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Project Management

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Measurement: Benchmarking to Chart Project Trends NEW
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

How can you compare the productivity and quality you achieve across the span of your projects—whether agile, waterfall, or outsourced? Join Michael Mah to learn about schedule, quality, and defect metric trends and how these patterns behave on real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to understand your own project trends for productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of software measurement, showing you these metrics in action. With hands-on exercises, learn how to use these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. Leverage these metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

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MB Configuration Management: Robust Processes for Fast Delivery
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous application build, package and deployment to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore. Bob Aiello presents an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change management and control, release management, and deployment which are the prerequisites for continuous delivery and DevOps. Bob describes current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, container based deployments including Docker, cloud computing, and mobile apps development—and reviews the industry standards and frameworks available in practice today. Take back an integrated approach to establish proper IT governance and compliance using the latest CM practices while offering development teams the most effective CM practices available today.

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MD Eight Steps to Kanban
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

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ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.

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MG Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.

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MH Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Michael Sowers, TechWell Corp.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Mike identifies several metrics paradigms and discusses the pros and cons of each.

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MI Building Cross Platform and Mobile Apps with XAML NEW
Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

To make it possible for designers and developers to collaborate and build compelling user interfaces using the same assets, Microsoft created the extended application markup language XAML and introduced it in the release of the Windows Presentation Foundation. Based in XML and using language features that enable data binding, templating, styling, and adaptive layouts, it creates the interfaces declaratively and efficiently. XAML has appeared in Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Metro and has now gone cross platform to Android and iOS with Xamarin. Mike Benkovich begins with the basics of XAML—controls and containers, options for layout including canvases, stack panels and grids, and responsive layouts that take advantage of the available screen real estate. Next Mike dives into XAML advanced data binding and converters. Finally, he takes a brief look at Xamarin to show how you can deliver great applications across platforms on almost any device.

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MJ Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Employing lean principles, you optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, cross-functional teams, implementing pull, and managing work in process. Ken describes how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.

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One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may now think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.

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ML Test Attacks to Break Mobile, IoT, and Embedded Software NEW
Jon Hagar, Independent Consultant
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile, IoT, and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile, IoT and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of ten attacks against mobile, IoT, and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software today. Like software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be customized for particular contexts. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack, who should conduct the attack, and why the attack works to find bugs. In addition to learning these testing concepts, attendees will get to practice the attack pattern on devices containing mobile, IoT and/or embedded software—so bring your smart phones.

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MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

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MN Planning, Architecting, and Implementing Test Automation within the Lifecycle
Michael Sowers, TechWell Corp.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little to no consideration of an overall plan, architecture, or the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test automation journey in large and small enterprises. Discover approaches to ensure that the test tools you currently have and the new test tools you acquire or develop will work well with other testing and application lifecycle software. Explore approaches to drive test automation adoption across multiple project teams and departments, and communicate the real challenges and potential benefits to your stakeholders.

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TA Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.

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TB Requirements Engineering: A Hands-On Practicum SOLD OUT NEW
Erik van Veenendaal, Improve IT Services BV
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

Identifying, documenting, and communicating requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are How do we discover the real requirements?, How do we document requirements?, and How do user stories, use cases, and epics fit into requirements? Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions. Practice specifying and evaluating traditional requirements and user stories while learning how to gather information through varied elicitation techniques. Explore the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Learn a rule set for determining how much documentation you need for “good enough” requirements. Explore requirements review techniques—walkthroughs and inspections—to determine what will work best for you. Create a set of Golden Rules for requirements engineering that your project can use.

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TD The GROWS™ Method: A Modern Software Development Suite NEW
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

Join Agile Manifesto author Andy Hunt and Jared Richardson to learn about GROWS™, a modern development approach that’s built around the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition and deliberate experimentation to guide project decisions. Incorporating existing practices, it's a methodology designed to improve both initial adoption and on-going evolution of your team and organization. Andy and Jared describe GROWS in detail, diving into specific steps and practices for managers and executives. Learn techniques to share the company's vision effectively, and simple tools for managing progress without micromanaging. Know when a project is doing well—and when it's in trouble. Discover how to keep your team on track with the “3 Rs”—building on a Rhythm (their iteration cadence), building the Right thing (from the vision), and working the Right way (with craftsmanship and technical practices). Come, learn, and participate as Andy and Jared provide an understanding of the GROWS Method and how it can move your company forward.

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TE Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions SOLD OUT
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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 problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.

