Conference Schedule
Sunday, June 3
Agile software practices are being employed within many development organizations worldwide, and as a result, many testers struggle to understand the agile development process and their place in it. In Agile Tester Certification, both novice and experienced testers learn the fundamentals of agile development, the role of the tester in the agile team, and the agile testing processes. Learn technical and team skills testers need for success in the world of agile development, as well as the techniques of Test-Driven Development (TDD), Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) and Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) during this two-day course. All participants are expected to have experience in or knowledge of agile development fundamentals.
Gain the knowledge necessary to lead an enterprise agile transformation by leveraging the Scaled Agile Framework, and its underlying principles of lean thinking, and product development flow. This two-day course meets the education prerequisite for the Leading SAFe—Scaled Agilist Certification exam.
Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification. ISTQB is the only internationally accepted certification for software testing and has granted more than 500,000 certifications in more than 110 countries around the world. In this three-day course, learn what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, exploratory testing, and more. This course is appropriate for those new to the testing profession and those seeking certification in software testing.
As companies transition to agile environments, Selenium is an essential tool to release quality software more quickly. Learn to use Selenium and to craft maintainable test frameworks and test suites in this one-day, hands-on course.
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).
DevOps combines development, testing, and operations and includes continuous integration, automated testing, continuous delivery, and rapid deployment practices. Because DevOps practices require confidence in nearly all changes, automated testing is an essential ingredient that is integrated into the process and relied upon for enforcement of quality gates and to ensure overall delivery quality. This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Test professionals, operations engineers, developers, project managers, and business owners will all benefit from this curriculum.
Begin the journey toward agile leadership in this two-day workshop focused on the role, responsibilities and reasons for being an agile leader.
This two-day Certified Scrum Product Owner certification course gives you the skills to assume the hardest role in Scrum, a Product Owner. Taught by leading agile practitioners, the focus on this course is providing real-world techniques that have been proven effective by product owners in hundreds of actual projects. Business customers, product managers, and line managers will benefit from this training. Upon completion, successful participants are registered as a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) with a two-year membership in the Scrum Alliance® (www.scrumalliance.org).
Monday, June 4
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...Read more
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...Read more
For most managers Agile is a totally different way of work that requires a particular style of leadership. However, agile transitions often fail to provide adequate guidance on how a manager fits into an agile organization. Your role and responsibilities need to change as the organization changes. You must learn to coach, remove obstacles, and model new styles of communication. In this interactive session, learn how you can flourish as an agile manager as you nurture your teams to thrive. Join seasoned leadership coach Selena Delesie as she discusses the differences between traditional and...Read more
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high-quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the basic principles and practices of lean software development, concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process, and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather than resource...Read more
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...Read more
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. Ryan Ripley says that if you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get...Read more
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 fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...Read more
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done are often areas of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items, living in our defect tracking systems, can be traced to our difficulty performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)/behavior driven development (BDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD/BDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. By decreasing re-work, ATDD/...Read more
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—and with your customers. 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...Read more
Is your industry being disrupted? Is it getting more difficult to keep your customers—or to find new ones? Agile and DevOps form the foundation of best practices for how to build products, but they work just as well when applied to the right—or to the wrong— products. We need a different process to help us distinguish between the two. Lean Startup drives to the source of the problem and helps us answer the question— Should we build it? This year more than half of the participants at Lean Startup Week were from enterprise organizations. If you’re not using the Lean Startup way of designing...Read more
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...Read more
Tuesday, June 5
Server-side monoliths—single programs that provide all back-end services—just don't work. They are hard to build, impossible to maintain, and gradually accrete so much baggage that forward development slows to a crawl. Agile development is impossible over this sort of system. Allen Holub says that microservices—systems of small, cooperating server-side agents—solve these problems. However, building a microservice system is not easy, and doing it wrong is disastrous. Taking a deep dive into practical microservice architecture and implementation, Allen covers a lot of practical details to...Read more
Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful discipline that combines testing, coding, and software design to ameliorate defect rates and facilitate future enhancements. TDD has been around for some twenty years, so why isn’t it more prevalent—and more popular? For one thing, TDD is not easy to get right! And, it seems expensive. In this mostly hands-on tutorial, Rob Myers will explore these concerns by diving straight into the deep-end. Rather than starting with theory and working toward practice, Rob is going to reverse the tutorial recipe. Come prepared to spend the first half...Read more
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...Read more
Team charters are essential, but there's no specific formula for how to effectively create them or what to include. Each element of the team charter is specific to each team. There can be a framework for developing the charter, but it must be a collaborative effort of—at a minimum—the members of the team. Join Doc List as he shares his often-used framework, the key steps in crafting a charter, and the activities that are a must for the process. Explore aspects of setting specific constraints or criteria for the team, particularly Definition of Done and Definition of Ready, and see examples...Read more
One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
Are important words often left unsaid at your place of work? Do you feel like you're navigating a complex maze in conversations? Does your message tend to miss the mark with co-workers, who increasingly seem to be impediments to your reaching your goals? Trust and communication issues within the workplace can hollow out an organization. When organizations suffering from a lack of trust, it costs them speed, productivity, and collaboration. Join Allison Pollard and Marcus King as they share models to evaluate your own behaviors and facilitate activities to help you find your voice for...Read more
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. Join Jennifer as she explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can...Read more
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...Read more
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 the customers who derive value from it, you can make smarter...Read more
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...Read more
This tutorial is for product creators who are passionate about delighting their customers by solving their true needs. Join Catherine Louis as she walks you through Design Thinking, Build- Measure-Learn loops to validate assumptions, and Scrum to deliver as table stakes for building the right thing rather than building the wrong thing faster. In this highly interactive workshop, you will be “learning by doing”. Some of the topic we’ll explore include practical Product Discovery tools and how to effectively en-Vision your products. We’ll use User Story Mapping as means of defining and...Read more
Wednesday, June 6
At 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...Read more
The world of work is transforming at an unrelenting pace. Product development is increasingly more complex and uncertain while the speed of decisions and delivery is escalating at an exponential pace. Many of us are unaware of how our thoughts and actions work against our own objectives and our organizations’ goals and needs. Pete Behrens illustrates how leadership agility improves self-awareness, amplifies decision-making, improves outcomes, and grows resilience and capacity in highly complex and fast-paced environments. Sharing stories from his two decades of personal experience...Read more
Teams struggle for many reasons, leaving people frustrated, complacent, and content to exist in mediocrity. There is a secret sauce that propels individuals, teams, and entire organizations to be really successful. And that secret is effective leadership! And not just the executives, managers, or those with leader titles get to lead – everyone does. The real benefits of agile emerge when each person embraces their personal leadership. By embracing our inner leader, we are able to engage our team, improve the value and quality of our deliverables, and gain the competitive edge the agile...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
In this session, you will:
Understand the changing forces that are creating the urgency for greater efficiencies between development and operations Gain a high-level understanding of Lean Principles and Systems Thinking Learn how to defend the need for a budget around DevOps tools and acquire knowledge to create a DevOps roadmapRead moreContinuous improvement is the goal of agile teams. But what does it look like when we create a continuous improvement strategy beyond our agile teams and bring it to the company level? Working at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith saw the benefits of its fantastic continuous improvement culture. When he joined Avvo as its new CTO, his primary goal was to help Avvo create that culture for itself. In this session, Kevin will show what Avvo has done to build a foundation for a continuous improvement culture. He’ll explore the frameworks used to create highly engaged teams and share the organizational...Read more
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,...Read more
Organizations 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...Read more
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....Read more
Agile methods aren’t just for software anymore—actually, they haven’t been for quite a while. Agile's collaborative, iterative, incremental approaches to work have caused it to go mainstream. But can we apply team-based agile straight out of the box in a nonsoftware context? Although most of the principles and patterns apply, sometimes the practices and frameworks need modification for a particular context. Mike Cottmeyer will explore two case studies of agile journeys: an international hotel chain going through a major rebranding initiative, and a well-known fast food restaurant looking...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
The effectiveness of agile approaches are built on influence rather than authority. Practices like collocation and stand-ups actually amplify influence, leveraging behavior patterns built into humans through biology and social conditions. In this workshop, Bernie Maloney will show you how to unpack some fundamental influence patterns, gleaned from typical collaboration ceremonies, and turn them into conscious tools for leadership. Through interactive exercises, you’ll amplify and practice your ability to influence by quickly establishing and building rapport via all forms of...Read more
