Agile + DevOps West - Conference List Schedule | TechWell

Conference archive

Conference Schedule

Sunday, June 4

Registration Hours—7:30am–5:00pm
7:30 am to 5:00 pm
Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Multi-Day Training Classes Begin—8:30am–5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Agile & DevOps Leadership—ICAgile Certification
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Designed for executives and organizational leaders, this highly-interactive, hands-on course will teach you what you need to know to successfully implement agile and DevOps in your organization.

Agile Fundamentals - ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP)
Jeff Pierce
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Learn what agile is all about, why agile works, and how to effectively plan and develop software using agile principles. Successful participants will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile) and awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional designation (ICP).

Implementing DevSecOps
Tom Stiehm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm

Explore security within a DevSecOps pipeline in an informal and interactive workshop setting. Attendees will gain practical experience through both group discussions and hands-on exercises.

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Training Classes Continue—1:00pm–5:00pm
1:00 pm to 5:00 pm

Monday, June 5

Registration Hours—7:00am–5:00pm
7:00 am to 5:00 pm
Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Multi-Day Training Classes Continue—8:30am–5:00pm
8:30 am to 5:00 pm
Full & Half Day Tutorials—8:30am–12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Tutorial MA A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning NEW
Tariq King
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Although 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,...Read more

Tutorial MD How to DevOps Your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis NEW
Adam Auerbach
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

The 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...Read more

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full & Half Day Tutorials Continue—1:00pm–4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Tutorial ME An Agile-Not-Fragile Introduction to Microservices NEW
Tariq King
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

The microservices architecture provides guidance for decomposing systems into small, loosely coupled, independently deployable and scalable services. Microservices align well with Agile development and DevOps practices because they enable new increments of the system to be delivered earlier, more frequently, and even continuously throughout the lifecycle. However, as with all new paradigms, there are pros and cons that must be considered when transitioning onto a new landscape. Join Tariq King as he gives you an agile-not-fragile introduction to microservices. You'll learn the foundations...Read more

Tutorial MG Facilitating Team Decisions NEW
Tricia Broderick
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

One of the agile manifesto principles is “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Tricia Broderick wishes this principle was written to say, motivated teams. Because leaders giving the environment and support for individuals to make team decisions is anything but trivial. Achieving effective decisions goes beyond bringing people together for consensus. This approach may lead to groupthink or repeating decision meetings. Instead, leaders facilitate collaboration by building and tapping into the co-...Read more

Tutorial MH Are You Building the Right Thing? Product Roadmapping for Outcome-Based Results NEW
Charlotte Chang
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

The world of agility and DevOps is focused on building it fast and building it right. But, are you building the right thing? Should you even be building at all? All too often the onus to identify “value” is on a Product Owner or Scrum Master. But, they are often without the support of a product strategy, and neither they nor the delivery team has a real understanding of expected business outcomes. The result? A disparate list of “must have” requirements that eventually end up with a go-to-market team who coordinates a release train based on coordinating operational considerations rather...Read more

Speed Networking—5:15pm-6:00pm
5:15 pm to 6:00 pm

Tuesday, June 6

Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Registration Hours—7:30am–5:00pm
7:30 am to 5:00 pm
Full & Half Day Tutorials—8:30am–12:00pm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm
Tutorial TB Creating a High-Performance Agile Team NEW
Mary Thorn, Bob Galen
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TC Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeffery Payne
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TD Approaching Conflict Productively NEW
Tricia Broderick
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

When 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...Read more

Tutorial TE Prioritizing Like a Pro: Designing and Executing Defensible Ordering Strategies NEW
Arlen Bankston
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

Effective 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...Read more

Tutorial TF Threat Modeling
Tom Stiehm
8:30 am to 12:00 pm

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 Derrick and Tom as they shares their knowledge and experience...Read more

