Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Automated Testing

While there seems to be a clear description of the Product Owner role, the sad reality is that there is a tremendous amount of variety in the “real world”. There are also quite a few impediments standing between Product Owners and effectively doing their jobs. Much of this is due to organizational pressure and misunderstanding rather than by the Product Owners themselves. Well, forget the excuses, pressure, hand waving, and debate. In this workshop, we’re going to explore what solid, fantastic, excellent agile Product Ownership looks like. First, we’ll use a model called the 4 – Quadrants...

Effective prioritization is critical to wring the most out of agility. When you’re just delivering once, ordering matters little. However, when the option to release on a regular basis is available, what you do sooner rather than later can have huge impacts on value realization, risk mitigation, and more. However, prioritization is much easier in theory than in practice for most organizations. Arlen has been a practicing agilist for over two decades. Working with hundreds of clients and teaching thousands of students how to effectively prioritize is one of the most frequently raised topics...

The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...

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...

Measuring a programmer’s productivity is a problem as old as the software industry itself. Number of worked hours? More productive people should need fewer hours, not more. Number of completed tasks? Not all tasks are equally hard. Number of introduced bugs? Bugs are not necessarily the programmer’s fault, and besides, what constitutes a bug anyway? The closest we’ve ever got to measure a developer’s productivity is lines of code, and this has proven to be a poor metric because not all lines of code are equally valuable. However, if we could measure not just how much a developer writes but...

The widespread adoption of test automation has led to numerous challenges that range from development lifecycle integration to simple scripting strategy. Just because a scenario CAN be automated does not mean it SHOULD be automated. Teams that adopt automation often rush to automate everything they can -- the automation firehose. For those scenarios that should automated, every team must adopt an implementation plan to ensure value is derived from reliable automated test execution. In this session, the audience will learn how to automate both strategically and tactically to maximize the...

Application Security is a critical part of software development that isn’t well represented in many agile projects. This talk will explain how to factor application security into short feedback cycles so that teams aren’t overwhelmed by application security issues or practices at any one time.

One of the challenges we have in using Application Security practices is where to start, how to get value. The world is being driven more and more by network-connected applications and services that are constantly under attack from the curious and malicious. What should you do If you aren’t...