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...Read more
Is 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...Read more
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...Read more
It's important to create a culture that inspires and infuses your development team with great ideas. But ideas are not action. Ideas in and of themselves are nothing more than unrefined, random thoughts, and worse, most ideas never get implemented. Even when you do follow through on some of the best ideas, they can cause great harm without proper planning and execution. While creativity is an asset, unbridled creativity where disparate ideas abound outside a sound decision-making and execution framework will create distraction and chaos. In this session, Melissa Petak will show you how to...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
It 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...Read more
In this session, you will learn:
The hottest app trends for 2018, including progressive web apps and headless browser benefits Upcoming mobile OS changes and how the will impact your dev and test activities The optimal devices and platform mix for maximizing your test coverage at any stage of the DevOps pipeline A methodical, risk-based test coverage approach for your mobile, web and responsive web needsRead moreThroughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Agile Dev, Better Software, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote...Read more
Thursday, June 7
Let's try an experiment. Rather than trying to figure out what you need or want to hear from a keynote, we propose your taking over as the product owner and driving the discussion? Join Ryan Ripley and Faye Thompson as they take your most pressing, real-time questions and craft them into an inspiring keynote that is relevant to you and your needs. They will take on all agile topics: How does a team optimize their learning? How do you make it safe to explore, experiment and fail? What should you do when your teams aren’t “buying” self-direction and accountability. What do you do when those...Read more
Now that organizations have opted to morph agile into their own homegrown Agile Center of Excellence, many have missed out on simple advanced practices that would allow them to be even more aligned and ready to embrace a more practical agile application. Join seasoned agile coach Lee Henson as he shows you how to leverage internal and external agile service agreements to help guide your teams to a more solid agile footing. He will explore setting a clear vision and strategy by building an “agile press release” and how to embrace estimation excellence for stories, releases, and entire...Read more
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...Read more
Test-driven development is supposed to help us refactor our code safely, but we often find that when we refactor our code, we also have to refactor our tests. What was supposed to add safety becomes a burden requiring time and effort. Writing good unit tests is a critical skill that developers need to master in order to get the most benefit from test-driven development. Tests must be unique, written at the right level of abstraction, and implementation-independent in order to be most valuable. In this session, David Bernstein will cover effective techniques for doing TDD that support...Read more
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...Read more
Agile and Scrum Teams are self-organizing and self-managing. As a line manager, what's left to do? Traditionally, managers are responsible for the output of their teams. Sometimes they're even responsible for the for a team's delivery that they do not have direct oversight. This model is flawed. People are complex, a team of people is a complex system. May as well try to manage the weather. To get a handle on the complexity of teams, managers need to act differently in how they lead others. In other words, managers of agile teams will fail if they do not shift their thinking from...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
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....Read more
So, your company wants to be innovative. Are you comfortable with failure? The word failure is littered with negative connotations. Elon Musk financed three failed SpaceX rocket launches. Edison designed more than 2,000 light bulbs that did not work. The Wright brothers crashed dozens of planes and gliders before one took off. And the Americas were discovered through failed circumnavigation. Some failed small and learned. And some failed big but survived and thrived. The lesson is that organizations must embrace failure to accelerate innovation. Join Stefana Saxton to learn how to...Read more
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...Read more
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, business analysts, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulties encountered while performing these initial requirements activities. Ken Pugh introduces behavior-driven development (BDD), also known as acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), and explains how it works in creating detailed requirements. He outlines the different roles that team members play in the...Read more
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...Read more
Every software conference has a number of folks who are brand-new to agile—as well as folks who think they understand it but could use a solid refresher. This interactive presentation will focus on newbies who want to understand the key concepts of both agile and Scrum. Certified Scrum trainer Steven Spearman will give an overview of the key concepts and learning approaches needed to understand agile and Scrum in one hour. While he will cover the structural basics of roles and events, he’ll focus primarily on key concepts of complexity, why traditional methods fail us so often, taking...Read more
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...Read more
