Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Digital Transformation
Tuesday, June 4
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Beginning a Cloud Migration
NewThere are many ways to take a traditional application to the cloud. From lift-and-shift to rewriting the application as a series of cloud-native microservices or even rebuilding the application as a series of serverless cloud functions. These options all come with tradeoffs, and it is easy to get stuck debating the merits of each approach. This tutorial provides practical advice coupled with hands-on labs to help illustrate some migration approaches. Start with a traditional application, running in a traditional way, and explore some paths to the cloud. Participants will use a number of...
DevOps for Leadership
Preview NewCompetitive 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
Start Your DevOps Journey on the Right Foot
The word "DevOps" is ubiquitous, yet there is no standard definition of the term. DevOps is not a tool or something you can buy. DevOps is a cultural and professional movement focused on how we build and operate high-velocity organizations, born from the experience of its practitioners. So, how do you get your organization on board with the ideas of DevOps? What are the steps to begin this journey? You start by clarifying who your customer is and how your work plays a part in delivering delight to these customers. With that in mind, dedicate yourself to experimentation and learning. Make...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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
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...
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...
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...
Agile+DevOps Feud!
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...
The Evolution of a Continuous Integration Pipeline
Preview
Each month more than 120 million unique visitors access content from USA TODAY and Gannett’s local media organizations, making them the largest US newspaper publisher by total daily circulation. The company’s continuous integration pipeline has evolved from a slow-moving tortoise to a sprinting hare and continues to evolve today. When they started their pipeline, everything was a manual process. Now they have a dedicated operations team that oversees onboarding, maintains the infrastructure, cares for the continuous integration and continuous delivery tools, provides...
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...
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...
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...
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...