Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Agile & Lean Practices
Tuesday, June 14
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually, a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
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...
Approaching Conflict Productively
NewWhen it comes to high-performing teams, conflict is inevitable and necessary. The very essence of gaining the best value outcomes is a result of leveraging the wisdom of various perspectives and experiences. Those variances will generate conflict. Yet, this is only a negative if we are unequipped with the knowledge and tools to embrace and approach conflict. In this tutorial, expect to unpack the differences and the relationship between conflict and drama. Discover tools for helping all voices be heard. Plus, have fun practicing skills in preparing how to react to conflicts productively...
The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership
NewBased on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
Wednesday, June 15
Adept Agile Requirements – Plan Faster, Better & Easier
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...
ScrumBan – Effectively Combining Scrum and Kanban
PreviewTeams 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...
Scaling your WIP Limits Can Unlock Organizational Agility
Today, it’s not uncommon for teams in large organizations to be inundated with requests from enterprise stakeholders, leadership, and anyone other than customers. These requests take the form of mandates to ensure compliance with various standards as they relate to information security, architecture, and other areas that position teams to be “well-managed”. The requests often pile up like traffic on Los Angeles’ Harbor Freeway at rush hour, pre-covid, of course. The end result is that this work takes priority, steamrolling all the product-lead development requirements, and therefore...
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Preview
Improving Test Automation Code and Strategy
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?
...Thursday, June 16
Mainstreaming the Mainframe - Taking the Agile and DevOps Journey
How to go from Waterfall development with annual releases to Agile Scrum with more frequent releases on the mainframe. Starting with why waterfall isn't working, and the problems that can cause for the entire organization. I give practical advice on how to break through the resistance to Agile and move at a much faster pace while improving quality. I will lay out 10 steps to mainframe agility. Examples are drawn from personal experience and working with several mainframe organizations. Attendees will leave with the knowledge that it can be done and have a roadmap for how to implement it in...
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Taking Great Measures – Quit Measuring and Start Influencing
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...
Agile + Automation = Transformation
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...
Permit to Cloud: Landing with Confidence in Azure
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...
Adopt Continuous Testing to Fulfill “Need for Speed” with High Quality
When it comes to DevOps, organizations find QA to be a bottleneck. Often in the race for faster releases, enterprises tend to sacrifice “Quality”. Companies that merely focus on speed and ignore quality suffer a huge blow. Often, they can’t implement Continuous Testing fully or lack the tools and processes for test orchestration in the pipeline. To do so successfully, you not only need to move testing upstream, but you also need to adopt the right set of test practices. In practice, continuous testing is the process of testing early, testing frequently and comprehensively, using automation...