Designed for organizational leaders and change agents, this two-day course introduces the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) and provides the tools necessary to lead an enterprise agile transformation using the lean and product flow principles of SAFe.
Conference Schedule
Sunday, June 2
Agile software practices are being employed within many development organizations worldwide, and as a result, many testers struggle to understand the agile development process and their place in it. In Agile Tester Certification, both novice and experienced testers learn the fundamentals of agile development, the role of the tester in the agile team, and the agile testing processes. Learn technical and team skills testers need for success in the world of agile development, as well as the techniques of Test-Driven Development (TDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) during this two-day course. All participants are expected to have experience in or knowledge of agile development fundamentals.
Begin the journey toward agile leadership in this two-day workshop focused on the role, responsibilities and reasons for being an agile leader.
DevOps combines development, testing, and operations and includes continuous integration, automated testing, continuous delivery, and rapid deployment practices. Because DevOps practices require confidence in nearly all changes, automated testing is an essential ingredient that is integrated into the process and relied upon for enforcement of quality gates and to ensure overall delivery quality. This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Test professionals, operations engineers, developers, project managers, and business owners will all benefit from this curriculum.
Explore the many ways automation supports agile testing in this two-day course with real-world, vendor-neutral examples of agile test automation approaches and tools. In addition, successful attendees are awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA).
This two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner certification course gives you the skills to assume the hardest role in Scrum, a Product Owner. Taught by leading agile practitioners, the focus on this course is providing real-world techniques that have been proven effective by product owners in hundreds of actual projects. Business customers, product managers, and line managers will benefit from this training. Upon completion, successful participants are registered as a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) with a two-year membership in the Scrum Alliance® (www.scrumalliance.org).
Gain the the foundational skills required to leverage Selenium in order to write meaningful automated tests and increase the speed and quality of testing in this two-day, hands-on course.
Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification, aligned to the new 2018 syllabus. ISTQB is the only internationally accepted certification for software testing and has granted more than 500,000 certifications in more than 110 countries around the world. In this three-day course, learn what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, experienced-based testing, and more. This course is appropriate for those new to the testing profession and those seeking certification in software testing.
Explore security testing in an interactive workshop setting. This course is appropriate for software development and testing professionals who want to begin doing security testing as part of their assurance activities.
Monday, June 3
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,...Read more
Performance issues can be difficult to resolve when found late in the software development lifecycle. Using an open-source tool like JMeter to develop, manage, and execute load and performance tests while the code is being developed, is an inexpensive way to help find performance issues. Executing these performance tests as part of your CI/CD pipeline enables users to find and resolve performance issues as soon as they are introduced. This hands-on workshop will help attendees develop a foundational understanding of JMeter, while engaging them in creating and running performance tests...Read more
Imagine 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...Read more
Does the idea of just thinking about negotiating with a difficult person give you anxiety? If so this tutorial is for you! This tutorial is specifically about negotiating and leadership: how to deal with difficult people and sticky problems. Join Catherine Louis as she walks you through several negotiation techniques. Armed with these new techniques, we will then “learn by doing” covering the following sticky sample negotiating exercises:
Dealing with a difficult stakeholder The customer is about to fire you, what do you do? The QA manager is not investing in her people. The...Read moreAre 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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
Containers. 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...Read more
Unleash 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...Read more
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...Read more
Tuesday, June 4
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...Read more
For many organizations, delivering software into production has become increasingly more complex with long testing cycles and a division between development and operations teams. DevOps is a cultural movement that is breaking down those barriers. Focusing on automation, collaboration, tools, and knowledge sharing, DevOps is showing that developers and system engineers have much to learn from each other. Through a series of hands-on exercises, Danilo Sato will use a sample web application to demonstrate how to automate its build and deployment pipeline, using infrastructure and pipeline as...Read more
Organizations 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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
There 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...Read more
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...Read more
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,...Read more
Wednesday, June 5
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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.Read more
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,...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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.Read more
At this session, Rasmus will touch on major challenges of fully incorporating modern incident management into your DevOps toolchain and provides practical insights to help you develop an operations competency to optimize your IT and drive business value.
Learn the top causes of downtime, how to avoid them and the key steps to implement a modern incident management plan to increase efficiency at a lower cost
Gain insights on real life stories from key companies on how they implemented modern incident management and transformed their businesses.Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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.Read more
● Anyone can do it - no coding experience required! We'll prove it live. ● Create scalable, auto-healing tests on modern, highly dynamic sites ● View live test output, and ML-driven regression insightsRead more
Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.Read more
Thursday, June 6
Organizational diversity isn't just about the attributes we can see. Every team has members with a near-infinite spectrum of needs, some of which we know about and a lot more we probably don't (and might never). How do we create a safe, accommodating space for things we aren’t aware of? It's possible. For our teams to reflect the diversity of our worlds, HR policies are necessary but not sufficient. Our teams can and should take concrete steps, large and small, to make ourselves more welcoming. You're probably doing some of them already, so let's talk about what works and how we...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
● What is not an intelligent use of AI ● What AI should mean ● How Functionize uses AI to create, maintain and scale tests in the cloudRead more
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,...Read more
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...Read more
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....Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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....Read more
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...Read more
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.Read more
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 ...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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-...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
Kickoff the Agile Leadership Summit with a reception and some networking.Read more
Friday, June 7
Thursday, June 6 • 5:30pm–6:30pm and Friday, June 7 • 8:30am–4:30pm
Agile transformation requires more than a change in process; it needs a change in mindset. In order to fully embrace agile and create a productive environment, team members must change how they think. The leaders in an organization play a key role in making the team's agile change journey sustainable.
Join in the conversation with your peers as experienced business leaders share their lessons learned while leading agile transformations. Learn about best practices and...Read more
Search the internet for agile transformation roadmaps and you’ll find multiple articles, blogs and experts talk about major agile transformations taking between 3-5 years. Three to five years is too long to transform anything in our rapidly changing world. Once a transformation effort runs over 12 months, it’s in the danger zone. You’ll start hearing the cynics come out of the wood work saying, “We already tried this before and failed.” or “I told you so.” Next your CTO’s position is in danger and the revolving door keeps going around and around. Join Stan Guzik to learn how he transformed...Read more
Whether you are responsible for driving transformation in the DevOps, Data, Cloud or Agile spaces, success hinges in large part on your ability to effectively message and engage executive leaders. Knowing how to strategically manage the executive landscape by educating leaders on benefits, earning their trust, gaining sponsorship and motivating them to action is an art, and something that doesn’t just happen – it takes a focused and purposeful approach, hard work, creativity and a lot of patience. Michelle DeCarlo will share proven executive engagement strategies she has successfully...Read more
Join with your peers in an engaging and highly interactive session to discuss the issues that affect you most. Using answers to the question “As a Leader, What is Keeping You Up at Night?” posed at Thursday’s evening reception, participants will form small groups to work on finding solutions to pressing test management issues. Discussions will review identified issues, barriers to change, and focus on innovative strategies and practical next steps. At the end of the think tank, all feedback will be collected and posted online to encourage further collaboration.Read more
Based upon the problem definitions developed during Part I of the Think Tank, small groups will brainstorm on how to best solve these challenges, leveraging the collective wisdom of peers and Summit speakers. Each group will designate a representative to present its results and practice delivery.Read more
Small group representatives will each be given five minutes to present their leadership solutions. Summit participants will vote on which group produced the best solutions.Read more