Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Project Manager

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...

What do users really need? Do they really know what they need? Although developers and testers are expected to implement stories and requirements that add real value, users often describe wants rather than needs and ask for features rather than solutions. Rob Sabourin shares his experiences applying task analysis using the “critical incident method” to better understand user processes and determine needs and desired solutions. Rob does not ask “what the system should do for the user” but rather, learns “what the user does with the system.” The critical incident task analysis method is a...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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...

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-...

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...