Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Agile & Lean Practices | TechWell

Conference archive

Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Agile & Lean Practices

Monday, June 3

Coveros
MA

Introducing Docker and Kubernetes to Your DevOps Toolchain

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

As organizations look to improve the speed with which they deliver software, they increasingly turn to microservices and infrastructure-as-code for software architecture and delivery techniques to help leverage value from their DevOps adoptions. Docker, an industry standard containerization tool, facilitates moving processes into isolated environments that can be frozen into images, with an ecosystem that helps developers across organizations build and share these containers. Kubernetes builds on these capabilities and allows a software team to break down their application into small,...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
ME

Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...

MF

Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
MG

Getting Started with Acceptance Test-Driven / Behavior-Driven Development

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Monday, June 3, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) practices that help facilitate better communication. Mary explores the nuances of BDD and ATDD and shows you how to implement BDD...

Tuesday, June 4

Allen Holub
Independent Consultant
TA

The Architecture of Microservices

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Server-side monoliths—single programs that provide all back-end services—just don't work. They are hard to build, impossible to maintain, and gradually accrete so much baggage that forward development slows to a crawl. Agile development is impossible over this sort of system. Allen Holub says that microservices—systems of small, cooperating server-side agents—solve these problems. However, building a microservice system is not easy, and doing it wrong is disastrous. Taking a deep dive into practical microservice architecture and implementation, Allen covers a lot of practical details to...

Tom Stiehm
Coveros, Inc.
TE

Tools for DevSecOps

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is about creating alignment across the value stream for an application, service, or product. DevSecOps integrates security into this process, making the entire team responsible for delivering secure code that works and can be deployed and used securely. But how do you actually do that? What tools do you add to your DevOps pipeline to help make your software secure and provide your stakeholders with a high level of confidence that the software meets all security requirements & standards? In this tutorial Tom Stiehm will explore what security tools you can add to your DevOps...

Victoria Guido
Blackstone Federal
TG

Tools for Teams - Launch a Rocket with Atlassian Portfolio, Jira, and Confluence

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Join one of the leaders from the Washington, DC, Atlassian User Group, for a hands-on workshop of Atlassian Portfolio, Jira, and Confluence. We will create and finish our own project starting from strategic planning, through development, and ending ready for operations and maintenance using the Atlassian tool-suite while discussing best practices, common barriers, and past experiences for managing information flow on projects. Be prepared to practice your improv skills as literally every aspect of the project will be fake and made up. Will we launch a rocket? Write a novel? Create...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
Bob Galen
Vaco
TH

Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...

Glenn_Buckholz
Coveros
TO

Implementing Pipeline as Code Using Jenkins

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

As organizations strive to improve the speed with which they deliver software, they increasingly turn to Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines and infrastructure-as-code software architecture and delivery techniques to help leverage value from their DevOps adoptions. While many of the steps in a pipeline are automated, management of the pipeline itself remains a largely manual process which slows the delivery process. Join Glenn as he describes how pipeline as code gives teams the ability to define and manage an entire DevOps CI/CD pipeline in code, allows them to...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.Com, Inc.
TI

The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
TJ

Rethinking Your Retrospectives

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TK

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Mary Thorn
Vaco
Bob Galen
Vaco
TM

Creating a High-Performance Agile Team

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...

Gene Gotimer
Coveros, Inc.
TN

DevOps for Leadership

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Tuesday, June 4, 2019 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Competitive markets dictate an ever increasing need to be able to react quickly and deliver business value and quality efficiently. Organizations who cannot evolve to the newer and faster paced delivery models will not survive. DevOps is necessary to deliver robust software solutions and products quickly and reliably, without increasing risk or sacrificing quality. Today’s leaders need to understand what DevOps is all about and how to implement it across the enterprise to remain competitive and facilitate growth. This interactive workshop will explain what DevOps is and isn’t, what...

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...

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...

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,...

AD7

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...

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
AD12

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...

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.

Victoria Guido
Blackstone Federal
K2

Nontechnical Managers Leading Technical Teams

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Wednesday, June 5, 2019 - 1:45pm to 2:45pm

Technology is complicated and changes every day. Even leaders with a technical background and deep understanding of tools and processes have trouble keeping up, and it’s virtually impossible to be an expert on every single aspect of a product. How can you help your team if you have no idea what anyone is talking about? Engineers and developers have all experienced the frustration and difficulties of being led by someone deemed “nontechnical,” from promising a customer unrealistic deadlines or solutions to a lack of trust and a complete breakdown in communication. Victoria Guido...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

Owen Gotimer
TechWell
B1

Agile+DevOps Feud!

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Thursday, June 6, 2019 - 1:30pm to 2:00pm

Join us for a game of Agile+DevOps Feud, where two teams of thought leaders compete to name the most popular responses to survey questions to win bragging rights and to share their experiences. Questions and voting will be in the TechWell Hub leading up to the conference, where community members will name their greatest concerns, best practices, etc. Our two teals of panelists, Mary Thorn, Ryan Ripley, and Lee Eason, versus Melissa...

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...

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...

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
AD53

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...

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...