Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Concurrent Sessions

Do your teams think Kanban grass is greener? Did you learn about Kanban informally? Often, Scrum teams look to Kanban as the easier way to complete work, thinking the process is easier and less structured than Scrum. In this presentation, Christina will discuss the myths surrounding Kanban (myths like there are no ceremonies, is no estimation, are no deadlines, and there is more time to complete work). Christina will bust those myths by presenting the practices and principles behind Kanban, and how to integrate Kanban tools into any process to solve your team’s problems. Attendees...

It doesn't matter you call it DevOps, DevSecOps, or Rainbow Monkey Unicorn Pony - security is an integral part of the software development lifecycle. Even though we understand this, it's often difficult to know how to start building an effective DevSecOps program. This presentation will address four pillars of a successful application security program: Analysis, Validation, Observation, and Enablement and how they enable an organization to develop, deliver, and deploy applications from an idea to a customer facing environment. We'll discuss how to roll out a collaborative DevSecOps program...

Terraform is one of the most common coding platforms for managing cloud infrastructure as code. I have been using Terraform to manage infrastructure on the cloud for several years now. Additionally, I coach DevOps teams in large enterprises that implement 100% infrastructure as code. Everything in this presentation comes from experience. I'll guide you through a series of best practices including source code management, environment management, execution through pipelines, modularizing Terraform code so it can be reused across the enterprise, and much more. Additionally, I'll review...

While the Agile concepts may sometimes be easy, the why's and how's are a little trickier to wrap your head around. I’ve unfortunately participated in three recent rising flood water events in Houston over the last three years. Employing my agile skills has had a profound impact on the "success of the project". I will be mapping common Agile ideas to dealing with rising water encroaching on your home. I start with an interactive exercise where we talk about flooding, with the outcome being the question: “What do you do when you know that your house might flood?” The answer to this...

Are you trying to follow the industry and shift from a monolithic system to a widely distributed, scalable, and highly available microservice architecture? Maybe you already shifted to Agile delivery models, but you’re struggling to keep up with the rate of change in the technologies of these systems. Your DevOps team has thrown a bunch of automation in place to help this, but it seems to be creating a bigger, different mess that results in broken systems that don’t work together.

To succeed, you need to properly design and implement your delivery process with the right technology...

Agile mandates continuous testing processes. Within Agile there are various personas trying to accomplish exactly that, however, they bring different constrains including time lines, skillsets, and testing objectives. With the growing adoption of Cypress testing framework that appeals to front-end developers, how does Cypress plays within a single pipeline together with Selenium? Do they compete or complement each other? In this session, Eran Kinsbruner, DevOps chief Evangelist, Author and Sr. Director at Perforce will uncover the main benefits and consideration for using the 2...

Everyone talks about the importance of innovation, but few understand what factors contributes to, and detracts from, true innovation.

This presentation will cover the following: Why is innovation in the workplace important? - Springboard by sharing two stories; one from a company that failed to innovate and one from a company that continually innovates - Whole group discussion on benefits of creating an innovative company culture

Innovation squelchers -What are most people doing to prevent innovative ideas and deliverables? - - What you need to STOP doing - Example/...

In this talk, Paul will demonstrate why defining infrastructure in general programming languages is a better choice for infrastructure management. From defining resources to testing and validation, software engineering processes and best practices can be applied to cloud infrastructure help teams to ship faster.

Pulumi is an open source tool that allows users to write their infrastructure code in TypeScript, Python, DotNet or Go. General-purpose languages allow infrastructure code to have integrated testing, compile time checks as well as being able to create infrastructure APIs...

Whether you are in a large or small organization, we all have to convey and demonstrate our accomplishments in our software. Many of us struggle finding what to show, especially if it’s not a UI. In this presentation, we'll walk through various aspects of presenting software: presenting basics, how to prepare, how to convey your ideas, how to keep their attention, tips and tricks, remote presentations, and finally how to convey specific software topics. The entire presentation will be a culmination to that last topic: how to convey specific software topics, like spikes, backends,...

