Conference archive

Better Software East 2016 - Software Tester

Monday, November 14

ME

IoT Testing Workshop

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

No longer a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. With the proliferation of connected devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes, the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Jennifer Bonine says our testing, product management, and development teams need to be addressing how to develop and test in this new world of IoT. Testers accustomed to traditional platforms are now asked to test on newer devices and more advanced platforms, some never tested on...

MG

Docker Fundamentals Jumpstart

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Docker is a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization that is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architectures. Interest in Docker—with its lightweight, portable, “build once, configure once, and run anywhere” containers—is growing. Aater Suleman presents and demonstrates best practices, pitfalls, and practical advice from real-world case studies using Docker. Aater discusses basic Docker concepts, Docker terminology, Docker commands, must-know Docker features, and real-world examples of Docker projects. He focuses on eight common use cases and explores the...

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
MJ

Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an...

Tuesday, November 15

Bob Aiello
CM Best Practices Consulting
TA

Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TC

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering 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....

Andy Kaufman
Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
TD

How to Make Better Choices for You, Your Team, and Your Projects

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

As leaders of teams and projects, we regularly face choices and decisions that have downstream consequences. Do you want to be able to make better decisions in your personal or professional life? Do you want to help your team members make better choices when it comes to decisions on their projects? Or are you simply curious about how and why people make certain choices? In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman shares why the familiar pros-and-cons approach seems to make sense—but is profoundly flawed. He discusses how our biases influence the options we...

Robin Goldsmith
Go Pro Management, Inc.
TE

Writing Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Poor requirements are often the major cause of project problems. Yet nobody does much about them—at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that often don’t help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front of an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. In this exercise-focused interactive workshop, Robin Goldsmith reveals reasons user stories...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TF

Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
TH

The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
TI

How to Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX)

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TN

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and...

Wednesday, November 16

Andy Kaufman
Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
K1

Lead Teams that Deliver the Goods

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 8:30am to 9:30am

In software development—and in many life activities—success often depends on how well we collaborate with our team and our stakeholders. Yet getting a group of people to truly work in partnership—let alone self-organize—is a daunting challenge. And we’re often left with lingering tensions, anxieties, and sub-par performance because teams are made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge, skill, and commitment. Although we need our team focused on delivering a great outcome, sometimes egos, personalities, and agendas get in the way. Andy Kaufman asks you to...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AW1

The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Ryan Ripley relates that during his last agile transformation project, a key stakeholder asked, “Why are we adopting agile?” Ryan talked about increasing quality, delivering software sooner, and fostering a more collaborative relationship with business partners. After a few moments, the stakeholder raised his hand and said, “I get all that. But how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?” Ryan says that leaders must answer the better, faster, cheaper question if they want their agile transformation and associated projects...

Fadi Khoury
Ford Motor Company
AW3

User-Centered Design Using Personas

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

A failure point in developing useful and usable products are user requirements and expectations—understanding who the users are, their goals, actions, motivations, and pain points. Fadi Khoury explains that user-centered design is a product development methodology based on actual user needs, behaviors, abilities, and perceptions. User-centered design is popular because it offers the most effective path to useful and usable products. Combining this design approach with personas—fictional characters, created to represent the different user types that may use a...

Steve Moses
Applause
BW2

In Their Shoes: Understanding Your Mobile Users’ Point of View

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

A team’s ability to manage change and match shifting business goals is a major component of successful mobile agile development. To help an organization rise above its competition, especially in today’s digital economy, teams must get apps to market fast—and also delight users. User experiences—and the feedback provided to the world via social media and the app store—pave the way toward a brand’s success or failure. So it’s critical that organizations understand the all-important mobile user point-of-view (POV). Steve Moses describes how to leverage the right mix...

Adam Serediuk
xMatters, Inc.
DW1

From Ops to DevOps—and Beyond

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am

Join Adam Serediuk on his journey leading change during the transition from IT Ops to DevOps and the driving forces behind making this change. In this non-tool talk, Adam describes the cultural and organizational approaches, challenges, and techniques his company used in establishing successful DevOps teams and their continuing journey toward NoOps. Adam outlines the steps his organization took to reshape its operations and development teams along with the reasons and the opportunities for making those changes—with tradeoffs and benefits. Any IT Ops team trying...