Lunch—12:00pm–1:00pm
12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Full & Half Day Tutorials Continue—1:00pm–4:30pm
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Tutorial TG The Craft of Highly-Effective Agile Leadership NEW
Mary Thorn, Bob Galen
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Based 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...Read more

Tutorial TH What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
Jeffery Payne
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

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...Read more

Tutorial TI Effective Engaging Retrospectives NEW
Tricia Broderick
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

There is an agile manifesto principle stating, "At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly." Yet, there seems to be a pattern for skipping retrospectives; if they are held, they are beyond painful. Few people are interested in spending their time in vent sessions, endless repeating loop sessions, or simply checkbox go through the motion sessions. This doesn't have to be the case - we can stop the madness and head towards value. In this deep dive session, discover and examine the ideal flow of a retrospective and...Read more

Tutorial TJ Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings NEW
Arlen Bankston
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Many 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...Read more

Tutorial TK Become Your Company's Quality Consultant NEW
Péter Földházi
1:00 pm to 4:30 pm

Companies of all sizes face difficulties in achieving higher quality standards within their organization. As quality engineering includes various roles and activities, it is also challenging to find the right people to analyze the current state from a wide perspective and provide the recommendations that will allow these organizations to mature their teams, improving their DevOps culture in the process. Join Péter Földházi as he illustrates the knowledge and skills necessary to become your company's quality consultant. Péter's goal is to involve engineers from beginner to advanced levels...Read more

Welcome Reception—4:30pm–5:30pm
4:30 pm to 5:30 pm

Wednesday, June 7

Morning Yoga—6:45am–7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
Registration Hours—7:00am–5:30pm
7:00 am to 5:30 pm
Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Networking Events— Agile + DevOps Genius Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Keynote K1 DevOps From Large Enterprises' POV
Tapabrata “Topo” Pal, Fidelity Investments
8:45 am to 9:45 am

It’s been more than 10 years since the term DevOps has become popular. As of today, there is probably not a single IT organization who has not embraced DevOps in some form or fashion. Most organizations have roles, teams, and departments that have the name DevOps in them. DevOps is no longer a “cool thing” that applies to only “tech companies.” Why is it that we are still talking about it? Because we still have challenges. Most of us have not yet “figured it out.” Every DevOps transformation is unique and there is no one size fits all, yet there are some common themes. In this keynote,...Read more

Networking Break in the Expo—09:45am–10:30am
9:45 am to 10:30 am
Visit the Expo—09:45am–2:00pm
9:45 am to 2:00 pm
Concurrent Sessions—10:30am–11:30am
10:30 am to 11:30 am
Industry Technical Presentation ITP1 Turn Chaos into Payoff: Future-Proofing DevOps Strategies with VSM
Michael O’Rourke, OpenText
10:30 am to 11:15 am

Software quality should maximize the value of your strategy—not put it at risk. But the drive to transform forces companies to release faster while still needing to deliver quality products that attract customers and gain market share. Consequently, quality is often sacrificed to increase delivery velocity, and alignment between business and development is lost.

In this session, Michael O’Rourke will explain how AI delivers better quality, how analytics are key differentiators for VSM and optimizing your DevOps strategies, and how you can get it right the first time with fewer...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP2 Streamline and Turbocharge your Java and Big Data DevOps
Pratik Patel, Azul
10:30 am to 11:15 am

In this session, come and learn about the challenges with managing both your Big Data infrastructure (like Kafka or Cassandra) and Java applications. Whether you deploy into the cloud or on-prem or hybrid, there are ways to better run these types of infra and apps. In this session, we'll discuss some strategies for running Java faster and more stable.Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP3 Software Quality & Testing based on End User Experience (EUX)
Steve Barreto, Keysight
10:30 am to 11:15 am
VIRTUAL ONLY

The words “quality” and “testing” are broad and loosely used words when developers and testers are testing an application or a business process flow. We can attain approval in functional and performance testing but if it doesn’t gain a positive end user adoption then what was gained? This session will dive into the different aspects of testing and what quality really means when looked at from different angels and the adoption of testing it from an End User’s perspective.Read more