Objectives and Key Results, or OKRs are a popular concept nowadays. The reason why OKRs work is because they are about motivation (teams setting objectives that they are passionate about), collaboration (people who have similar passion collaborating to achieve results), and innovation (no one tells them how to achieve these results). OKRs are aligned across the organization so that everyone has a chance to contribute. One of the primary areas where OKRs are extremely important and not yet fully discovered is DevOps. The topic OKRs with a focus on one of the most complex and...

Tools like Cucumber and Fitnesse have been popularizing the ‘idea’ of using Behavior Driven Development (BDD) for test automation for over a decade. While there are many benefits to using these tools, adoption of BDD practices and principles can add a lot more value than the tooling alone. BDD isn’t about testing; it’s about design, and team collaboration. Max will review the main tenets of BDD, and dive into some ideas of implementing this process. He’ll cover the benefits of doing true BDD: how it can be used to increase product quality and reduce feature churn. He will also...

Have you ever looked at a dashboard and felt lost? Have you been asked the question “why are we doing this?” and your answer has been “everyone is doing it.” Have you struggled to explain how your actions are going to benefit your business partners? Let’s explore ways to tie our metrics, progress, and transformation activities to business outcomes that matter to our organizations. We’ll start the session discussing why it’s important to map our transformation activities and metrics to organizational goals. We’ll also review real life examples of completed visual maps. You might be...

DevOps is all about a cultural change to how you manage your IT resources. However, the biggest challenge when implementing DevOps is learning all the necessary tooling in support of automation. The issue of automation is even more challenging when it comes to automating database deployments. This session will show you the tools and mechanisms needed to get your databases deploying through AWS. We’ll slowly add additional steps and tools within AWS to expand the complexity and functionality of the database deployment process. Understanding how to build out the bare bones of an AWS...

Growing up, my mother said to me that I am a person who does not like confrontation, that I cannot take critisism. Now, 32 years of age, I got to know myself as someone who does avoid confrontation. I rather say straight what the situation is like for me, than keep people guessing, because that is what I hate the most when the tables are turned. This is also in the Dutch culture to be very straight and make no bones about it. In this talk i would like to explore confrontation, in the workspace, but also in our personal lives. Most people have the tendency to avoid confrontation, but...

Innovative Silicon Valley companies like Etsy leverage DevOps and Continuous Delivery practices to achieve new levels of automation and agility, shrinking development lead times and deploying to production many times each day. However, many companies struggle to implement these practices for the legacy systems that run their core business. To make matters worse, the agile community offers relatively little practical guidance for implementing DevOps practices in legacy environments. Fortunately, the Kanban Method provides a practical way to gradually evolve these core systems towards...

Continuous integration seems to be a difficult topic that often eludes many individuals. Some typical questions that arise are which technologies should we use and how do we actually put everything together? However, CI doesn't need to be so difficult with the combination of the right tools. In this live-coding session developers will learn how to create a web-app using React. Afterward, we will shift-left by adding some automated unit tests using Jest. Next, we will shift-right by adding some functional tests using Cypress.io. Finally, the developers will learn how to continuously build...

Communicating honestly and effectively with team members and stakeholders is difficult enough when we are face to face. We have the tendency to not express disagreement or bad news, ultimately putting off potentially unpleasant conversations. Due to an ability to put off such discussions in a fully distributed setting, disagreements or software problems can rapidly escalate out of control in a rapid-paced development and testing team. The result can be poor code quality, missed deadlines, and team friction, imperiling the success of the project. Today’s virus pandemic makes it...

There is a widespread disconnect between Business and Delivery. These days many delivery teams follow agile principles. Their focus is on improving agile metrics such as sprint velocity,tracking product burnup/burndown etc. However, these metrics/measures do not say anything about the value a user or customer is getting. Business wants to gauge customer satisfaction,employee satisfaction, time to market, innovation, cost, revenue etc. There is a disconnect. Some of the common pitfalls – last-minute surprises, dissatisfied teams, and significant cost impact. Agile metrics...

When working with medical products, the verification process can be a real pain – especially when dealing with completely new QA team, complex hardware/software setup and collaboration of multiple scattered teams. My first release as a System Test Manager was a real struggle – stress, overtime, exceeding deadlines and a lot of uncertainty. But I’ve learned my lesson and focused on preparing and building the team with the right skill set and competencies. Now each team member is a leader in his own field, with set of responsibilities and me acting as a glue to hold them all together....