Better Software West 2018 - IT Operations
Customize your Better Software West 2018 experience with sessions covering IT ops.
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...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...
Tuesday, June 5
Continuous Delivery in Practice: A Hands-On DevOps Workshop
For many organizations, delivering software into production has become increasingly more complex with long testing cycles and a division between development and operations teams. DevOps is a cultural movement that is breaking down those barriers. Focusing on automation, collaboration, tools, and knowledge sharing, DevOps is showing that developers and system engineers have much to learn from each other. Through a series of hands-on exercises, Danilo Sato will use a sample web application to demonstrate how to automate its build and deployment pipeline, using infrastructure and pipeline as...
What DevOps Means for Testers and Testing
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...
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...
When Continuous Improvement Feels Like Constantly Failing – An Introduction to Design Thinking
Do your Retrospectives feel like a repeat of the last one? Are they moan and groan sessions? Want to try something new to give your team a boost? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users. Why not try using known design principles during your retrospectives to get that "wow" factor for your teams! In this session Catherine Louis will provide a Design Thinking overview. You’ll roll up your sleeves up and try it...
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...
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...
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...
Scaling to Infinity: The Quest for Fully Automated, Scalable, Self-Healing Systems
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....
The Great Debate: The Pros and Cons of Continuous Delivery
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....
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,...
Aligning Zero-Touch Nonfunctional Testing in DevOps Implementation
When a host of applications and data centers get migrated from their traditional IT systems to a cloud-based data center using an automated DevOps model of deployment, effective testing is critical to success. True DevOps value is realized when all development, testing, and operations functions collaborate and operate on a zero-touch automation model. In this session, Subash Newton will review the prerequisites for creating an effective DevOps testing strategy that includes nonfunctional testing. He will share how to set up an effective test strategy using a zero-touch process automation...
I, Project Manager: Meet the Future of AI Software Delivery
PreviewAre you ready for business agile? Machine learning? Chatbots and intelligent decision support? What about hiring new people and delivering high-quality projects on time and on budget in this new paradigm? Emerging technology and embedded IT teams are entering into a symbiotic relationship, where DevOps is inefficient without AI and business leaders are involved in the everyday of the tech team. In this session, Rachel Burger will discuss how IT leaders can determine which DevOps technologies are hype and which are real. You'll learn how to best leverage new technology to empower...
Friday, June 8
Shhh...it's not "SAFe"!
Scaling agile is tough. Convincing regulated financial institutions to change their "governance" processes to a matrixed, decentralized decision-making organization is almost impossible. But that’s just the change of direction that adopting agile approaches requires.
Come listen to the journey that Mary Thorn took with two regulated financial institutions by implementing the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) without the business-side and people actually realizing the source of the change.
You will learn why and how the principles and values of SAFe and agile can transform any...
For Lasting Change, Take an Agile Approach to Your Agile Transformation!
One of the most difficult challenges faced by an organization entering a large-scale, enterprise transformation is how to achieve lasting change. Oftentimes, leadership will charter an Agile Center of Excellence (COE) in the hopes that training, coaching and publication of best practices will bring the desired change. While these actions typically generate excitement and build early momentum, by themselves they will not change the “DNA” (aka, mindset) of the enterprise. To avoid long-term atrophy of agile benefits, it is critical to charter a COE that is deeply in-tune with the enterprise...