Concurrent Session W1 Being a Courageous Leader
Tricia Broderick, Ignite Insight + Innovation
10:30 am to 11:30 am

Have you ever felt like you needed to defend your leadership principles or approach? Where the momentum and status quo seems to be counter to your goals? You would not be alone. Once during a tense re-organization discussion, Tricia was warned to step back with “We have real leaders here. Not ones that focus on the fluffy stuff you do. We don’t have time for all of that.” Although she was tempted to respond with things that would be very inappropriate, Tricia understood that evolving the world of leadership required courage. In this session, expect to consider and adapt several tips for...Read more

Concurrent Session W2 Everyone...Is an Agile Coach
Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies, Inc.
10:30 am to 11:30 am

Some perspectives imply Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else. Or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers, Scrum Masters, and leaders, will find difficult to impossible to master. This session intends to debunk those notions. Bob Galen subscribes to several generic notions in agile contexts. One is that everyone has leadership potential and can rise to be a leader. And the other is that everyone is a coach, can coach, and has a foundational responsibility to coach, regardless of their role. The only questions are will,...Read more

Concurrent Session W3 Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile Transformation
Péter Földházi, EPAM Systems
10:30 am to 11:30 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W4 The Art of Defensive Programming
Joylynn Kirui, Microsoft
10:30 am to 11:30 am

With every commit, the threat landscape increases. One single vulnerability is all a hacker needs. Vulnerabilities have multiple sources, and you must have a plan for securing each potential risk vector and identify vulnerabilities early. In this session, we will describe defensive coding techniques you can use as a daily practice and how you can build a security champion program. We will practically cover ways of identifying security vulnerabilities in your IDE using CodeQL as a Static Code Analysis tool. This is an important step in the pre-commit stage to identify security...Read more

Concurrent Session W5 DevOps, Development Cadence, and the Product Lifecycle
Michael Feathers, Globant
10:30 am to 11:30 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W6 Reimagining Digital Cloud Transformation: Automation and DevOps Pipeline
Deepak Sharma, KPMG
10:30 am to 11:30 am

Organizations face numerous challenges during their journey to Digital Cloud Transformation—the most pressing challenges are frequent failures and the absence of a “big-picture” mindset. Driven by KPMG’s quest to deliver a superior customer experience, their Digital Cloud Transformation framework delivers improved quality, reduced time to market, reliability, and sustainable Cloud Transformation. Moving away from the archaic approach from replicating traditional regression onto cloud integration validations, KPMG has helped customers minimize risk and increase test coverage by E2E...Read more

Concurrent Sessions—11:45am–12:45pm
11:45 am to 12:45 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP5 Going Beyond Agile, Lean, and DevOps with a Value Stream Approach
Jonathan Harding
11:45 am to 12:30 pm

Enterprises are well on their way with Agile, Lean, and DevOps adoption and have made substantial gains. However, are they focused on the right thing? Adoption of software value stream management (VSM) has been on a slow rise, but the most recent “State of Value Stream Management” report shares that it is “Crossing the Chasm” - moving to main-stream adoption. Let’s talk about the opportunities VSM adoption presents to an organization and go beyond the technical pipeline truly aligning teams to delivering on the desired business outcomes. The time has come to embrace VSM and move beyond the...Read more

Concurrent Session W7 Full-Stack Psychological Safety: Go Beyond the Front End
Kara Burgan, MITRE, Deanna Stanley, MITRE
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

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 –...Read more

Concurrent Session W8 Where the Rubber Meets the Road: How to Integrate DevOps with Development Teams
Michael Rollins, Coveros
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

More engineering teams are adopting the use of DevOps practices in their product delivery, but sometimes it can be a struggle to integrate DevOps engineers into their organization and benefit from the investment they make in doing so. In other words, how can product owners gain a return on their investment in DevOps practices, which will lead to the benefits that DevOps promises? The solution begins with the DevOps engineers themselves and how they interact with the teams they support. It continues with the way their solutions are presented and adopted by their development team, and how...Read more