Harold Grunenwald
Independent Consultant
DW2

Fear and Loathing in Systems Administration

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 11:30am

Harold “Waldo” Grunenwald hears it all the time—DevOps doesn't work. Sometimes it's from people whose “DevOps transformation” consisted of a team rename or from operations people who scoff at the idea of letting development teams deploy to production frequently. Waldo demonstrates why placing the blame on DevOps practices and tooling is missing the point. He offers practical solutions to the problems of historically poor relations between operations and development teams, describes why delegating authority is the path to freedom, and shows why cross-functional...

Brandon Carlson
Lean TECHniques, Inc.
AW4

Unconventional Agility: Beyond Dogma

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

You’re agile. You talk the talk and walk the walk. Just like the twelfth principle of the Agile Manifesto says—“At regular intervals, the team reflects on how to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts its behavior accordingly”—you have regular retrospectives. So, why are your agile practices, whether based on Scrum or SAFe or even XP, the same as everyone else’s? Brandon Carlson explores another agile principle that often seems to be forgotten: “Simplicity—Maximizing the amount of work not done is essential.” Using a case study example, Brandon shows you...

David Bernstein
To Be Agile
AW5

Five XP Practices for Agile Development

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

David Bernstein says that the core of Extreme Programming (XP) is comprised of five development practices: automating the build for continuously integrating software as it is written, collaborating with team members through pair programming, practicing agile design skills that enable testability, using test-first development to drive design, and refactoring code to reduce technical debt. Together, these five technical practices are essential for sustained success with XP and for many of the best agile teams. However, quite a few agile teams haven’t been exposed...

Tom Chavez
Independent Consultant
BW5

Tools and Techniques for Testing Mobile Apps

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

With hundreds of mobiles, tablets, and wearables running different versions of iOS and Android, automated continuous testing is the only sane way to address mobile testing. Tom Chavez reviews automated testing tools for mobile apps, including tools that require writing tests in a programming language and tools that record and playback mobile app actions for replay requiring no programming at all. See tools that show your real user data including location, OS, connection type, device battery level, and data I/O. Tom shares how these affect application performance...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
BW6

SEBTE: Simple Effective Experience-Based Test Estimation

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Testers are challenged to provide accurate estimates. Later, magically, test estimates become commitments cast in concrete even in the most turbulent contexts. In fact, most test estimates are based on shallow project insights. Estimators are often ignorant of key design, usage, and environmental factors. Many traditional project management estimation techniques fail when applied to testing projects. After all, what you test next depends on what you learned before, and knowledge evolves as the project continues. Rob Sabourin shares his SEBTE test estimation model...

Lee Eason
Ipreo
DW3

DevOps Is More than Dev and Ops: It’s about Tearing Down Walls

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The word DevOps is quickly becoming the new Agile—an overused word that has lost its meaning. Cutting through the jargon, Lee Eason gets to the heart of what DevOps means, where it came from, and why it is crucial for your company to embrace it. If you want to deliver on the promise of agile—to improve quality and reduce time to market—you must understand and implement DevOps. Lee shares three mechanisms of change—enablement, mentoring, and coaching—you can use to drive the transformation, as well as key performance indicators to measure your progress along the...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
DW4

Make Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline as Fast as Possible

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Continuous integration (CI) and continuous deployment (CD) have been key to increasing the pace at which development teams can deliver value to the business while keeping quality high. However, many teams are finding that their build pipelines are hard to manage, with builds taking so long that they often halt the development process. Abraham Marin-Perez explores the negative effects of long builds and discusses the most common solutions that organizations apply—many of which involve unfortunate compromises that reduce the benefits of CI/CD. In order to fix this...

Anthony Crain
Blue Agility, LLC
AW7

Introduction to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is one of the fastest growing frameworks for large teams doing agile—now second only to Scrum. Scrum helps small collocated teams develop solutions in an agile fashion, and up until now, most teams have had to scale agile for multiple teams and program management on their own. Anthony Crain introduces SAFe, which has quickly become the most popular technique used by very large agile organizations. SAFe targets groups of 50 or more people—and even thousands—on one or several related projects. Anthony assumes you know agile, the...

