Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Agile & Lean Practices

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...

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...

Many developers would love to work on brand-new, cutting-edge, greenfield projects, never having to deal with the mess of unintelligible code someone else left behind. But most of us spend most of our time maintaining existing code, and it is often spaghetti code with no unit tests, no documentation, and, if we are lucky, a comment that says, “Not sure how this works, but it does so don’t touch it.” We need to make changes, but we can’t even figure out what the code is supposed to do. You know your changes are just going to pile on and make it worse. You can’t change the code safely...

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...

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...

Applying Agile ways of working to large complex programs involves more than merely teaching your teams to sprint. It requires the building blocks of strategic planning, road mapping, and backlog prioritization to properly plan the work and deliver customer-centric value. In this session we will look at these essential components of Agile at Scale Program Management to successfully deliver large, complex solutions that entail both custom development and large, off-the-shelf COTS programs. Specifically, we will discuss the following topics: 1. How to apply Agile principles to At Scale...

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,...

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...

This session will provide you with strategies on how to enhance clarity within your organization using visualization. We will review concepts, guiding principles and methodologies for “Visualizing Flow.” Participants will visualize one process within their organization, evaluate its effectiveness, design a plan to problem solve and increase efficiency through transparency. The session is intended for anyone who wants to learn a new technique for communicating ideas using imagery within their organization. How to equip teams and leadership with shared understanding around day-to-day...

Everywhere we hear and see software driven organizations have led and dominated their industry. An essential ingredient has been a shift to Lean Agile mindset and product centric operating model built on three pillars – product & portfolio management, product development & delivery and product enablement. These unicorns begin each mission with what problems we need to solve, what culture we want to build, what good looks like? Then align expectations with leaders that change is a journey and not a destination. They experiment and iterate, celebrate small wins, learn from failures...