Concurrent Session W9 Three Steps to Digital Transformation
Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

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."Read more

Concurrent Session W10 Shifting Left the Right Way–Improving DevSecOps
Christopher Harrison, GitHub
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

"Shift left" is the mantra of DevSecOps. The closer to our developers that we can move the prevention of a security vulnerability being introduced to our codebase, the cheaper and faster it is for our organization. However even in 2023 old vulnerabilities find their way into new pull requests and merges. We can't continue to "shift left" and hope for the best. Instead, our focus needs to turn to providing the right tools and resources to our developers at the right time. Proper techniques need to be as friction free as shortcuts, workflows integrated, and correction offered in clear...Read more

Concurrent Session W11 You Want to Test What in the Build Pipeline? How to Move Integration, E2E, and Other Large Tests Reliably into the CI/CD Pipeline
John Jenkins, Disney
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W12 Build Containerized Applications Using Docker and Azure
Hamida Rebai, Revenu Québec
11:45 am to 12:45 pm

This session will cover the development & deployment of containerized ASP.NET Core 6 apps using Docker and Azure and architectural design & implementation approaches using .NET and Docker containers. The different services to deploy on Azure like Azure Container Registry, Azure Container instance, Azure Container Apps, and Azure Kubernetes Services as an orchestrator will be reviewed. We will also create the different resources and explore the different tools and properties if attendees prefer not to use Docker-Compose.yml. Then we will deploy our application that's based on Docker...Read more

Lunch in the Expo—12:45pm–1:45pm
12:45 pm to 1:45 pm
Keynote K2 Humanizing Work
Charlotte Chang, Director of CX Enablement, Jariatu Mansaray, Black Tech Columbus
1:45 pm to 2:45 pm

Is your favorite flavor of agility resulting in process over people? Is your contribution mired in person hours that inevitably turn into mythical person months? Are human efforts in heroic zeros and ones measured in seemingly pointless (story) points instead of customer, business, and employee value (ROI)? What began as a technology revolution has devolved into frameworks and processes that focus solely on mindless over mindful measuring, tracking, and projecting. And while many organizations find initial success that generates interest and demand for scaling agile and digital...Read more

Concurrent Sessions—3:00pm–4:00pm
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP7 Don’t Forget the Database
Steve Jones, Redgate Software
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

Complex enterprise applications are rapidly growing and evolving as DevOps sweeps through software development. However, many teams struggle to meet the demands placed upon them if they do not have a solution to speed up database development. Learn how prioritizing database development can accelerate the adoption of DevOps just like any other applicationRead more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP8 SRE within the Financial Industry
George Brisco, Citadel Securities
3:00 pm to 3:45 pm

COMING SOON!Read more

Concurrent Session W13 Rethinking Career Development
Kimberley Miller, Spotify
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W14 Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?
Adam Sandman, Inflectra
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and...Read more

Concurrent Session W15 Driving Innovation in Agile Organizations
Bharat Nagpal, Capital One, Amitav Parida, JLL
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W16 Building Applications with Infrastructure as Code
Talia Nassi, Akamai Technologies
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm
Concurrent Session W17 What Are Your Automation Strategies?
Lisette Zounon, FORT Robotics
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session W18 Empowering DevOps with OpenAI
Paul Klinker, ManTech
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

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...Read more

Visit the Expo—3:30pm–6:30pm
3:30 pm to 6:30 pm
Networking Break in the Expo—4:00pm–4:30pm
4:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Keynote K3 "We're in it Together" and Other Perspectives on Effective Product Development Culture (Circa 2023)
Jason Yip, Grainger
4:30 pm to 5:30 pm

