Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Teams & Leadership
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
The Traps of Accountability
That dreaded "we need to figure out what happened to hold people accountable" meeting is approaching, which often means people are getting their fingers ready to point. When working with humans, blaming never leads to accountability. Blaming leads to a loss of focus and a waste of time towards the shared goal of delivering value. In this session, Tricia Broderick explores the common traps of accountability and blame within organizations. Then expect to go beyond the identification to examine and practice a few alternatives towards building responsibility.
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...
How Wayfair Tests Software (Shift left)
PreviewImproving 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?
...Stepping Up - Becoming a Leader in Your Team
One of the most difficult transitions to make is from being a member of the team, to owning your former teammates performance reviews. It is awkward. It is stressful. And you can do it! How do you maintain a trusted relationship with your team mates? How do you employ empathy to help yourself understand your team? How do you gain authority and decision making where previously you had none? How do you make decisions that impact the lives of your team in very significant ways? How do you balance your corporate strategic responsibilities with your desire to advocate for your own team member's...
Engineering Excellence in a VUCA World
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...
Is it Time to Rethink TestOps?
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:
The four...Thursday, June 16
Effective Leadership Strategies for Managing a Team with Diverse Skill Sets
PreviewIs Agility Even Possible in Implementing Commercial, Off-the-Shelf (COTS) Systems?
PreviewMany 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.
Building a Distributed Automation Team from Scratch
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...
CI/CD with Github Actions
As more organizations move towards continuous integration and continuous delivery with DevOps pipelines. Github Actions enables you to create Continues Integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) pipelines directly in your Github repository. These workflows are made out of different tasks so-called actions that can be run automatically on certain events. Through this talk I will walk through CI/CD concepts, GitHub Actions Workflows, Build Artifacts, Packages Management, and Deployment Triggers.
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...
How to Create a Product Office
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.
Transformation at Wiley (DevOps, and Agile, and ITSM Oh My!)
Wiley is a company that is transforming at every level. Our industries, from research to education, are going through unprecedented change. As a company, we are going through a massive transformation in Agile, DevOps, and ITSM to meet the changing demands of our markets. Learn how Wiley is managing multiple simultaneous transformations while continuing to deliver for researchers and educators around the world.
Key takeaways: - Learn how to drive transformation in Agile, DevOps, and ITSM - Gain insight from concrete examples about how Wiley is driving DevOps, Agile, and ITSM...