Peer-to-peer Discussion: How Do I Make CD Work in My Environment? Building a successful continuous delivery pipeline is very context specific. Large organizations with legacy code, existing physical environments, regulatory constraints, large monolithic applications, or stove piped organizations often struggle to find a continuous delivery approach that will work for them successfully. If this sounds familiar, this session is for you. Join facilitator Lee Eason as conference participant’s work together to identify and solve difficult continuous delivery challenges. Learn how other...Read more
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...Read more
Do you have trouble generating test ideas? Are there bugs that are getting through because you missed certain tests? This workshop will teach you mob test design techniques to help you generate test ideas around your features and products. Join James Fogarty and Jeff MacBane to learn the benefits of mob test design and understand the value your colleagues bring to test design. First, they will explain how mob test design sessions work and why you need to be doing them. Next, they will explore a heuristic test strategy model they’ve developed to help organize a mob test design...Read more
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...Read more
Google pioneer Alberto Savoia offered this sage advice: Build the right "it" before you build It right. But few software companies take the time to define, much less build, the right "it." The problem starts with a poor requirements definition process. In this session, join Kathryn Campbell as she examines the five most common mistakes that software companies make during requirements definition—and how to avoid them. First Kathryn defines thinking too small as a huge problem and shows you how to broaden your perspectives. Next, she exposes being stuck in the past, with legacy systems...Read more
"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...Read more
Does it seem like your team is the antithesis of agile? Being negative or fearful, resisting change, or hoarding information are common pitfalls that impede progress and can sink an agile team. How can your team adapt to each other, avoid these patterns, and find its greatness? All teams have people with talents and untapped abilities, but it can be difficult for a team to figure out what works for them, what they have, and what they lack. If your team is struggling to unify, find its stride, or revel in the fun of working together, then this session is for you. Michelle Vician will reveal...Read more
"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...Read more
Many teams make the mistake of starting their DevOps journey without a plan. They are excited that there is a way to eliminate pain and increase value in their delivery cycles and value streams, but starting without a plan often relieves pain in one part of the value stream but only causes more pain elsewhere. In this case study-style presentation, Logan Daigle will discuss the methods he has used with a variety of companies to ensure they are thinking about the whole DevOps picture from the beginning. He'll discuss best steps and practices for applying systems thinking to DevOps and give...Read more
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....Read more
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,...Read more
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...Read more
For years, people have made recommendations for how to develop software in an agile way based almost entirely on intuition, folklore, and anecdotes. They've never been able to quantitatively show the accuracy or applicability of these recommendations. This session quantifies those recommendations in the most precise and objective terms, including a presentation of general findings in Larry Maccherone's research correlating agile practices to performance along the dimensions of productivity, predictability, quality, and time to market. These data can be used to make general decisions about...Read more
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...Read more
You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more
Are 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...Read more
Directional awareness in product development is one of the most challenging aspects of building things—whether applications, services, or true products. Gaining a true north in your journey and having a light to show you the way are often the difference between success and failure. But what is your compass? Where is your lighthouse? It’s your customer, and your challenge is determining how to effectively engage the customer. Agile product management provides a distinct mindset with techniques and patterns useful in navigating these often-convoluted courses. And Anu Smalley is an...Read more
Friday, June 8
"Leading through Agile’s Larger-Scale and Regulated Challenges" Thursday, June 7, 5:30 p.m.–7:30 p.m. • Friday, June 8, 8:30 a.m.–4:00 p.m.
One of the challenging landscapes for agile transformation is in more regulated environments, such as the medical and financial domains. While agile is possible in these contexts and can even thrive, it often requires a different sort of leadership skill to guide the introduction and evolution. This summit is focused on solving your issue in these larger and more regulated contexts, including: • Heavier-weight...Read more
Agile, Waterfall, and everything in between starts and ends with teams. No matter what role you play on the team you have the power to unlock the team’s real potential. No – this isn’t a talk on how to get a higher velocity while working less. This session is the practical view into HOW to become or inspire high performing teams. Join seasoned agile and leadership coach Jessica Soroky as she shares the secret to unlocking your own personal power first. Sick of talking conceptually? Don’t worry this session is all about giving you real tools and techniques you can start using today to take...Read more
Implementing Agile practices in a regulated industry has its own set of unique challenges. Learn what worked and didn't work at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) and WellCare Health Plans as they adopted Agile practices in product and software development within their regulated organizations.
Join Leon Sabarsky as he shares his advice and lessons learned on implementing Agile at the Blues and other healthcare organizations. Some or their particular challenges included scaling up, connecting with non-agile PMO’s, reconfiguring our traditional testing processes, and...Read more
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...Read more
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...Read more