Have you watched those Spotify engineering culture videos? They were trendy and influential in the agile community but that was around nine years ago. What might we say about effective product development culture today? In this keynote, Jason Yip will share a summary of 2023-era effective product development culture based on his eight years at Spotify and 14 years at ThoughtWorks. This will include core beliefs, guiding principles, and core practices. Which ones will align with what you see at your workplace? Which ones will highlight opportunities for improvement? This keynote is not to...Read more

Expo Reception & Prize Drawings—5:30pm–6:30pm
5:30 pm to 6:30 pm

Thursday, June 8

Morning Yoga—6:45am–7:30am
6:45 am to 7:30 am
Networking Events—Agile + DevOps Genius Bar (All Day)
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Bonus Session B2 Enabling Automation Org-Wide with GitHub Actions
Tanvi Tyagi, GitHub
7:30 am to 8:30 am

We all know a strong focus on automation can reap benefits, particularly in your development workflow and DevOps lifecycle. When adopting these however, there isn’t usually one clear path to take. This can lead to silos across businesses and wasted efforts by application teams creating similar build and deployment pipelines in parallel. You also must account for team maturity or legacy tools that can add complexity to the SDLC. As teams start to consolidate and avoid reinventing the wheel, several challenges can arise on how best to automate and push quality code live, ensuring security...Read more

Registration Hours—8:00am–3:00pm
8:00 am to 3:00 pm
Keynote K4 The Truth About Agile
Melissa Boggs, Melissa Boggs Speaking & Consulting
8:45 am to 9:30 am

Do you need to breathe new life into agile principles in your organization? In 2001, 17 leaders in the software development industry came together to create the Manifesto for Agile Software Development. Today, 30 fifteen year olds in Denver, CO, are tackling their English homework according to the four values and 12 principles that these leaders outlined. The agile movement started spontaneously at precisely the right moment, as the pace of change in the world was accelerating exponentially. But how did agile principles used in software development end up in public high school? If you’ve...Read more

Networking Break in the Expo—9:30am–10:00am
9:30 am to 10:00 am
Visit the Expo—9:30am–3:00pm
9:30 am to 3:00 pm
Concurrent Sessions—10:00am–11:00am
10:00 am to 11:00 am
Industry Technical Presentation ITP10 AI and the Future of Coding
, Christopher Harrison, GitHub
10:00 am to 10:45 am

Over the years, we've seen countless shifts in how applications are built. New languages and frameworks have streamlined development. Visual and no/low-code have empowered those who aren't traditional coders to create apps.

And now we have AI tools which can create code "for us".

With these changes, where does this leave our developers?

The list of what needs to be built remains limitless and the list of talented developers limited. If used well, AI is a tool which can help our devs be more productive and find more satisfaction from the job. Let's discuss what AI...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP11 MLOps: Testing and Deploying Machine Learning Models and AI Models
Jeffery Payne, Coveros
10:00 am to 10:45 pm

With the emergence of deep learning integrated into today's software products, a modern software development process needs an effective way to automatically test and deploy machine learning models as part of product delivery. In this presentation, Coveros CEO Jeffery Payne introduces deep learning AI models and how to effectively test and deploy them as part of product development. Approaches to testing models will be discussed as well as how to automate your deployment process when machine learning is part of your product.

Join this session to:

Learn more about deep learning...Read more
Industry Technical Presentation ITP12 Build a Faster End-to-End Continuous Testing Feedback Loop
Joe Lust, mabl
10:00 am to 10:45 am
VIRTUAL ONLY

DevOps practices enable our teams to build and deploy software faster, speeding up the ability to get fixes and new features to users. However, achieving efficient continuous testing that provides fast feedback on impact to your user experience continues to be a challenge, either hindering velocity or risking shipping poor-quality software.

