Conference Schedule

Unexpected regressions, bugs with no apparent reason—they happen, especially if you work in a complex, fast-paced ecosystem with multiple moving parts. Is it possible to avoid failures if you don’t know what can fail? How do you even find out about such failures? The Netflix Growth Engineering team owns the infrastructure for user signup for over 190 different countries. The team supports many device types and payment methods, run A/B experiments, and integrate with dozens of services owned by multiple other teams as well as external partners. There are many opportunities for things to go...Read more

As enterprises progress through their digital transformation journeys, QA organizations are being integrated with development and operations organizations. Working software is the true measure of our success, and there are some effective testing practices that enable cross-functional agile and DevOps teams to take ownership of quality. These techniques foster team engagement and help your teams grow product knowledge, mentor testers, cross-train team members, and spread ownership of quality. Jagdish Karira will share some of these extreme testing experiences, with a focus on "bug-athons,"...Read more

When it comes to our agile testing teams, the best we can hope for is to hire people with the right attitude and necessary aptitude, and then nurture their QA and testing skills. How do we accomplish such a monumental task? Several years ago, Bob Crews had an epiphany: games! He recalled his military days and the war games the Army would play, and then consulting for the Navy to teach them how to automate tests against flight simulators. History tells us games go back over 2,300 years as a tool to teach. Bob began using games, puzzles, and brainteasers to provide ongoing...Read more

Some of the key tenets of the Agile Manifesto are that we should prioritize user interactions over documentation and embrace the fact that requirements will constantly change. This has led to the adoption of user stories as the almost exclusive form of requirements documentation in agile projects. User stories are incredibly valuable in expressing the desires of users in a consistent, simple, and easily understood format. However, Adam Sandman has seen many projects and customers get into trouble by relying on them as the sole type of requirement. Adam will discuss how we can use...Read more

Many systems we build find their end of life due to excess complexity, bloat, and risk involved with making changes. The open-closed principle, when applied properly, can help make sure the cost of change in a system remains relatively flat over time. Join Dustin Williams to discover context setting of the SOLID principles and the general use of the open-closed principle, with some manufactured examples of violation shown with guidelines about how to "fix" the code. We'll explore complex examples taken from actual systems and discuss various ways in which the violations can be resolved....Read more

When an organization is growing, having teams of half a dozen or so engineers focused on a specific product area causes several issues for management. Scaling the number of teams can be challenging, as every time a team member moves, it means pausing that product area's development for months. A bit more than a year ago, Kadri Pirn's organization decided to convert teams to tribes and remove team leads. Instead, they now have one people manager and temporary teams inside the tribe—every team has a lead, but with this approach, any engineer can volunteer for that lead role. This gives the...Read more

Performance testing isn’t the first thing organizations think about when moving to DevOps—in fact, it’s often ignored, as traditional approaches don’t jibe well with the fast and nimble world of DevOps. However, performance is still a critical part of the user experience, and poor performance and outages will quickly negate the value of the features you’re delivering. Lee Barnes believes that organizations don’t have to gamble with application performance. He will discuss techniques for implementing continuous performance testing in your pipeline, so you don’t have to roll the dice on your...Read more

Mob programming is a software development practice that brings together three to five developers all working on the same thing at the same time. There's one computer, one keyboard, one task, and one group of people working together. Thomas Desmond uses mob programming full time on all production software because of the quality of the software produced. His team consistently has no reported bugs in production, and at one point they went a year and a half with no reported bugs in production. Join Thomas as he shares what mob programming is, what it is like to be a mob programmer, the...Read more

Today’s agile testing teams require a solid strategy for building and executing test cases earlier in their sprints to obtain faster feedback required for iterative development. Unfortunately, when it comes to performance testing, most organizations complete this practice at the end of development cycles due to constraints in the test environment. Taking a shift-left approach to performance testing can identify API and UI issues earlier in the development lifecycle and reduce the cost of remediating defects once the application is fully built. This session will help you reuse functional test scripts and leverage service virtualization to optimize early-stage performance testing.Read more

Teams are getting good at agile—they learn the ceremonies, they get a good agile coach that tightens performance, and they become a well-oiled machine primed for delivery. But are they delivering value to the customer? In agile, for some teams sprint 0 is assigned to research spikes, to help define the value that the sprint should deliver. But for many teams, there is not even a sprint 0; value delivery should happen constantly. Join Vidya Dinamani and Heather Samarin as they share what they’re seeing in multiple organizations: Teams that are constantly delivering, but their products are...Read more

DevOps culture has come a long way over the past decade. We have been able to automate almost every step of the delivery process—yet we still lack automated monitoring. The transition from the classic way of monitoring to continuous monitoring is difficult, not only because it demands strict approaches to the methodology and architecture, but mainly because our organizational culture is not ready for it. Join Pawel Piwosz as he attempts to create a common understanding of what continuous monitoring is, what foundations are needed to start building continuous monitoring, and what advantages...Read more

Join Jeff Payne as he kicks off the Agile Leadership Summit right before the first Keynote speaker presentation.Read more

The aspiration of leadership is often rooted in character traits that make effectively leading healthy organizations difficult. Pride, ego, and ambition are powerful internal motivators, but they must be tempered in order for you to grow into the kind of leader your people need. An effective transformation of any kind must start with you to be successful. Join Lee Eason as he shares his stories of leading organizational change while highlighting the personal growth that had to occur for him to be successful. Learn how Lee lead product development turn-arounds and widespread organizational...Read more