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TF Build Your Continuous Deployment Pipeline NEW
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

A great deal of confusion surrounds the concepts of release automation, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. How these concepts work progressively to achieve high-quality software delivery is generating a lot of discussion and controversy. Jennifer Bonine defines the methodology options, processes, and tools associated with release automation, as well as the differences between its maturity levels. Understand the benefits of more frequent, smaller releases, and the exponential risk generated by large, infrequent releases. Hear highlights of industry case studies that demonstrate the substantial speed, quality, and ROI gains of improving your release automation process. Acquire the insight and motivation needed to take the next step—from wherever your organization is now—toward full release automation. Learn to build your continuous deployment strategy, and discover ways to incorporate mobile and device testing into your plan. Start building out a roadmap using a case study and understand your options for building a continuous deployment pipeline.

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TH Test Estimation in Practice
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. Rob Sabourin says that the key to good estimates is to understand the primary variables, compare them to known standards, and normalize the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when very little is known about the project and what is known is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking, and estimation can become a nightmare. Rob provides a foundation for anyone who must estimate software testing work effort. Learn about the test team’s and tester’s roles in estimation and measurement, and how to estimate in the face of uncertainty. Analysts, developers, leads, test managers, testers, and QA personnel can all benefit from this tutorial.

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TI Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns on their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides you through the rest of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.

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TK Mobile App Usability and UX for Developers and Testers
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Many enterprises  today are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis, although there are currently no formal models describing UX. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, UX becomes paramount. Phil Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving UX on the mobile platform. To build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX, Phil gives examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.

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TL Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Principles and Practices NEW
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area 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 the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce delays in development by decreasing re-work. Through interactive exercises, Ken shows how acceptance tests created during requirement analysis decrease ambiguity, increase scenario coverage, help with effort estimation, and act as a measurement of quality. Join Ken to examine issues with automating acceptance tests including how to create test doubles and when to insert them into the process. Explore the quality of tests and how they relate to the underlying code.

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TN Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development
Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways that test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection, appropriate automation design, and team collaboration can be combined to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams. Learn how automation supports and drives agile testing activities, and how test automation is implemented in diverse organizations. Rob illustrates many types of automation with sample test descriptions, source code, and test scripts. See examples of automated tests for TDD, acceptance test-driven development, and behavior driven-development. Leave with a new toolkit of agile automation methods and techniques.

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Keynotes

K1 The Care and Feeding of Feedback Cycles
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 8:30am

Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.

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K2 Continuous EVERYTHING: How Agile Is Changing Our World Forever
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 10:00am

Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.

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K3 Introducing the GROWS™ Method for Software Development
Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 8:30am

Agile software development is in a rut. Agile is consistently misapplied, misunderstood, misused, and then, all-too-often abandoned. Worse than that, many popular agile methods are not actually agile. They've remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. And despite preaching inspect and adapt, users adopt and forget, following practices by-the-book and suffering when a practice conflicts with their local context. Join Andy Hunt as he describes the GROWS™ Method—a new approach to software development. The GROWS™ Method is based on four key ideas—the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, and local customization. The Dreyfus Model speaks to limitations in human cognition and problem solving. Evidence-based practice is a framework for first-class experiments that encourage us to make decisions and answer questions with actual outcomes—not wishful thinking or popular folklore. Inclusivity includes more of the organization than just the developers, and local customization makes adaptation to individual environments a first-class part of the method. It’s now time to grow software development beyond the limitations of agile.

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K4 Scaling Agile: A Guide for the Perplexed
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 4:15pm

Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.

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Concurrent Sessions

DW1 DevOps @Scale: Overcome Enterprise Adoption Challenges
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

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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DW2 Bringing Continuous Delivery to Dell.com: A Retrospective
James Watt, Dell, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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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DW3 Agile and DevOps Transformations in Large Organizations
Siraj Berhan, Royal Bank of Canada
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

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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DW4 Continuous Integration Is for Everyone—Especially DevOps
Chris Riley, Sauce Labs
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

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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DT1 Evolve Your Development Practices: Agile to DevOps to Continuous Delivery
Anders Wallgren, Electric Cloud
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

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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DT2 Advance ALM and DevOps Practices with Continuous Improvement
Jason St-Cyr, Nonlinear Digital
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 11:30am

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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DT3 Continuous Delivery in a Legacy Shop—One Step at a Time
Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

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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DT4 Rethinking Test Automation in a DevOps Era
Kalyana Konda, Gallop Solutions
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

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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