James Waletzky
Crosslake
AW9

Agile Snafus: When Good Teams Go Bad

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Agile done well can lead to great successes—rapid delivery of business and user value, high product quality, fast time to market, and engineering productivity. Agile done poorly leads to skepticism of the methodologies, distrust of the principles, and failure to deliver—in essence, a snafu [sna-foo]: a badly confused or ridiculous muddled situation. James Waletzky has gathered a set of snafus (anti-patterns) that pose challenges for organizations adopting agile. Set yourself up for success by understanding where teams go wrong with agile, complete with tips on...

Jonathan Silva
Axosoft
BW7

Evangelize for Your Project, Team, or Cause—No Matter What Role You Play

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Whether you’re a developer, tester, ScrumMaster, CTO, or CEO, you know you have to listen to the needs of your customers and team; accept the fact that they are going to change their minds; and respond, adapt, tap dance, iterate, raise your voice, stand up, and delight your audience in order to ship out the best software of your entire life. Can I get a witness?! Jonathan Silva shares evangelizing strategies that can help you inspire at any level—whether a Fortune 500 company or a startup software company. These approaches include developing your point of view,...

BW8

Testing Transformation in the IoT Era

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

In the next few years, when more than 20 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, many of us will be IoT testers—in one way or another. Jennifer Bonine explores new areas you will need to address in your testing, new testing skills for the IoT era, and how to innovate your technology strategies and processes to account for new vulnerabilities. Jennifer addresses current IoT trends that are taking shape and what you need to do to enhance your testing skills—and even your career. She explores the real “game changers”—data security, “things” test labs,...

Susan Schanta
Cognizant Technology Solutions
BW9

Leading a Testing Center of Excellence

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

As companies look to drive down the cost of quality, they often leap to the conclusion that centralizing QA into a Testing Center of Excellence (TCoE) will magically result in increased quality and lower costs—without understanding the path required to get there. Change requires defining mission and goals, and putting into place a plan to move forward. Equally important is the need to establish cost of quality metrics to shift the focus from the cost of testing to the cost of building quality applications. Susan Schanta shares her experience transitioning...

Ken Mugrage
ThoughtWorks
DW5

DevOps and Continuous Delivery: What’s It All About?

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

It seems like everywhere you look someone is telling you to implement continuous delivery (CD) within a DevOps framework. Although there is a lot of talk about what you should do, there’s precious little about why or how. Ken Mugrage starts with the business issues that resulted in CD being formalized and how these issues can be made better with CD practices. He moves on to discuss the DevOps culture movement and clarifies the differences between CD and DevOps. Ken shares some useful ways you can start applying these concepts and practices. Throughout the...

Al Wagner
IBM
DW6

Transform Organizational Culture for DevOps Success

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

An organization’s ability to adopt a DevOps approach for software delivery often hinges on a cultural transformation that may be more difficult than technology issues. The keys to success are change supported from the top down, combined with people on the front line who are willing to experiment, fail fast, continuously learn, and openly collaborate in a blameless and fun working environment. When done right, the result is a renewed level of trust between the people involved and the organization they work for. Join Al Wagner as he shares how teams can increase...

Mike Cottmeyer
LeadingAgile, LLC
AW10

Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Large-Scale Agile Transformation

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today, executives are asking their teams how they'll make the transformation. We have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, but executives now demand a greater level of assurance that the plan is actually going to work. Executives are tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Executives want to know how agile is going to help make things better. Mike Cottmeyer begins by discussing the elements of an agile...

France Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
AW11

The Agile Dojo: Shiny Toy or Best Idea Ever?

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Remember your first two weeks on a Scrum team? It was fantastic and miserable all at the same time. And when things got difficult, your team teetered on the edge of the waterfall. What if there were a way to help teams gel more quickly and accelerate their agile learning by immersing them in it? What if there were a place where they could practice what they’ve learned in training, without interruption? Enter the Agile Dojo, a real experiment happening in a large, complex organization. Francie Van Wirkus shares her insights and learnings of creating and sustaining...

