Better Software East 2017 - Digital Transformation

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 a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so you can model...

DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you so, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). Agile, continuous delivery, and DevOps all promise the same dream—improved time to market through incremental delivery of quality software. So where should you focus? Max Griffiths begins by distinguishing DevOps from the other approaches and, rather than wrangling new words for old problems, helps refocus how to measure success. How long does it take you to commit and deliver code? Max shows how you can measure this through Value Stream Mapping, a crucial tool used to...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....

Have you ever been in the same room with co-workers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? Many people are starting to prefer virtual or instant chat messaging to live conversations, but live communication can get better results at work. As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer shares a toolkit to help you assess your core communication competencies and see how you...

Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team dissatisfaction, shares techniques to uncover hidden issues, identifies the most common traps project managers fall into, and offers general tips to avoid them. Now that you understand what could be impacting your team’s performance, Larissa guides you on how to minimize the dissatisfaction and keep the team...

Fire the project managers … do DevOps … hire plenty of agile coaches. Agile leadership books, guidance, and carnival barkers abound. However, with much hype to sort through and little guidance, how can you separate the snake oil from the real thing? How can you develop a North Star to guide you through agile, DevOps, and organizational transformation? Roland Cuellar shares lessons based on two decades of experience consulting with leading executives worldwide. Rooted in a foundational philosophy of self-management that evolved into a cutting-edge approach, Roland shares an essential...

Becoming a DevOps shop isn’t just about hiring DevOps engineers and implementing a new toolset. It’s about changing the culture of your organization. Patrick Turner believes that your focus for DevOps should be to bring a cultural shift throughout the organization—up to the business team and down to product delivery. Focusing on the culture shift of DevOps creates faster innovation. And all of this enables transparency in this process for those who have not had visibility in the past and encourages transparency for those who have worked behind the curtain of complexity that has...

Are you looking for ways to ensure your teams are always working on the highest customer value ideas? Do you want the ability to quickly adapt to microchanges in the market? Do you want end-to-end visibility of work across the enterprise from inception to delivery? If so, this session with Mario Moreira is for you. Discover how to operate in an agile manner at every level of your enterprise and gain the business benefits it can bring. Mario explores innovative concepts such as enterprise kanban, lean canvas, cost of delay, agile budgeting, discovery mindset, incremental thinking,...

After you hear Stephen Frein's keynote on intelligent software, join him for a hands-on tour of machine learning techniques. Using the free R language and the RStudio IDE, Stephen guides you through a sampling of machine learning techniques and discusses how these techniques can be used for both understanding and prediction. Follow along as he extracts data from online sources and builds machine learning models in real time to predict numeric values, assign classifications, and categorize textual sources of information. Experiment with the demonstrated methods by modifying the code and...

Docker seems to be taking the IT world by storm. But why all the excitement about yet another virtual machine technology? Because Docker is much more. Korey Earl says that Docker solves many DevOps challenges including process isolation, build once-deploy anywhere, and automated scaling without the resource overhead that comes with virtual machines. Docker can improve resource utilization, infrastructure agility, and the transition from development to operations, allowing IT organizations to support the business rather than holding it back. Join Korey as he reviews the basics of the Docker...

After predominantly being used in the build/test stage, Docker has matured and is expanding into production deployment. Similarly, microservices are expanding from greenfield web services to use throughout the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolithic systems to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says running microservices-based systems in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—both for build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. This makes Docker and microservices natural companions, forming the foundation for modern...

Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...

From its earliest times, software development has featured commercial and government-grade encryption libraries. Encryption libraries make it possible for organizations to protect data with the highest level of security. Gene Chorba says that despite a big push in the past few years to use encryption to combat security breaches, lack of expertise among developers and overly complex libraries have led to widespread implementation failures in business applications. Although any developers believe they know how to implement crypto, they haven't had any specific training in...

The idea of transformation can be both exciting and frightening. How do we shake off old ways of thinking? What will emerge when the transformation is complete? How will I know the transformation is finished? These are questions and challenges that many product teams face as they make the transformation to agile.

Kevin Stilwell shares his experience and techniques for shaking off old paradigms and practices to break the organizational “muscle memory” that exists in many companies. What emerges will be a high performing product team—and the reward will be well worth the effort.

Love it or hate it, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was found to be the most used framework for enterprise-level agility in Version One’s annual survey. That said, many aspects of SAFe—including effective portfolio management—are difficult for organizations to implement.

Laura Burke Olson shares Big Wall Planning, a technique that Ipreo uses to “seed” their release trains with high-priority, high-value, and balanced portfolio-level epics. Big Wall Planning engages all aspects of company leadership in deciding the product roadmaps. This is a huge challenge in organizations that...