Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Concurrent Sessions

Agile is not a fairy tale. You have to face real life challenges and be well prepared in order to succeed. The reality is the bigger and older your organization is, the more difficult it is to pass through process level changes and that's when chaos is born. Resolving all the issues with chaos could potentially take years. In this session, Peter will share his story of one of his projects where he had to face numerous obstacles as a Test Manager in achieving proper agile implementation and to raise the quality of the products of his client. Some of the obstacles included: - Agile...

In many DevOps initiatives, the DORA metrics are treated as the gold standard. When teams have good scores on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to recover, and change failure rate, we assume that we are on track, but this steady-state view doesn’t align with the fact that innovation and delivery are often episodic and have cadences that vary cross the product lifecycle. In this session, we’ll look at the general issue of development and delivery cadence, and explore a model based on Kent Beck’s 3X which allows us to interpret and target DORA performance in terms of the...

When someone says DevOps, you probably think of tools: parsers, scanners, compilers, version controllers, and more. Or you may think of a cross-disciplined team with mix of skills to take a product from idea to deployment and maintenance. While DevOps does include both, tools and skilled staff are a fraction of what is needed to be successful. In this session, we will present the main ingredient for gaining the full benefits of DevOps: Psychological Safety. Unfortunately, Psychological Safety is often overlooked or over-simplified. If spoken about, it is often addressed in binary terms –...

The concept of Digital Transformation has been around for a while now, but COVID is the accelerant that brought it to the forefront of many organizations' minds. It has transformed your customers' habits and behaviors, changing how they want to interact with your organization. Today, the companies that leverage their digital assets and put the customer at the center of their organization are winning. In this session, Brandon will share a simple, three-step process for transforming your organization so that can compete with the "digital natives."

Testing automation has a reputation for being slow and unreliable, but automated tests which are not run as a part of the CI/CD pipeline are often ignored or written off when they don't pass. If nobody pays attention to the results though, automated tests are not very useful. Any tests which depend on another system will eventually break, unless special care is taken, keeping the addition of integration (or larger) tests to the build pipeline just out of reach. During this session, John Jenkins will show attendees how these larger tests can be reliably automated, so that these tests can be...

Careers used to be very linear; a ladder you would continue to climb up until retirement. But today we are discovering that careers are no longer strictly vertical. In this session, Kimberley Miller will challenge organizations to rethink their career development outlines and separate monetary promotions from job titles in order to create a robust working environment that encourages career development in all directions. Other topics Kimberley will cover include: - Do you have a track for individuals who are people vs. craft focused? For example, can someone progress in your company without...

Pause to innovate, and your company will cease to exist pretty quickly thereafter. In the current business climate, “innovation” should not just be a part of your company’s vision, but it also needs to be embedded in the cultural fabric of your organization and must be practiced relentlessly. As companies brace themselves for agile transformation, one key area that needs the utmost attention is—how to build a culture of innovation that can coexist with the agile delivery framework, or SAFe as we know it. In this session, we will focus on the significance of innovation and how an agile...

Everyone in your organization has probably discussed automation at least once. But who is responsible for automation? And what are the automation strategies for your organization? Several factors should be considered before jumping into automation. In this session, Lisette Zounon will share her personal experiences and cover case studies and successful quality transformation. Lisette will also cover what to consider for your automation strategies because it always depends on your organization and what you are trying to achieve. Attendee takeaways from this session include identifying your...

Agile presentations frequently discuss the difference between doing versus being agile and the importance of shifting to an Agile Mindset. They also mention the role of an organization’s culture in making that shift. But we don’t spend much time trying to understand the underpinning values that shape those mindsets or the influence that mindsets and culture have on one another. For those of us instantiating agility in an organization, the biggest challenge is working up and down the organizational hierarchy to shift individual mindsets. To do that we have to 1) understand the internal...

Júlio de Lima has lost count of the times he's heard people saying that he should start testing as soon as possible when working as an agile tester. However, no one told him how to do this practically. So he started thinking about how to anticipate his tests and managed to find a few ways: 1) Gather refinements and ask questions about quality risks, 2) prepare his testing strategy in advance, and 3) read the code and mentally compile the code and verify that the tests he planned would pass. Júlio can say that #1 and #2 helped him a lot, but #3 had a big impact on the software testing...

Two steps forward in professional scrum. Come and explore the advantages of personal engagement. What makes a team thrive? How do you increase the maturity of a scrum team? What tools can you use to wake up from zombie scrum? Do you want to understand how to increase your team's engagement and help your team grow? In this session, we will help you advance forward by using scientific principles and practical tools by starting with personal engagement. We will share how to increase personal engagement, we will provide you with tools to get everyone involved, and we will help you gain insight...

It is important for businesses to understand scaling agile and DevOps capabilities before considering an agile transformation. In this session, Dr. Tawanna Sargent will share her experience joining a business that wanted to go through an agile transformation, but leadership didn't know how to make this happen. Dr. Sargent quickly learned about the organization and discovered that structure and alignment did not adhere. This session will dive into the key lessons learned including creating synergy and autonomy in teams, SAFe improving DevOps, identifying ineptitudes, and embracing the...

Is it possible to test millions of healthcare records for the entire country? Sure it is. But what about in an agile environment that requires a quick feedback loop? This session will share a case study on how Dan Reale and his team were up against a tight deadline and struggling to test a data migration. With two testers on their scrum team and constantly shifting requirements, the team tested one state a day for their MVP launch. They realized this was not sustainable if they wanted to test all 50 states, so they implemented an automation framework that could help test faster. Taking...

Inspired by Sharon Bowmans’ Training From the Back of The Room, this session will explore how you can use brain science to keep scrum events live, active, and worthwhile. For example, research shows that our brain 'disconnects' after ten minutes when nothing changes. In a training setting, you would use this knowledge to change the setting regularly, or to make short exercises or chunks of information. In a scrum event, you could use this knowledge also. How? That's what we will explore during this session. You will learn about neuroscience and how you can use it to activate your brain and...

Software development is hard and poorly implemented or broken tools, techniques, and patterns just make it worse. Learn to spot DevOps anti-patterns and how to work your way back to a sane way of working. Continuous Build is an anti-pattern that Tom Stiehm has seen often, where a team will have what they call Continuous Integration (CI) in place, but it only builds the code. There are no unit tests or static analysis run. Certainly, this is better than not building, but it leaves a lot of health check information on the table that is considered part of CI. Without this information, you can...