Agile + DevOps West 2023 - DevOps Automation
Monday, June 5
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,...
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...
Tuesday, June 6
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...
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...
Wednesday, June 7
You Want to Test What in the Build Pipeline? How to Move Integration, E2E, and Other Large Tests Reliably into the CI/CD Pipeline
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...
Empowering DevOps with OpenAI
AI is upending everything about the SDLC. For example, Microsoft has monetized GitHub Copilot, their AI development assistant, and now 40% of the code users check into GitHub is written by the AI. However, using Copilot is still highly dependent upon developer adoption and not fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline and Paul wanted to bring AI into our agile process and DevOps environment. In this session, Paul Klinker will discuss how he and his team decided upon a phased approach for their customers, starting with integrating OpenAI into the CI/CD pipeline to enable greater visibility...
Thursday, June 8
Best Practices: CI/CD with Micro Services
You have finally split your monolith into microservices. How do you validate a complex application and make it scale? Instead of having just one CI/CD pipeline, you have several. And as the number of microservices increases, so does the quantity of pipelines. As an outcome, managing pipelines for microservice applications can get out of hand, especially when you try to reuse common pipeline parts amongst different applications. If you apply monolithic solutions to microservice problems, you will have a bad time. If you treat microservices like monoliths, you’ll end up with thousands of...
Why Kubernetes Applications Require a New Approach to Testing Using Testkube
Microservices, CI/CD, DevOps, GitOps, cluster networking, etc.—more and more teams are building software fundamentally differently than they did even a few years ago. However, testing approaches and tooling have not caught up yet. At least not until now. What if you could apply the same type of GitOps and DevOps methodologies to your testing activities? Tests could be deployed and stored in a Kubernetes cluster, they could be decoupled from your CI/CD, orchestrated in the cluster in the same way you do with your applications and not in your CI/CD, publish results aggregated in a common...
A Journey in Improving Test Pipeline Stability
Building automated tests is only the first step. The true challenge is building them with high enough reliability that they can be run as part of a deployment pipeline. But understanding how to get to that point is hard, and getting to that point often seems unsurmountable. This session will focus on exactly how Olo went from having a few hundred tests being triggered manually, to having thousands of tests running as part of a deployment pipeline. Brian Kitchener will give concrete examples of what tools were used at each step of the process, what challenges were faced, what tools needed...