Better Software West 2018 - Automation, Development, Test, Release
Monday, June 4
The DevOps 2.1 Toolkit: Continuous Deployment with Jenkins and Docker Swarm
DevOps is the answer to today's need for fast-paced, high quality software development—and continuous deployment (CD) is its culmination. The ability to deploy every commit to production is the ultimate proof that DevOps practices are implemented and that they provide real value. Join Viktor Farcic as he explores the processes and tools that lead to CD nirvana. Many of us have experimented with Docker, perhaps running one of the pre-built images from Docker Hub. The team might recognize the benefits Docker provides in building microservices and the advantages the technology brings to...
Building Continuous Delivery Pipelines
Although continuous delivery (CD) and DevOps are growing in popularity, not much practical information is available about how to get started. Join Ken Mugrage for this hands-on technical tutorial where you can get your feet wet and your questions answered. In this workshop, Ken will provide a cloud-based instance of the continuous delivery server GoCD for you to learn on. You will configure a complete continuous delivery pipeline from source code commit through deployment. Learn when to run each common type of automated test for the fastest possible feedback and how to run tests in...
Tuesday, June 5
The Tester's (New) Role in Agile Development
Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so 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 help clear the way for...
Wednesday, June 6
Use DevOps Principles to Transform Culture
PreviewAt the heart of DevOps is the idea that organizations break down silos and teams work together to innovate faster, reducing the length of feedback loops and delivering value faster. Ashley Hunsberger describes how Blackboard is using DevOps principles—collaborative practices, iterative improvements, incremental testing, and more—to transform their development culture so everyone owns quality. Big change does not happen overnight, so they learned to make smaller changes that support the overall vision. Join Ashley as she lays the groundwork for iterative and continuous improvement...
Taking Your Automation Framework to the Next Level Using Machine Learning
Automation fails frequently in companies due to a variety of reasons, including poor team communication, lack of skills, flaky tests, and inadequate understanding of test coverage. Even when things are going well, the automated tests sometimes grow to a size where the test suites take too long to execute for the run to be viable. James Farrier is a test automation architect who will show you ways to leverage machine learning to address these challenges. You'll learn how to determine which tests are valuable to run after each commit or build in order to cut down the suite run time, how to...
You Only Have to Change One Thing to Make DevOps Work: Everything
We’re told that adopting DevOps can have all sorts of benefits, but many organizations are not getting the results they hoped for. The term “DevOps” has been co-opted to mean anything from tools to a job title. Without an understanding of what DevOps is really all about, success is elusive. In this session, Ken Mugrage presents DevOps as an overhaul to existing software development organizations and processes. He talks about organizational structures that enable team members to take full advantage of the automation and visibility gained with a DevOps-enabled culture. Ken will then discuss...
Managing Microservices Using Terraform, Docker, and the Cloud
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...
Strategies for Selecting the Right Open Source Framework for Cross-Browser Testing
PreviewOrganizations today are required to test their web application across browsers and mobile devices. Choosing the right framework is a matter of organizational as well as technical fit. With a plethora of test frameworks that span across practices such as behavior-driven development, unit tests, UI, and others, it can be a struggle to select the right tool. In this session, Eran Kinsbruner will provide an overview of the market and cover the top ten open source test frameworks, with a comparison table of pros and cons about when and why to use one tool over another. Eran will take...
How DevOps Drives Product Innovation
Customers are demanding faster delivery of software products. Unfortunately, many organizations have not figured out how to automate their delivery process so they can deploy software applications on demand. In this session, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan will discuss how Varian Medical Systems uses DevOps capabilities, AI, and chatbots to improve the operational aspects of its 360 Oncology care management platform and enable innovation by shortening time to market. As with any DevOps infrastructure for cloud-native applications, 360 Oncology's infrastructure is complex and has multiple...
One Metric to Rule Them All: Effectively Measure Your Teams Without Subjugating Them
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...
Accelerating Your Test Execution Pipeline
PreviewIs your team constantly feeling pressure to deliver software faster without compromising quality? As your test automation process ramps up, your testing efforts can lag behind due to speed and scalability issues. Test environments are often the root cause for a number of these problems due to the time it takes to create them and the cost to reflect real users. Incorporating a test automation platform can cut your testing time in half by leveraging cloud capabilities of testing multiple devices and browsers at one time and fixing bugs as fast as you find them. Bria Grangard will...
Proving Out Your DevOps Pipeline Using a Minimum Viable Product
In the rush to be more competitive, an organization is often tempted to do an across-the board, "big bang" implementation. However, taking a big bang approach to implementing a DevOps pipeline carries with it a myriad of risks and challenges that can result in a failed DevOps implementation. Many of these risks and challenges can be mitigated or even eliminated by developing a DevOps minimum viable product (MVP). Join Tim Guay as he discusses how to apply an MVP concept to DevOps. You'll understand how to effectively test the end-to-end functionality of your DevOps pipeline and provide...
Liquibase: An Open Source Version Control Tool for Your Database
PreviewIt is generally accepted that you should always use proper version control when developing software. Why wouldn't you do the same with your database changes? It's even more important as part of a DevOps continuous integration strategy. Evolving your database schema using SQL scripts seems easy at the start but quickly becomes a nightmare as your application grows more complex. How do you track which scripts have been run? How do you rollback changes? Can you conditionally run certain changes for different environments? In this session Blaine Carter will discuss using a schema...
Thursday, June 7
Product Delivery Powered by Continuous Integration: A Case Study
Are you a developer who wants to easily manage and customize continuous integration and delivery? Do you work in a team environment where everyone collaborates and depends on CI for automation and delivery of clean code to production? In this session, Amit Mishra will share a case study of how Credit Karma evolved from a single, standalone CI instance to a self-service, Dockerized CI infrastructure combined with bots, webhooks, and GitHub APIs. He will cover GitHub's features and powerful APIs that were most valuable in this process, and how using GitHub freed up time previously spent on...
Engineering Productivity and Enterprise Quality at Scale
Over the past two years, PayPal has been on a journey to modernize its internal development and test systems, from test environments, implementing enterprise continuous integration and code propagation into the development pipeline, to release processes and production code validation. Jose Buraschi and Nir Szilagyi will talk about transforming the code of 5,000 developers across 350 teams and how it required social “magic” to influence behaviors and motivate engagement. This modernization of PayPal's development practices has involved creating reliable integrated test environments,...