Robb Pieper
Responsive Advisors
AW12

Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Imagine you’re on an agile development team—and something feels weird. People disagree constantly, and when they finally do agree, no one commits to deliver the solution. Vocal team members dominate the conversation. You don’t trust your teammates. They don’t trust you. This isn’t a team. It’s just a group of people. Does this sound familiar? Because people are people—not interchangeable robots—building high-performing, self-organizing teams takes specific skills and a lot of work. In his experience working with agile teams, Robb Pieper has often taken on the...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
BW11

Avoid Critical Mobile UX Mistakes

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

With SaaS-based business models, where users pay by the month and can switch applications in a heartbeat, great user experience (UX) becomes paramount. Mobile intensifies this as users can quickly and easily try another app. You’ve got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value from it. So, how do you do that? Not with a beautiful UX or “wow factor” but with a UX that works for and speaks to the user, understanding what they want when they want it. Phil Lew outlines key principles for the design and evaluation of usability...

Alexander_Andelkovic
King/Midasplayer AB
BW12

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Testing: The Future Is Now

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

When building new content for a game such as Candy Crush Saga that has more than 1000 levels, it is extremely important to make sure that the level of difficulty is balanced and that the user does not experience crashes or problems through some unforeseen type of play. Alexander Andelkovic shows you how King is training AI-programs (bots) to test its games by mimicking human interactions. Alex explains how King is taking testing to the next level by employing Monte Carlo tree search, automatic heuristic construction, and NeuroEvolution of Augmenting Topologies (...

Bob Aiello
CM Best Practices Consulting
DW8

Agile ALM: Using DevOps to Drive Process Improvement

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Wednesday, November 16, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Many organizations struggle to improve their existing IT processes to drive their software and systems development work. This leaves technology managers and teams to use whatever worked for them on the last project, often resulting in a lack of integration and poor communication and collaboration across the organization. Agile application lifecycle management (ALM) is a comprehensive approach to defining development and operations processes that are aligned with agile methodology. Bob Aiello explores how to use DevOps principles and practices to drive the entire...

Thursday, November 17

Sherry Chang
Intel
K3

Solve Everyday IT Problems with DevOps

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 8:30am to 9:30am

Some believe that DevOps is only applicable to Internet-based companies with a desire to disrupt existing businesses. On the contrary, DevOps practices can dramatically reduce many everyday IT problems—defects, incidents, waste, bottlenecks, downtime, and infrastructure fragility. Sherry Chang dives into these problem areas and outlines the DevOps tools, practices, culture, and other artifacts necessary to eradicate them. She shares practical tips and hard-learned lessons from Intel IT to arm you with the knowledge and tools you need for DevOps adoption. You and...

Dave West
Scrum.org
AT1

The Past, Present, and Future of Scrum

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, used in some form today by 90 percent of agile teams. As Scrum starts its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework it once was. Yes, it has met—and dealt with—commercial, technical, philosophical, and practical challenges. Dave West discusses the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from more than 200,000 open assessments and 50,000 professional assessments to describe its challenges and evolution. Learn how to: (1) add the development infrastructure for...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
AT2

Managing Agile Software Projects under Uncertainty

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In chasing velocity, we often ignore or don’t understand the uncertainties and associated risks in our processes and their results. Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. But shouldn’t we also be thinking about and mitigating the uncertainties that are unique or even introduced by using agile? Phil Lew suggests that our problem is that we sometimes carry assumptions which either cause us to spend too much effort on things we can’t control or give us unfounded comfort and reassurance. If we can’t...

Michael Durrant
Everquote
AT3

Developing Reliable UI Test Automation in Agile Development

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Automated UI tests typically suffer from a number of problems: They are brittle, hard to maintain, hard to read, often test only one browser, and are frequently slow. These problems are amplified in agile environments which often have less up-front planning for these tests, contributing to a number of issues affecting their reliability and maintainability. Michael Durrant says that writing reliable, automated UI tests in agile environments requires a development style that emphasizes a standards-based approach and the application of specific practices such as...