Joe will lay out a blueprint for how to reliably add end-to-end test coverage at every stage of development, the best ways to collaborate with your quality team, how to build a culture of early feedback on your team, and share examples how how...Read more

Concurrent Session T1 What Does a DevOps Manager Do?
Jessica Fritsch, Remesh
10:00 am to 11:00 am

As a DevOps Manager, Jessica Fritsch often finds herself educating people about what she does and why she does it whenever she joins a new team or organization. She also finds engineers have lots of questions about management and if they really want to go down that path in their career. This session will address both of these problems - educating people about what a DevOps Manager's job is like, so that current DevOps Managers and engineers looking to get into management have a answer to the question, "What does a DevOps Manager do?" Highlights from this session will include a day in the...Read more

Concurrent Session T2 Balancing Agile and Cybersecurity Implementation
Teri Musick, CGI
10:00 am to 11:00 am

Over the past 25 years, software development has changed drastically due to evolving market demands. To respond to these needs, software development teams must reduce their time to market with releases that are more frequent. This has led the industry to move away from the waterfall methodology to agile development methodologies, thus enabling security to be engaged from inception instead of bolted on at the end of the process. While security methodologies rely more on a systematic and requirement-based approach to development much more conducive to the waterfall methodology, we must...Read more

Concurrent Session T3 360 Degree View of Agile Mindsets
Shaun Bradshaw, Zenergy Technologies, Inc.
10:00 am to 11:00 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T4 Best Practices: CI/CD with Micro Services
Adil Aslam, Royal Cyber
10:00 am to 11:00 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T5 Collaborating Effectively as a Tester to Anticipate Defects in Code Review
Júlio de Lima, Capco
10:00 am to 11:00 am

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T6 Why Kubernetes Applications Require a New Approach to Testing Using Testkube
Alejandra Thomas, Testkube
10:00 am to 11:00 am

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...Read more

Networking Break in the Expo—11:00am–11:30am
11:00 am to 11:30 am
Concurrent Sessions—11:30am–12:30pm
11:30 am to 12:30 pm
Industry Technical Presentation ITP13 Boosting Business Agility with Value Stream and Scaled Agile Strategies
Sriram Rajagopalan, Inflectra
11:30 am to 12:15 pm

In today's business world, individual and team agility are not enough to compete. Businesses must also be able to respond quickly to market changes and regulations, which can be difficult and overwhelming. While value stream journey mapping and scaled agile approaches have been around for a while, we are now able to integrate them into product, project, process, and policy level thinking. This helps us infuse risk-driven thinking into business agility. This talk will cover the basics of this integration, which can improve the flow of value, meet business objectives, and increase customer...Read more

Industry Technical Presentation ITP14 Navigating Icebergs with Trust in a Remote Company
Kevin Borders, minware
11:30 am to 12:15 pm

Many teams are struggling to adapt to the new norm of remote work. In this talk, we look at the challenges of building trust and healthy information flow in a remote environment, then discuss strategies for creating a successful remote work culture.

The speaker’s previous company, Collage.com, was a pioneer in remote work, featured in a Harvard Business School case study. One principle that he applied was to treat every piece of bad news like the tip of an iceberg.

Word travels quickly in an office, but languishes in silos when people have no avenue for casual conversation...Read more

Concurrent Session T7 The Power of Personal Engagement
Evelien Acun-Roos, Xebia Academy, Rozemarijn Geelen, Visma
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T8 What the Titanic Disaster Can Teach Us About Software Quality
Shelley Rueger, BetterHelp.com
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

An engaging and entertaining session that takes lessons from the Titanic maritime disaster and uses them as jumping off points for lessons about software quality. As an example—on the Titanic, the lookouts did not have access to binoculars, which impacted their ability to see icebergs in time to prevent the disaster. What tools are we missing that allow us to see problems coming? By presenting this topic as a series of stories instead of as a dry set of bullet points, people will take away key details and be able to apply them to their own unique situations.Read more

Concurrent Session T9 Scaling Agile and DevOps Capabilities
Dr. Tawanna Sargent, Agile Private Investments, LLC
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T10 Evolving QA for the Age of Agile
Leandro Melendez, Grafana k6
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

