Agile + DevOps West 2022 - General Management
Customize your Agile + DevOps West 2022 experience with sessions covering general project management.
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...
Congratulations! You're a leader! Now what?!
You’ve done it! You’ve finally gotten into that leadership position, whether it be a test lead, test manager, or even test director. Now what? You’ve gotten to this point because of your technical skills. Always one to jump in and fix things or get things done. However, now your job is people. You’ve gone from doing the testing to leading people who do the testing. What does this mean for you? In this talk Janna will talk about the transition from individual contributor to leader. What do you do when the skills that got you here aren’t the same as the skills that you need to be a good...
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...
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?
...
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
Preview
Is 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.
_2.jpg%3Fitok=FrxLLvuG&sc=cb2a3e29f7b3438b076e74656a8ad757 "Amanda-Palovcsik")
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...
.PNG%3Fitok=ozQqD6_7&sc=5a20cb9fa970bb9911103251df02d098 "Sean-Mack")
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...