Agile + DevOps West 2019 - Test Management
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2019 experience with sessions covering test management.
Monday, June 3
Test Design for CI/CD Delivery
PreviewImagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
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...
Getting Started with Acceptance Test-Driven / Behavior-Driven Development
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...
Continuous Testing with Containers
Preview NewContainers. Every manager thinks they want them, but few teams have experience in knowing what to DO with them. Used thoughtfully, containerization of your services can transform the way your organization thinks about testing. Gone can be the days of maintaining X different compute environments with Y different configurations. Imagine instead spinning up just the code you need, on the machine type it needs, and only for as long as you need it. In this technical training, Melissa will walk through what containerization means for a legacy code base attempting to practice continuous...
Unleash Your Organizational Superpowers With Liberating Structures
NewUnleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...
Tuesday, June 4
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
Preview NewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
Sold Out!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...
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
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...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
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...
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...
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
Who Owns Quality in Agile?
What do you mean, who owns quality? The quality assurance team, of course—the kings and queens of quality, the masters of the tests, the lords of the sign-off. People often used to look down on quality assurance as less technical, the last to get their hands on the code, and the first to be blamed when things go wrong, but of course, agile adoption has changed the industry. These days we have cross-functional teams and develop test automation. But we also do "Scrummerfall" and have hardening sprints and stressful deadlines. Despite all of that planning, testing still often comes as an...
Hunting Sasquatch: Finding Intermittent Issues Using Periodic Automation
In pop culture, Sasquatch (aka Bigfoot) is an ape-like creature infrequently seen in the Pacific Northwest of North America—if he even exists. In the software realm, we have our own version of Sasquatch: that irritating, elusive "intermittent issue." Traditionally, we run automated tests on event boundaries, like when we have a successful deployment; we look for problems when we think they may have been introduced. Logically, points of change are when we expect to have injected issues, so we tend to only look for issues then. This approach alone, however, limits opportunities to reproduce...
Leadership in the Age of Agile
Do you want to grow your organization’s ability to respond to market opportunities, competitive pressures, or opportunities for innovation? Then join Ryan Ripley as he explores how leadership in an agile world has sparked a change in the way we show up as leaders and managers in our organizations. We’ll discuss how leaders enable agile to thrive and grow, while keeping a laser focus on delivering value to customers and stakeholders. Ryan will address your questions and give you practical tips and ideas that you can start using tomorrow. Join us and learn what professional agile leadership...
Thursday, June 6
Postmodern Testing
If you want to speed up delivery while maintaining quality, this is the talk for you. Jason’s move from Microsoft to Google’s agile and DevOps-driven world was a shock. Today’s agile teams have ten times more builds, ten times faster releases, ten times fewer testers, ten times quicker bug fixing speed, and … similar or worse software quality. Jason shares his lessons learned from being a tester on high-quality teams such as Google Chrome and Search. Jason also has experience managing software quality in the roles of director of engineering, director of product, and now startup CEO. He...
Using Component Testing for Ultra-Fast Builds
A best practice of software architecture is to design your applications into independent modules or components, with a published contract for interaction between components. This is a principle of the microservices style of architecture, but it also applies to components created in a large monolith. If we can test the functionality of the component independently, and apply a level of trust that those components work, this opens the door to rethinking our continuous integration and continuous delivery strategy, potentially reducing the need for long test suites and many environments. It...
Building Quality into Your Release Pipeline
Decreasing the time to market has become critical for many organizations. This heightened focus on speed has fundamentally changed the way software is designed, developed, released, and tested. Not long ago, it would have been common to see release testing efforts that took weeks or even months. Today, in many instances, QA instead only has days or hours to complete their testing efforts. Stepping up to this challenge is not easy, but it's essential. Troy Walsh will talk about adding quality to your release pipeline, starting by looking at what a release pipeline is and how it works....
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...
Building the Blocks of Trust in Automation
PreviewWhen moving toward automation, establishing trust in the automation test suite is important to unite the team as a whole. Once trust is established in the process and the tests, it becomes crucial to the overall software development lifecycle. Join Sneha Viswalingam as she shares the journey of how her team of manual test engineers contributed to automation, the steps they took to build clean automation and win the confidence of the organization, and how they came to believe that the automation effort has their backs. She'll outline the strategies used to make the tests reliable...
Pyramid Discussion: DevOps Adoption in Large, Slow Organizations
PreviewAre you in a large, plodding enterprise that's beginning, in the midst of, or considering a move toward DevOps? Unsure how or even if it will work, but know you have to make a move anyway? Do you want to hear from your peers about how they've managed so far? A pyramid discussion starts as a series of one-on-one conversations between the participants. After each pair hashes out their thoughts with each other, they join another couple to refine their points and hear pros and cons. After a while, those four join with four more, and so on until there is only one discussion, with...
Leading in an Era of Constant Change
Change is a good thing. Being a leader in an era of constant change can be frustrating. Putting a company through a significant transformation is a serious process that takes a lot of people, time, and money. However, if your organization doesn't innovate and change by market-driven needs and demands, it will fail—it's just that simple. So, how do you do it? This interactive workshop will introduce five key factors to successful change management. You will experience techniques to get everybody actively involved in transformation, from top-level executives and stakeholders to the team...
Getting to Continuous Testing
Max Saperstone tells the story of how a healthcare company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases. Initially, as no test automation existed, Max was able to capitalize on a greenfield test automation opportunity, and in the span of 12 months, develop over 2,000 test cases. A pipeline was created to verify the integrity of the automated tests and build Docker containers for simplified test execution. These containers could be easily re-used by developers and the DevOps team to verify the application. Join Max as he walks...
See the Forest, Not Just the Trees: Improving Quality and Flow in a Continuous Delivery World
There are many companies today implementing agile and DevOps practices, usually enabled by a microservices architecture. Most of them are focused on continuously delivering value to their customers within the boundary of a time-bound sprint. If you work at one of these companies or want to move in that direction, how does the quality delivered by your team today compare to in the past? Has it improved, stayed the same, or gotten worse? Are you actively using that data to improve quality? Join Ashwin Desai as he reviews how his company implemented a lean-based approach that allowed them to...