Agile + DevOps West 2022 - Tutorials
Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of the conference. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into a specific topic so that you can learn to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you.
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
Continuous Delivery in Practice: A Hands-On DevOps Workshop
What is continuous deployment? How does it differ from continuous integration and continuous delivery? Every company thinks they want CI/CD, but few teams have experience in knowing what that means and how to build it out. Join Janna and Melissa as they walk through building your own build pipeline using GitHub Actions, Docker, and Azure to continuously deploy to production. They will walk you through some of the basics of Git, Docker, and YAML to create build pipelines that run test automation and deploy an application. These tools and techniques will help reduce debugging differences...
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...
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...
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...
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...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...