Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Product Owner

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...

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...

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...

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...