Better Software East 2017 Architecture - Design Sessions | TechWell

Conference archive

Better Software East 2017 - Architecture - Design

Sunday, November 5

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com

Agile Test Automation—ICAgile

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:00pm

Explore the many ways automation supports agile testing in this two-day course with real-world, vendor-neutral examples of agile test automation approaches and tools. In addition, successful attendees are awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA).

Monday, November 6

Wayne Ariola
Tricentis
Alexander Mohr
Tricentis
MC

Service Virtualization for Faster Development and Testing

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

An agile development mantra—Test early and test continuously—is rapidly becoming the mantra for DevOps as the business demands frequent releases of compelling functionality. As testers, our efforts to “shift left” and support continuous integration with automated (and manual) tests are disrupted by a number of factors. Access to constrained system components is one of the greatest challenges. Research has found that an application under test interacts on average with more than fifty separate components—less than half of which are reliably available when testing. So, how can we ensure that...

Tuesday, November 7

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TH

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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 test designers) on his test...

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks
Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks
TA

Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
TB

The Architecture of Microservices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Microservices—one of the latest software architecture styles—promises to deliver benefits such as fast and easy deployment, ease of testing, fine-grained scalability, architectural modularity, and high overall agility. Unfortunately, these benefits are coupled with a lot of complexity. In this product-agnostic architecture tutorial, Mark Richards provides you with an understanding of the microservices architecture style and what hybrids and alternatives exist. This helps you make the right architecture and design decisions for your organization. Mark discusses the core concepts of the...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TE

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Francie Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
Claudia Marquette
AB2 Consulting
TG

What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Maybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all of the customers who derive value from it, you can make...

Wednesday, November 8

Stephen Frein
Comcast
K1

Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

The machine learning age is well underway. Today’s software can see novel patterns that humans are unable to see and improve task performance based on experience. Learning algorithms are widely used for varied purposes, including loan approval, intrusion detection, fraud prevention, risk analysis, and online sales optimization. Yet, like the proverbial cobbler who left his children shoeless, software practitioners have been slow to apply the benefits of machine learning to their own work. Join Stephen Frein for a tour of the current machine learning landscape and its most popular...

Tom Chavez
Splunk
BW3

Machine Data Is EVERYWHERE: Use It for Testing

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are difficult to detect, and cannot be corrected quickly. Tom Chavez presents the four steps that quality engineers should include in every test plan for apps that produce log output or other machine data. First, test that the data is being created. Second, ensure that the entries are correctly formatted and...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
BW5

Leverage Streaming Data in a Microservices Ecosystem

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Imagine a world where operational data is continuously flowing from applications and devices at an extremely high rate. Now imagine services intercepting this data and analyzing it real time. Sounds futuristic? It's not—it's here today. Mark Richards describes what streaming architecture is all about—what it is, when to use it, and how to implement it in a microservices ecosystem. Mark describes the overall ecosystem for streaming architecture—including a brief discussion about the differences in Apache Spark, Flink, and Hadoop—and then explains how Apache Kafka works. Using live coding...

Thursday, November 9

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT2

It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA
AT6

Discover Your Team’s Values with LEGO® Serious Play®

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Creating a cohesive team doesn’t require knowledge of dark arts or forbidden rituals. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be fun! Using exercises built around the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) methodologies, Paul Wynia explores techniques that ensure full team engagement and collaboration resulting in more meaningful discussions. Working as teams, discover Team Values using a series of individual and collaborative LSP builds. Once the Team Values are defined, use them to guide your team’s behaviors. These are finally turned into the Team Working Agreement, a powerful tool for...

Anders Wallgren
Electric Cloud
DT3

Microservices and Docker at Scale: The PB&J of Modern Systems

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Steve Jones
Redgate Software
DT5

Databases in a Continuous Integration/Delivery Process

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

DevOps is transforming software development with many organizations adopting lean development practices, implementing continuous integration (CI), and performing regular continuous deployment (CD) to their production environments. However, the database is largely ignored and often seen as a bottleneck in the DevOps process. Steve Jones discusses the challenges of database development and why many developers find the database to be an impediment to the CD process. Steve shares the techniques you can use to fit a database into the DevOps process. Learn how to store database code in a...

Gene Chorba
Ionic Security
BT12

Implement Practical and Proven Encryption Practices

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

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...

Chris Parlette
ParkMyCLoud
DT8

Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps Strategy

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Chris Parlette maintains that renting infrastructure on demand is the most disruptive trend in IT in decades. In 2016, enterprises spent $23B on public cloud IaaS services. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach $65B. The public cloud is now used like a utility, and like any utility, there is waste. Who's responsible for optimizing the infrastructure and reducing wasted expenses? It’s DevOps. The excess expense, known as cloud waste, comprises several interrelated problems: services running when they don't need to be, improperly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT....

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
K5

Individuals, Interactions, and Improvisation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

As agile practitioners, we constantly strive to better ourselves, our team, and our delivery. A great way to achieve this is simply being open to learning new ideas from other disciplines—including improvisation. Jessie Shternshus shares her story of realizing the uncanny similarities between agile team principles and the pillars of improvisation. Effective improvisers give their teammates unconditional support, practice active listening and accept (and build on) each other’s ideas, see and use mistakes as opportunities, learn to embrace the unknown, and always consider who their audience...