Agile + DevOps Virtual 2021 - Case Studies
Wednesday, June 9
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Legacy Code
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...
Even Large Enterprises Need to be Agile
PreviewTo survive in this digital age of speed, agility, and customer-centricity, large enterprises must focus their efforts towards the delivery of the highest customer value within the shortest amount of time. Large enterprises are forced to operate like start-up companies. The only way to sustainably achieve this is through a Digital Transformation that drives Business Agility. But how can an organization embark on such a transformation? What would it take to transform the embedded practices: legacy applications, inefficient processes, traditional culture? How do we even begin? This...
Agile in 160 Billion Gallons: When Agile Principles Occur During A Disaster
PreviewWhile 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...
Adapting Agile Methodologies for Use in Regulated Industries Such as Aerospace & Life Sciences
How to adapt agile techniques for planning, development and testing so that they can be used in larger more complex situations that have a high degree of regulatory complexity, such as life sciences, aerospace, automotive and defense. In this session I would like to discuss my experiences with planning, developing and testing software applications in industries such as healthcare and finance that are heavily regulated by the Government, with strict requirements for validation, traceability and evidence. During the session, I will provide several actual examples, based on experiences and...
Thursday, June 10
Bringing DevOps to an Entrenched Legacy Environment with the Kanban Method
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...