Do you feel like your agile efforts are continuously (pun intended) being stopped or slowed by QA? That is a common problem that several organizations need help fixing, not knowing that the source of the problem may not be (only) QA. Join Leandro Melendez as he takes you through the evolutions of a set of comic book mutant superpowers that our teams and organizations need to have quality in their software. In the talk, Leandro will guide you through the characteristics of genuine agile teams, some pitfalls they may be falling into, and much more on the organization's side. But as well, QA...Read more

T11 A Test Automation Workflow for Mobile Software That Actually Works
Eden Full Goh, Mobot
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

The vision is shared amongst many engineering and quality teams: we’re going to automate our testing end to end and integrate it seamlessly into our CI/CD pipeline. It sounds beautiful and efficient. And for much of your software testing infrastructure, you’re probably making it happen! Then reality hits hard as soon as you deploy the latest release of your mobile app. You don’t have control over the third-party devices or SDKs your app depends on, or the universe of operating systems users actually use. If you care about quality, and you want complete coverage for your mobile app, it isn’...Read more

Concurrent Session T12 Migrating Healthcare Data for All 50 States
Dan Reale, Dun & Bradstreet
11:30 am to 12:30 pm

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...Read more

Lunch in the Expo—12:30pm–1:30pm
12:30 pm to 1:30 pm
Concurrent Sessions—1:30pm–2:30pm
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm
Concurrent Session T13 The Impact of Leadership Effectiveness
Dorothy Aubut, Nagarro
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Leaders often don’t realize how their style impacts the people around them or their business results. Effective leaders give their businesses strategic and competitive advantages. During times of transformation, people’s feelings are heightened, from loss of control, interruption of power, fear of failure. We fall into reactive fear-based patterns instead of coming from a place of curiosity and creativeness. Organizations that commit to growing more effective leadership find they attain and sustain high levels of business performance. We are all leaders and can involve our entire...Read more

Concurrent Session T14 Using Neuroscience to Boost Your (Scrum) Events
Evelien Acun-Roos, Xebia Academy
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T15 Regulated Industries—Is Agility Even Possible?
John Halberstadt, Lithespeed
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

Agile ways of working are thought by many to be incompatible with the realities of highly regulated industries. Financial services, insurance, healthcare and governmental organizations often are those which could see the most benefits from greater efficiency, transparency, and customer-value focus. However, due to real and perceived constraints of compliance, auditing, validation and related issues, traditional waterfall approaches are the de-facto default for these industries' product development and project management, with the traditional challenges with these traditional methods. Is...Read more

Concurrent Session T16 Continuous Build and Other DevOps Anti-Patterns and How to Overcome Them
Tom Stiehm, Coveros
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

Concurrent Session T17 A Journey in Improving Test Pipeline Stability
Brian Kitchener, Olo, Inc.
1:30 pm to 2:30 pm

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...Read more

Networking Break in the Expo—2:30pm–3:00pm • Closes at 3:00pm
2:30 pm to 3:00 pm
Summit Brainstorm and Brews 3:00pm-4:00pm (Leadership Summit Registration Required)
3:00 pm to 4:00 pm

Friday, June 9

Registration Hours—7:30am–3:00pm
7:30 am to 3:00 pm
Breakfast—7:30am–8:30am
7:30 am to 8:30 am
Agile + DevOps Leadership Summit
8:30 am to 3:00 pm
Leading Change in the New Normal FRIDAY, JUNE 9 | 8:30AM-3:00PM PT

Leadership has never been more important. Between navigating on-going economic challenges, dealing with staffing changes, and addressing tough issues surrounding back-to-office policies, while keeping our teams focused on business results is a challenge. Join in the conversation with your peers as experienced technology leaders share ways to lead and make software organizations successful. Discover how seasoned leaders have grown their leadership skills and what they believe the keys are to...Read more