Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Developer
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2022 experience with sessions for software developers.
Monday, June 13
A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning
NewAlthough there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...
Achieving Product Ownership Excellence – What does “Good” look like?
NewWhile 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...
Rethinking Product Strategy & Customer Discovery
NewIn many organizations product ideas often lack customer or business validation. Products or features tend to be a manifestation of a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion) or blind feature matching of a competitor. Likewise, product strategies are often pithy phrases, uninspiring targets, or contain too many goals to be actionable. Neither of these needs to be true! Using lightweight, evidence-based approaches that guide product discovery with demonstrable outcomes is key to finding customers and generating business value. Once a product idea has been refined, a well-designed and deployed...
Prioritizing like a Pro: Designing and Executing Defensible Ordering Strategies
NewEffective 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...
Continuous Product Road Mapping & Collaborative Prioritization
NewFor a lot of people, product roadmaps are something between a stack of lies and an act of futility. That’s because they are typically just a wishlist of features; often with deadlines that are wild guesses or imposed from On High. What’s worse is that the items in a product roadmap often lack true prioritization, change priority frequently, or are merely prioritized at the whims of a HiPPO (highest paid person’s opinion). However, product roadmaps do not need to be riddled with such frustration! Good product roadmaps are useful tools that establish a continuous process that balances...
How to DevOps your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis
NewThe 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...
Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings
NewMany teams have been following the same few patterns for facilitating sessions such as Daily Scrums, Sprint Reviews, Retrospectives, and backlog refinement events for decades now. However, while these well-trodden approaches can be good starting points, there are ways to make them tremendously more effective with minimal effort. You will learn to design agile meetings that account for your particular circumstances and goals while wasting as little time as possible. First, Arlene will cover Exploring the True Purpose of Agile Meetings – Is the Daily Scrum more about status or planning? Is...
Tuesday, June 14
Hands-on HELM: Templating Your Way to a Brighter Future
NewWith the introduction of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and the advancements of software architecture towards the use of microservices and containerized applications, open-source container orchestration platforms such as Kubernetes have become extremely popular for automating software deployments. While Kubernetes has helped solve the complexities of container orchestration it has also introduced new complexities dealing with deploying and managing applications. Using an open-source tool like Helm will help reduce the complexities of application deployment, enabling teams to...
Threat Modeling
If it seems as though attacks are always getting better, it’s because they are. Computers, apps, networks, and connected devices are all subject to different types of threats. Systems are facing new threats from things such as voice cloning and computational propaganda. Not to mention the growing importance of threats “at the human layer.” All of this can make it hard to keep up, let alone get ahead of potential threats. So isn’t it time that the threat modeling used by security pros, developers and systems managers evolve? Join Jeffery Payne as he shares his knowledge and experience on...
Wednesday, June 15
The Magic of Digital Transformation from non-Agile to Agile, within a few years at IKEA
The world is moving more and more towards digitalization, therefore if a company see the need to go against its competitors and perform better, it needs to foresee the future. Ikea needed a significant change, which leads towards lots of challenges to take this step. We needed a digital transformation, and we adopted to the Agile methodologies and practices. As a result, we maximized engineering teams’ efficiency within a few years. Therefore, we enhanced our performance and delivery and better customer experience. Education, learning and practicing the Agile mindset were the starting...
From Yearly to Always: A Continuous Delivery Roadmap
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...
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...
The Broader Business Applications of Telemetry Data
According to a recent study by Gartner, nearly 70% of corporate boards cite the impact of COVID-19 as the driving force for increased spending on IT and digital capabilities. As cloud computing becomes ubiquitous and digital transformation accelerates, the performance of software is being placed under a microscope that can’t be delivered by APM alone. In the post-COVID digital environment, enterprises and their engineering teams won’t be able to drive true innovation without full-stack observability. With more than 20 years of experience driving transformative product, cultural and...
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.
Measuring Long-Term Productivity: The Developer’s Legacy Index
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...
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...