Better Software West 2018 - Concurrent Sessions

Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you...

Agile coach Ryan Lockard interviewed fourteen of the seventeen authors of the Agile Manifesto for a special podcast project. Originally the idea was to capture the intent of authors and to chronicle the story of the Agile Manifesto, but what emerged became much more. This session covers the real story behind the rise and fall of agile in industry and what we can do to reclaim it. Ryan will dive into the history behind the Agile Manifesto and its signatories, what precipitated the manifesto's creation, and what the vision for it was. From that story emerges the rise of an industry, and to...

As agile goes mainstream, many organizations are only focused on mastering different elements of agile frameworks. Progress is measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts. These metrics can turn agile teams into backlog lumberjacks! Teams, ScrumMasters, and leadership must realize that while speed to launch is crucial to delivering software, speed to learning is even more important. To accomplish this mindset shift, product owners need to learn to change their focus from mastering the art of writing user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products...

Much has been written about how to write microservices, but not enough about how to effectively deploy and manage them. Microservices architecture multiplies the number of deployables IT has to manage by at least ten. In that world, tooling to manage cloud deployments and related infrastructure has become essential for success, and Terraform and Docker are increasingly being leveraged to facilitate microservices environments. Derek Ashmore will share his hard-learned best practices for deploying and managing microservices in production. He will leverage true infrastructure as code using...

In an agile world where having dedicated testers can be a controversial idea, manual testing is a tough sell. Not all contexts have their testing automated, so what is a manual tester to do when it comes time to release? Your team starts asking about regression testing, requests estimates, and expects justifications for the time being spent. Intuition isn't the answer, and retesting everything is not an option. In this session, seasoned tester Brendan Connolly will share his five core values for focusing your regression testing efforts: consistency over correctness, behaviors over bugs,...

As agilists, we know the importance of open, candid feedback for agile teams to be continuously improving. This talk will share how impediments, such as unconscious biases and a person’s level of self-confidence, can impact the feedback and learning cycle. Participants will learn why there are positive and negative reactions when feedback is given, the difference between a defensive (fixed) and accepting (growth) mindset, how age, self-confidence and gender biases influence an individual’s mindset and other impediments that can impact a team member’s ability to provide candid feedback....

On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features...

If you don't know how to measure what you want, you'll end up wanting what you can measure. The thing you want to know often isn't easily quantifiable, yet measuring the wrong things is worse than nothing—a toxic metric can damage your teams' performance. But with the right data, you can change the conversation. Step away from dangerous metrics that punish unfairly and are easily gamed. Instead, choose effective metrics that get everyone on the same page about what's important and communicate your team's authentic story to management, your customers, and beyond. Join Cheryl Hammond to...

Agile teams ship frequently and change things all the time--by design. In the middle of all this, agile teams need to make sure that their core user flows like sign-in, shopping carts and search features still work on every new build. Traditional testing is a poor fit for agile teams. AI changes all that with the ability to create automated verification for new user flows, and automatically maintain those verification steps even when the application changes. AI changes the game so that agile teams can move faster, with less risk or worry about breaking the app. Jason Arbon walks you...

On any team, from infrastructure engineering to development to HR, there is always a looming danger of one individual being the only person capable of performing a key task, either because of their technical skills, domain skills, or business experience. The risks of having key-person dependencies—reduced productivity, inaccurate project estimates, morale problems, delays, and business-impacting defects and downtime—are hard to identify and can be even harder to resolve. Lee Eason is a leader and coach who has experienced this problem for so long, he finally decided to do something about...

Are you considering kanban but not sure how you’ll predict delivery without story points, velocity, and a burndown chart? Or are you part of a Scrum team but feeling like your team could benefit from improved flow within your sprints? In this session, join Julie Wyman and Hunter Tammaro as they explore key kanban metrics for measuring team flow and predictability. In the first half, they will introduce metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram. They’ll review what each represents, discuss easy ways to collect them, and show how they are similar and...

Think about your latest retrospective. Were people interested and engaged, or did they complain and accuse? Did you leave the retrospective feeling like you learned something valuable, or were you simply there to check the retrospective off your list? Retrospectives are hard work, but effective retrospectives can have a transformative effect on your team’s performance and, ultimately, your organization’s ability to achieve its goals. Join retrospective expert David Horowitz as he explores tangible steps you can take to turn your retrospectives into the catalyst of continuous improvement...

Do you know how your work is aligned to tactical and strategic goals? Success is rooted in a productive and cohesive team-centered culture. When culture and execution are misaligned, failure is almost certain. Everyone on and around the team must understand their role in defining, delivering, and growing value. It sounds easy, but the discipline can be tough, which leads to disappointments and unwelcome surprises. Nabila Safdar focuses on curating transparent expectations by the following six core practices. First, foster candor and respect. This leads to unity. Second, have fresh...