Anders Wallgren
Electric Cloud
BT2

Continuous Delivery of Microservices: Patterns and Processes

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Tight coupling and interdependence between dev teams slows down development, and environment drift causes deployment problems when promoting applications between environments. The introduction of the microservices architecture expands on the role of SOA by allowing for the looser coupling of endpoints and environments, with more predictability, flexibility, and agility. Anders Wallgren says that microservices have gained attention for their ability to facilitate innovation among dev teams. By architecting applications into sets of smaller services that are more...

Abraham Marin-Perez
Equal Experts
BT3

Exploratory Security Testing in the Browser

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Much of the time, security testing is relegated to the end of development and then is assumed to be someone else’s problem. However, late security fixes can have a huge impact on your delivery dates. Although automated scanners offer some help by inspecting your application’s HTTP traffic, most common attacks are best performed in the browser, which should be the focus of your exploratory security testing. Using familiar automation practices, open source tools (Webdriver/Selenium), and a browser (Chrome/Firefox/Edge), Abraham Marin-Perez shows you how to drive a...

Adam Auerbach
Capital One
DT1

Demystifying DevOps: Capital One’s Journey toward Continuous Delivery

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00pm

Many companies are either talking about DevOps or already working toward adoption. Books and conferences around DevOps abound, and it seems that everyone is hiring DevOps engineers. What impact does adopting DevOps have on a company and its people? What does DevOps look like from the inside out? What does it mean to be a DevOps engineer? What do you need to do and learn to make sure you’re not left behind? Adam Auerbach answers these questions, explains the overall DevOps movement, and discusses how DevOps is driving changes to our organizational culture and...

Amit Patel
Total Performance Consulting
DT2

Optimizing Performance across the DevOps Lifecycle

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The world of DevOps moves fast and substantially impacts application development quality, costs, and customer confidence. Giving your operations and development teams an effective performance process from an early stage means quality is a priority throughout the development lifecycle. A “test early and often” approach improves your chances of on time/on budget application release and meeting your customer’s performance and quality expectations. Successful performance across DevOps relies on the use of proper processes, performance tools and solutions, and...

John Krewson
Sketch Development Services
AT5

Experience Agile Emergence through Sketch Comedy

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Most people read this principle from the Agile Manifesto and focus on the self-organization element. What about the concept of emergence? Exactly how do requirements and designs emerge? And how do self-organizing teams enable emergence? Get a hands-on lesson on emergence and self-organization using an unlikely source of inspiration: sketch comedy. John Krewson leads courageous delegates to envision, write, rehearse, and perform an episode of The Waterfall Comedy Hour....

Paul_Merrill
Beaufort Fairmont
AT6

Agile Test Automation Patterns: From the Inside Out

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Does your team struggle to test new functionality during your iterations? Do you end up testing code in added-on “test-only” hardening iterations? Are bugs still found in your product weeks or months after they were delivered? If so, you are missing out on a major process improvement that will save money, shorten delivery times, and reduce overall risk to the product and your brand. Paul Merrill empowers you to test quicker and earlier in your agile process with proven techniques and patterns like “use test driver,” “define interface,” “simulate functionality,”...

Micah Breedlove
iostudio
BT5

Them’s the Rules: Using a Rules Engine to Wrangle Complexity

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When dealing with complicated and ever-growing program conditions brought on by new business requirements, it's easy for what was once a small conditional block of code to grow to evaluating hundreds of unique conditions. Unfortunately, much like kudzu, that bad practice begins to creep into other areas of code. Micah Breedlove says that incorporating a rules engine to handle the conditional logic is a great way to reduce the code smells wafting from a multi-hundred line conditional. Converting the conditional into one small block of code which can retrieve and...

William Hurley
Astadia
BT6

Simplify Performance Testing with Production Data

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When creating models of system performance, the primary challenges are where and how to start. Whatever the performance characteristics to be estimated or modeled, we need to adopt methods that are repeatable and able to address both the business and technical needs of the project's delivery. All too often, performance tests inadvertently mix scenarios with little regard for how transaction rates can confound technical recommendations and business decisions. Join Will Hurley as he presents a real-world case study that demonstrates the impact on business decisions...

