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DevOps Concurrent Sessions

Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule, by choosing from track sessions Agile Development Conference East, Better Software Conference East & DevOps Conference East.

                           

Concurrent Sessions
DW1 DevOps @Scale: Overcome Enterprise Adoption Challenges
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Many companies are adopting DevOps practices to improve their application build, package, and deployment processes. DevOps requires that teams implement practices such as testing in production-like environments early in the process, using the same automated procedures to deploy in all environments, and getting Ops involved from the beginning of development. Bob Aiello acknowledges that individual teams are achieving success, but implementing DevOps across the enterprise has been far more difficult. Improving communications and collaborations between development, operations, and other key organizational units is a challenging endeavor. Many large firms, including banks and financial services firms, must maintain existing organizational structures for regulatory and audit compliance while focusing on eliminating siloed behavior that leads to mistakes and systems outages. DevOps @Scale requires that you assess existing best practices and create a plan for improving your existing process. Bob presents strategies for implementing DevOps across the enterprise to achieve reliable and secure systems that can be updated as often as necessary.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Bob Aiello.
DW2 Bringing Continuous Delivery to Dell.com: A Retrospective
James Watt, Dell, Inc.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Multibillion dollar sales portal Dell.com has more than 1,000 developers working in tandem to contribute content and code. This presents unique strategic challenges when it comes to selecting, planning, and deploying DevOps tools. James Watt presents a retrospective on transitioning one of the world’s largest grossing websites from a quarterly waterfall delivery cadence to weekly agile releases. Learn how “continuous” principles changed the way Dell.com improves its user experience and the tools that made it possible. Starting with a legacy waterfall delivery chain, the Buyer DevOps team had to design, develop, and roll out a staged plan to transition from monolithic integration environments linked by bespoke engineering to dynamically provisioned and continuously-tested cloud infrastructure based on industry-leading toolsets. James describes TeamCity and Octopus integration with Team Foundation Server and other Microsoft products, large scale C# Selenium test automation, and dynamic virtual environment provisioning along with continuous integration, continuous testing, and other rapid release concepts.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about James Watt.
DW3 Agile and DevOps Transformations in Large Organizations
Siraj Berhan, Royal Bank of Canada
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Many large scale organizations experience significant challenges as they pursue agile and DevOps transformations. They embark on adopting agile practices yet fail to reap the benefits of continuous release and delivery. Siraj Berhan explores common challenges—people, processes, technology, and operations—in the agile journey of large-scale organizations. Siraj explores a project suitability assessment tool for evaluating as well as mitigating risks specific to agile delivery, incorporating a time-and-material funding model, and maintaining a cross-functional self-managing team with a generalist-specialist attitude. Siraj discusses moving from a test-last mentality to a test-driven culture with a heavy emphasis on automation that supports continuous integration, release, and delivery. He offers suggestions for  promoting collocated development model to maximize the team’s agility and velocity while leveraging the usage of collaboration tools to its fullest. Explore ways to revamp engineering skillsets across the enterprise with practices and approaches that enable agility. Learn twelve helpful tips for getting started and additional advice for scaling your agile and DevOps journey.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Siraj Berhan.
DW4 Continuous Integration Is for Everyone—Especially DevOps
Chris Riley, Sauce Labs
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Continuous delivery and deployment are taking center stage in the DevOps conversations. Neither continuous delivery nor deployment are easy to jump into, and both make a lot of assumptions about the applications being released. Continuous integration (CI), however, is for everyone who wants higher development velocity and better quality. CI can be implemented in development shops from brand new to large enterprise teams. When implemented, CI helps the organization take a giant leap into modern development. With the ever-growing expectation for DevOps teams to produce faster, high-quality software releases, continuous testing—a key CI driver—must occur at all stages of the software delivery chain. Chris Riley covers the important tenets of CI metrics, key CI components, testing, infrastructure, and end-to-end testing. Learn how CI can fit into all development shops, and take back strategies for tackling the challenges of a new system including change control, management, and sustainability.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Chris Riley.
DT1 Evolve Your Development Practices: Agile to DevOps to Continuous Delivery
Anders Wallgren, Electric Cloud
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Many organizations have successfully implemented agile methodologies to speed up software delivery. Agile, which started in the development organization, has gradually expanded into other areas downstream—IT and operations. Anders Wallgren describes how software organizations have streamlined processes, improved feedback loops, and driven a much faster pace into IT departments, bringing profound effects to the entire organization. Building on this success, DevOps and continuous delivery (CD) have emerged to help connect development with IT operations to support and amplify agility, responsiveness, and faster time to market. Learn how to embrace DevOps and CD in a manner that aligns with existing agile practices and uses automation to streamline the software delivery process. If you’re in the middle of a DevOps transformation or just starting the process, you will benefit from the tips Anders shares for assessing the current state of delivery success and the incremental steps he offers for gaining cooperation and collaboration when development and IT operations come together.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Anders Wallgren.
DT2 Advance ALM and DevOps Practices with Continuous Improvement
Jason St-Cyr, Nonlinear Digital
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Do you want to improve your application lifecycle and incorporate DevOps practices quickly with limited resources? If so, you’re experiencing a common scenario – not enough budget and unrealistic time constraints. Your big multi-year application lifecycle management (ALM) project seems less achievable than ever, and you are left wondering how to move forward. Jason St-Cyr shares how to establish a continuous improvement approach using “build, measure, learn” techniques and a DevOps maturity model to kickstart your DevOps/ALM project. Jason reviews some of the tools—Visual Studio Online, Atlassian OnDemand, and TeamCity—available to support iterative DevOps changes. Find out how to tackle smaller achievable chunks of process improvement, even when time does not seem to be on your side. Learn how to plan for incremental organizational change and examine metrics for monitoring improvements, reporting on success, and supporting your business case for further investment. Join Jason to see why you don’t have to put your organization’s DevOps initiatives on hold.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jason St-Cyr.
DT3 Continuous Delivery in a Legacy Shop—One Step at a Time
Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Not every continuous delivery (CD) initiative starts with someone saying “Drop everything. We’re going to do DevOps.” Sometimes, you have to grow your process incrementally. And sometimes you don’t set out to grow at all—you are just fixing problems with your process, trying to make things better. Gene Gotimer discusses techniques and the chain of tools he has used to bring a DevOps mindset and CD practices into a legacy environment. Gene discusses how his team started fixing problems and making process improvements in development. From there, they tackled one problem after another, each time making the release a little better and a little less risky. They incrementally brought their practices through other environments until the project was confidently delivering working and tested releases every two weeks. Gene shares their journey and the tools they used to build quality into the product, the releases, and the release process.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Gene Gotimer.
DT4 Rethinking Test Automation in a DevOps Era
Kalyana Konda, Gallop Solutions
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Adoption of DevOps enables rapid build and release cycles in a continuous delivery environment. Kalyana Konda shares insights about how test teams can contribute to delivering high-quality applications by becoming an upstream quality co-creator rather than a downstream quality validator, thus implementing a continuous feedback loop to respond to customer needs and concerns. Kalyana discusses how to create a DevOps-friendly test automation strategy to ensure you overcome bottlenecks and reap the benefits of a successful DevOps implementation. This means using test automation extensively for quick, thorough, and frequent validation of changes to the application. He explores why and how to include the rapid provisioning/tearing down of test environments in the cloud, integrate automated test scripts with build management systems, and build enterprise test automation frameworks. Learn ways to report test results that verify quality aspects of the application throughout the lifecycle. Take back new automation approaches that drive multiple types of tests using different test tools and programming languages with centralized test initiation.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Kalyana Konda.