Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Concurrent Sessions

For a philosophy built upon the idea of rapid adaptation, the rigid way in which requirements are managed in many agile projects is a poor fit.  For instance, strict requirement trees linked tightly to organizational hierarchies can be damaging to local ownership, speed, and quality of decision-making.   Potentially useful ideas like user stories and Gherkin can be misapplied to ill effect.  A narrow focus on writing out requirements can miss opportunities for more effective communication through visualization. This workshop will review a host of simple but lesser-known techniques for...

When starting up a greenfield project, it's easy to take advantage of the most modern development practices. But what about the rest of us, who are working on codebases greater than five minutes old? How do you take code that's ten years and hundreds of thousands of SLOC, and turn that into a lean, mean, continuous-delivering machine? In this talk, Melissa will walk through what continuous integration and deployment mean for teams working on mature codebases, and what the roadmap looks like to get from a release cycle that may take weeks or months to one that deploys on-demand. Expect to...

Our repo has around 300K lines of code and more active feature flags at any given moment than we have fingers and toes. As we have moved into a world of continuous deployment with controlled releases, the use of feature flags has become an essential way of writing software. Yet, when we started out, we ended up with code that was hard to read, hard to reason about, and hard to manage. After exploring several strategies, we have found a pattern that aligns feature flags with larger code units (classes, components, reducers, actions) rather than at individual lines of code. This alleviates...

Teams using Scrum sometimes struggle with operational or emergent work blowing up their sprint plans. As DevOps delivery is increasingly used by organizations the need of Scrum teams to accommodate operational work also increases. After all, it does not matter how interesting that new feature is if production is down. By combining the disciplines of Scrum and Kanban teams can find that happy balance of planned work and emergent work while still maintaining discipline and continuous improvement. As an example, we will build up a hybrid process for a hypothetical team to discuss the...

Automation has gone from optional to mandatory in the past few years when it comes to developing software at speed. It has led teams and especially testers to adapt and evolve together with new technologies for coping with the automation needs. No matter the original motivation, you might have somehow ended up crafting a strategy for doing test automation. Now the question is, how did it mature? When was the last time you actually took a moment to do a little retrospective regarding your automation strategy? More so, when was the last time that someone reviewed the scripts themselves?

We are in a VUCA world.  VUCA stands for Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity and to survive, companies and teams need to have a Vision, Understanding, Clarity and Agilty in their software development processes.   Adopting Agile and DevOps has been a focus for companies over the past couple years.  While this definitely helps companies become more productive it’s not going to get them alone in this VUCA world.  Engineering Excellence is an emerging trend that combines agility and DevOps but also focuses on how the engineer’s work.  Adam will explain what it means to have...

TestOps is more than improving collaboration between testing and operations—been there, done that. But now that you have an agile team with developers, QA, product owners, etc. all contributing to testing, how do you scale effectively? This talk will discuss how scaling end-to-end testing is more important than ever. We will illustrate how the new TestOps provides a methodology for improving test planning, building governance, improving the management of tests and teams, and driving the insights you need to continuously improve quality.

In this talk you will learn:

 Many individuals who have worked as part of an initiative to implement off-the-shelf systems have heard that agile approaches can’t work - that agile only works when building solutions from scratch or adding functionality to these systems. We believe and have seen, that agile approaches are actually preferable to a traditional waterfall in these instances, and the differences between proprietary and customization of commercially available system development have more in common than not.

I have worked on QA teams with as few as three testers and as large as 20. Four years ago, I elected to start at CAQH (health care company) and was the only QA Automation staff member, was brought on board with a mandate to “convert the manual testing shop to Automation”. I found the organization had taken delivery on several poor-quality software releases of our flagship product from our development partner, and the ongoing application development and testing was in disarray. As employee #2 on the newly formed Technical/QA Team, this is the story of how we built Automation presence, built...

Using metrics in Agile has been an elusive endeavor, and how to use those metrics for good, not evil. Too often we see metrics used to compare agile teams, and question the wrong things. Too often we solution before we understand what the true need is. We took a different approach of not just using the standard agile metrics to help teams with efficiency, but working more closely with our leaders on data needed to help drive decisions around staffing, work prioritization, and value delivered. Through interviews and a focus on educating different levels of business and IT leaders, we were...

This session would emphasize on how important it is to adopt not just Agile but also Automated Testing. Together they can drive any transformation within the Team or the organization. It is crucial for teams to identify, communicate and define the expectations. These need to be validated in an automated way to increase speed and stability with each delivery.For smaller teams it might be an easier transformation, but there will be less resources as each member wears multiple hats. For larger organizations, it will be a slower transition as there are processes and roles that might need to be...

An application is an idea that has code, data and infrastructure, and choosing whether to build a conveyor belt or to put up guard rails along the path is important in maintaining velocity to the cloud. In this session, we explore the tools available in Azure for creating and enforcing governance policy, standards and infrastructure, including Azure resource template technologies and Bicep, Azure blueprints, as well as DevOps processes including GitHub Actions that you can use to ensure your cloud journey is predictable, secure and compliant. We’ll see how the tools work and share best...

Whether you’re researching market opportunities, brainstorming new product ideas, developing products customers love, or managing product roll-outs – organizations face many challenges in product delivery. In this session Dave explores the Product Office and how it helps organizational alignment across teams, oversees service delivery, and provides visibility into development.

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 jive 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 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 user...