Raj Induluga
LithSpeed, LLC
Robert Brown
Booz Allen Hamilton
DT3

Teach by Doing: Conversation-Driven Development with ChatOps

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am

Despite the proliferation of tools and processes aimed at lowering barriers and reducing friction across teams, do you still find yourself struggling to make sense of the information hairball, constantly asking—How's the deployment going? Who's responding to that incident? Is staging green? It’s time to STOP! Raj Indugula and Robert Brown introduce the essential concepts and benefits of ChatOps, discuss the anatomy of a chat application/robot, and demonstrate how to leverage ChatOps to help team culture through automation and sharing. ChatOps can improve your...

Stasi_Kirk
QualityWorks Consulting Group, LLC
DT4

Continuous Integration of Innovation and Quality

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

High-performing DevOps organizations deploy hundreds of times more frequently than lower performers, so it is no surprise that high performers are known for their innovation and quality. Low-performing DevOps teams fail to achieve continuous delivery due to limitations in their testing process and strategy and thus miss the opportunity to continuously test their ideas and integrate feedback. Stacy Kirk describes how to start or optimize quality in your DevOps lifecycle for continuous delivery of innovative applications. Stacy explains how to foster a culture of...

Heidi Araya
BrightLogic
AT8

Scrum, Kanban, or Scrumban: Which Is Right for You?

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Agile is on everyone’s minds today, as more and more organizations are eager to reap the benefits of rapid iterations using customer-centric approaches. Organizations tend to run to Scrum first because it is the most recognized agile framework. But is Scrum always the right answer for a team and a business? Heidi Araya discusses the types of scenarios and projects in which Scrum may not be a good fit. She shares other frameworks—including Kanban and Scrumban—as potential alternatives to consider to ensure teams and projects select the right fit and can deliver...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
AT9

The Three Pillars Approach to an Agile Testing Strategy

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Far too often, organizations focus solely on the development teams and their technical practices as their agile adoption strategy. And then there’s the near constant focus on acquiring development tools. Often the testing activity and the testing teams are left behind in agile adoption, or even worse, they’re simply along for the ride. This is not an effective transformation strategy. Join experienced agile coach Bob Galen as he shares the Three Pillars framework for establishing a balanced strategic plan for quality and testing. The Three Pillars focus on...

Andy Kaufman
Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
BT8

Take Control! Managing Your Time and Commitments

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

One of the most consistent concerns expressed by project teams everywhere is: We don’t have enough time! The stress of having too much to do and not enough time to do it is overwhelming. In this interactive session, Andy Kaufman shares practical lessons to help you get a better handle on what it takes to more successfully manage your time and commitments. Topics include understanding the importance of taking care of yourself (including getting more sleep and exercise), factors that drive procrastination (with approaches to overcome them and help you manage your...

Brian Saylor
Scripps Networks Interactive
BT9

Conquer the Murky Waters of Test Automation

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A solid test automation implementation is key to any foray into continuous delivery. Although the test automation waters may look peaceful and pristine, anyone who has jumped in to automate testing complex systems has found the waters to be troubled and murky. Tests take too long to run, they periodically break for mysterious reasons, or they fail to catch business critical problems. Over time this leads to automated tests becoming outdated and irrelevant. Brian Saylor has studied a number of test automation projects—and far too many lines of test code—to...

Chris Haddad
Karux, LLC
DT5

Integrate DevOps Release Automation with Cloud and Container Management

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Pushing code into Git and continuously building web applications with Jenkins are only the first steps toward a streamlined development workflow and agile delivery. Canary, Blue/Green, feature flag, and rolling update release strategies help teams deploy with confidence and zero downtime. Cloud Container platforms (Kubernetes, Docker Data Center, AWS ECS) provide automated workload scheduling and release capabilities. By automated environment provisioning with Terraform or AWS OpsWorks, teams can rapidly spin-up and tear-down Dev, Test, and production...

DT6

The Tester’s Role in a DevOps World

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

A DevOps approach to software development provides value to the business with incremental and frequent releases of new functionality to meet the demands of its customers and users. In this new world, the level of software quality directly impacts a company’s success or failure. If software quality is key to success, why do testers often feel ignored during the development process only to be blamed for defects escaping into production? Marianne Hollier explains how the tester’s role, now more important than ever, fits into a DevOps approach to software development...

