AD55

See the Forest, Not Just the Trees: Improving Quality and Flow in a Continuous Delivery World

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...

AD56

Encore Session

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 4:30pm to 5:30pm

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...