In agile, everything we do is an experiment. Product development is no different. We think we know what the customer wants, and the customer thinks they know what they want, but it turns out we're all wrong! To get to validated discoveries about our features, we must understand how to write a better hypothesis for our development experiments. This session focuses on challenging the mindset that we are validating options during our experiments. Natalie Warnert will show you how to eliminate options that don't work with data and feedback by looking at your product hypotheses as tests that...

The number of servers in our systems is constantly increasing. With the move to microservices and continuous deployment practices, deployments frequency is higher than ever, yet we are expected to handle increased demand with the same workforce as before. How can we operate clusters at scale with minimum human involvement? The answer lies in adoption of new practices and tools. Join Viktor Farcic as he discussions how container schedulers are becoming a de facto standard for deploying services at scale and continuous deployment is the new norm for complete automation of software delivery....

Understanding how our brains take shortcuts to process all the data they take in can help us recognize when its happening, take measures to correct our course, and use that information to build stronger teams. This talk sprang from my curiosity about the intersection of neuroscience and organizational behavior. It is my hope that attendees will leave with the ability to recognize when they and their teams are using processing shortcuts, as well as some techniques for mitigating their impact. Learning Objectives: - Identify several ways in which our brains short cut processing in order to...

As an agile community, we talk a lot about innovation and failure. But we often forget to talk about the head games that keep us from innovating. Billie Schuttpelz unearths those internal dialogues that prevent us from taking risks that drive innovation. Become a part of breaking open the conversation around impostor syndrome—yes, it exists, and it's stealing far too many of our authentic voices. Join Billie to get insights into how imposter syndrome is holding you back. You'll learn three ways to unleash your creative ideas, break free of the swirling thoughts and inactivity that...

Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made...

DevOps needs to consider many different aspects of software quality to deliver reliable software continuously. The term DevSecOps was developed to highlight that security is a key component of quality and cannot be ignored during continuous delivery. Join Gene Gotimer as he discusses how to determine a definition of done that includes security for DevOps pipelines. He'll discuss how continuous integration can invoke static analysis tools to test for security errors and check for software vulnerabilities. You'll learn how automated deployments and virtualization make dynamic...

Most agile practitioners first learn agile by reading a book, attending a class, or attending local meetings. But learning lean and agile concepts works best when we're able to put some concrete examples and practice behind the concepts. By adding a set of games and exercises that teach and reinforce lean and agile concepts to our toolboxes, change agents can provide some practical basis for conversations both inside and outside their organizations. In this talk join experienced agile coach Bill DeVoe, as he shares two of his “go to” games. First, up will be The Name Game, a game that...

"Move fast and break things” tells quite a story of the relationship between speed and agile. Speed has been a driver in our industry before it was even an industry. Books promise that certain frameworks can deliver twice as much in half the time, yet teams still struggle delivering what's expected of them. This session describes a six-month case study of a multi-team transformation. The orders were to make the teams deliver faster, but they were consistently missing deadlines. Frustration was on the rise. Only after taking the time to understand what they meant by "faster" could the teams...

"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." This quote from Peter Drucker identifies why even the most productive agile teams may not always deliver the most successful business solutions. The agile team depends on the product owner to correctly identify the business requirements with the highest values, to clearly describe each feature at the right level of granularity, to provide the necessary supporting documentation, and to continuously adapt the product backlog to meet the emerging needs of the organization. Otherwise, the team could be measuring its...

The Great Continuous Delivery Debate There is a lot of debate about whether continuous delivery is a boon or a curse. Proponents will sing the praises of being able to deliver software into production very frequently with no manual intervention. Skeptics will highlight the challenges delivering quality, working with legacy code, and the need for intensive system-wide assurance activities prior to deploying into production. So which is it? Can most organizations benefit from continuous delivery and, if so, how? Or is continuous delivery a pipedream and only reachable by the select few....

Ever find yourself making a sour face after talking to a coworker? Wishing your team meetings felt more like an engaging social hour? There is hope. Those everyday conflicts where something seems “off” after a conversation are often related to differences in communication styles. When team members understand themselves and others, there’s less conflict, more collaboration, and better working relationships. The DiSC model can help you understand why your team behaves the way it does and how to build trust for a more agile team. In this interactive session, agile coaches Allison Pollard and...

The problem with many agile teams is that they simply never become a team. This often manifests itself as team members feeling unsafe or not quite trusting each other. This workshop will show you how the same techniques improv theater troupes use to improve collaboration, creativity, and communication can be used to help agile teams, too. The three-minute improv warm-up games Wayde Stallmann will lead you through in this session—including improv's famous "yes, and" technique—will help you learn to establish trust, improve collaboration, and learn how to provide a safe environment for your...

Scrum surfaced in 1993. So, the role of a Product Owner has existed for 20+ years. Surely the whole idea is well understood by now. Right? And the role is a simple one. There is a single product owner per product team or teams. Defining and accepting the work to meet the clients’ goals. Always mucking around the backlog. Again, simple and clear. Right? Well, in my coaching travels and observations it’s not that simple. I still see literally tens of organizations and hundreds of teams that struggle with the notion of product ownership. So, let’s go over it...