Don MacIntyre
Scrum Etc.
AT11

Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explores how agile is being used well beyond traditional software development in the Internet of Things. First, Don dives into how agile is being used today in a wide range of development environments. He discusses cloud-based software-as-a-service, large complex mission critical systems, and both mobile software and hardware. Next, he reviews the IoT, describes how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and shares how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Don...

Judith Mills
Judith Mills Consulting
BT11

Don't Ask "Can You Hear Me Now?" Start Listening Instead

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Most of us believe we are good listeners. However, we often overestimate this skill and are hard-wired to short change it by making assumptions, providing answers, and jumping in when we think we know what people are trying to say. In doing so, we rob ourselves of the chance to encourage growth, build trust and respect, and promote ownership. Listening is about more than hearing the words; it is about tone, body language, and so much more. But wait … listening well can be learned, so join Judith Mills to understand and practice this underutilized skill....

Kevin Berg
Sauce Labs
BT12

Build Fail-Proof Tests in Any Browser with Selenium

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

What happens when you have thousands of tests that run beautifully in Chrome but many of them fail in Internet Explorer? Unfortunately, this scenario is all too common for testers and remains a major sore point for teams tasked with getting software to work in any browser. Kevin Berg highlights how access to cloud-based Selenium Grids makes it easier than ever to run functional test suites in every imaginable operating system and browser combination. The result is less time and hassle adapting testing suites to each individual browser. Join Kevin as he shares...

Esteban Garcia
Nebbia Technology
DT7

Use the Cloud to Enable Continuous Delivery

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

As your organization embraces DevOps practices, you may run into bottlenecks trying to find the infrastructure needed to support automated unit tests, load tests, UI tests, CI builds, automated deployments, and other parts of a continuous delivery pipeline. Esteban Garcia shares ways to use the cloud to remove these obstacles and help your team focus on delivering software. Using Microsoft's Azure infrastructure as an example, Esteban shows how you can quickly create a test environment with a web application and a database, and then use those resources to support...

Arthur_Hicken
Parasoft
DT8

Evolving from Automated to Continuous Testing

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Thursday, November 17, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Testing issues can be a significant barrier to taking full advantage of agile approaches to software development and the emerging DevOps movement. To leverage these development and delivery strategies to their fullest, you need to evolve beyond automated testing to continuous testing. Arthur Hicken discusses the testing and development processes and technology that enable continuous testing. He shares insights on how to close the gap between business expectations and development activities by encapsulating clearly defining development policies for software...

Friday, November 18

Ellen Grove
Independent Consultant
SMT2

Games for Learning about Conflict Resolution

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Friday, November 18, 2016 - 10:20am to 11:50am

Scaling agile across the enterprise can create challenging organizational conflicts as groups accustomed to working in their own silos struggle to collaborate effectively and identify their shared interests. Join Ellen Grove to learn useful models for considering conflict supported by games teams can use to develop and practice conflict resolution skills. The models address underlying drivers of conflict, modes for responding to conflict, ways to assess conflict severity to determine appropriate interventions, and patterns of principled negotiation. The games...

Esther Derby
Independent Consultant
SMT3

Leaders at All Levels

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Friday, November 18, 2016 - 1:00pm to 2:15pm

Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, and heroics. These definitions might have been sufficient in another time. However, organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader. Join Esther Derby to explore a new definition of leadership—the ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problems.

Madhumita Das
Great-West: Financial Empower Retirement
SMT4

Six Things to Avoid in Software Testing on Agile Projects

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Friday, November 18, 2016 - 2:30pm to 3:30pm

With the emphasis on cross-functional teams, are testers still valuable on agile teams? The answer: Absolutely! Testing helps consider the full spectrum of quality attributes by bringing a unique perspective of evaluating various user interactions with the application. Insufficient testing may allow severe defects to pass into production, causing financial loss or even bankruptcy. Knowing how to leverage testing to gain the greatest rewards can be tricky as there are many things you can do that appear to be equally important—and likewise many things to avoid. For...