DevOps East 2017 - Agile & Lean Development, Principles, & Practices | TechWell

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DevOps East 2017 - Agile & Lean Development, Principles, & Practices

Sunday, November 5

Roland Cuellar
LitheSpeed

Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
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.
Sanjiv Augustine
LitheSpeed

Certified Agile Leadership

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Bob Payne
LitheSpeed

Certified ScrumMaster Training

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
This two-day Certified ScrumMaster® Training prepares you both to gain your ScrumMaster certification, and more importantly, to utilize it in complex situations and projects. Upon completion, you'll be eligible to take an exam allowing you to become a Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM).
Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.

Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Learn what agile is all about, why agile works, and how to effectively plan and develop software using agile principles. Upon completion of this course, successful attendees will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile (ICAgile), awarded the ICAgile Professional designation (ICP).
Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com

Agile Test Automation—ICAgile

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:00pm

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).

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.

Agile Tester Certification

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Learn the role of the tester in an agile team and explore agile testing processes in an interactive workshop. Successful attendees earn the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Testing (ICP-TST) designation. This course is also accredited for the ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Extension exam.

Monday, November 6

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MF

Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis 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...

MG

Leading Successful Organizational Change Efforts

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization, and it doesn’t get the support you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for organizational change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MI

Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven Development

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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 our difficulty 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. By decreasing re-work, ATDD has proven to dramatically...

Tuesday, November 7

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks
Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks
TA

Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you so, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). Agile, continuous delivery, and DevOps all promise the same dream—improved time to market through incremental delivery of quality software. So where should you focus? Max Griffiths begins by distinguishing DevOps from the other approaches and, rather than wrangling new words for old problems, helps refocus how to measure success. How long does it take you to commit and deliver code? Max shows how you can measure this through Value Stream Mapping, a crucial tool used to...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TE

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TH

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time—with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and without considering 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 the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test...

Wednesday, November 8

Anthony Crain
Blue Agility, LLC
BW2

Measure Anything: The Quality, Productivity, Predictability, and Engagement Model

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Measuring software development is difficult. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of complex initiatives (such as adopting agile) is even more difficult. One department at IBM struggled to reduce a list of 150 metrics down to a top twenty to use in consulting engagements. Through the years, nearly every one of Anthony Crain’s clients has asked him for help in proving that their teams were “getting better” at development. Nearly all of their measures were “adoption” measures showing how teams were doing agile. However, none of the metrics was focused on whether the development was...

Linda Cook
Project Cooks
AW5

Why Won’t They Pair?

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do your developers and testers pair—and do it in the best ways? If you can answer yes, then you are among the fortunate ones who have a trusting environment where people have confidence in their work. Unfortunately, a large number of development shops don’t practice pairing in any form. Pair programing was documented in Kent Beck’s book eXtreme Programming Explained, published in 1999. So why is it that eighteen years later many developers and testers do not practice this simple yet effective programming technique? Linda Cook addresses many reasons that people don’t pair. Drawing on...

Sean McKeever
Edgenuity
AW6

Balance Discovery and Delivery with Dual-Track Agile

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do your product teams frequently struggle to have groomed and well-defined stories ready for the developers? Do you find yourselves frequently in “feed the beast” mode to keep your development teams busy? Do your product teams have problems gaining shared understanding across product management, interaction designers, developers, and QA? If so, your product teams manifest the symptoms of single-track agile—and this session is for you. Sean McKeever explains the key steps in establishing dual-track agile methodologies at your organization, presents his experiences, and provides...

V. Lee Henson
AgileDad
AW7

The Top Five Agile Concepts That Most Companies Completely Miss

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Organizations claim to be going agile. Many agile leaders promise twice the results in half the time. Unfortunately, most organizations and leaders fail before they even start. In five basic concepts Lee Henson shares the reasons for their failures. First, focusing on the outcome instead of the output is critical for agile project success. Second, organizations that succeed are those that take time to eliminate technical debt and focus on test automation. Third, as organizations strive to be precise in their estimates, they are learning that time-based estimation was never intended...

Sheetal Patel
The Vanguard Group
AW9

They Said, We Said: Bridge the Communication Gap with Behavior-Driven Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Have you heard that only 36 percent of business features built into software are actually used by end users? And why do we get functionality that fails to work as expected? One of the age-old problems between IT and our clients is that we don’t speak the same language. Sheetal Patel shares her experience of how behavior-driven development (BDD) introduces the bridge of common language that both IT and non-technical, business clients can speak to build the right product. Sheetal explains how collaborating on agile teams with BDD gains a common understanding among developers, testers...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
BW7

A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Lean software development has 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...

Thursday, November 9

Gitte Ottosen
Sogeti Denmark
AT1

We Are Doing Agile But, But, But …

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

“We are doing agile, but the only tests we do in a sprint are unit tests” or “We are doing agile, but we have a hardening phase at the end, which is really more of a system integration test” or “We are doing agile, but testing is done by a separate test team.” Sound familiar? Gitte Ottosen says that these agile transition failures prevent teams from getting the maximum value out of the agile context. Failing to create a mindset and environment where quality is built-in continuously and testing is an integrated part of the development lifecycle are risks not only to quality in classical...

Karen Holliday
Halogen Software
AT2

Awesome Agile and How We Did It: Halogen’s Journey

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many organizations struggle to achieve predictable, high quality software delivery. However, agile software processes are not prescriptive, and we recognize that processes are continuously evolving to improve delivery, consistency, and quality. Karen Holliday describes the challenges that Halogen Software experienced in the past five years as they moved from waterfall delivery to the agile/scrum development model. Karen shares the strategies implemented at Halogen that have led to a string of five on-time quality releases—including two early releases. Learn how to plan in an agile (ALM)...

Heather Fullen
Infinite Energy
AT3

Agile Testing Is All about Risk—Not Bugs and Quality

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many organizations make huge investments in software testing, and unfortunately they often don’t understand or extract full value from these activities. This can lead to testing being viewed as a mere formality or necessary evil within an organization. Fortunately, we can deliver more value with relatively minor adjustments to our approaches. The transition to agile practices provides a natural opportunity for test specialists and others to put these adjustments into practice. Plan-driven approaches can also be adjusted to increase the value delivered from testing activities....

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
BT3

Task-Oriented Unit Testing for Agile and Traditional Projects

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Developers are charged with developing software at lightning speed, often using new and unreliable technologies. Rob Sabourin shares a task-oriented method for organizing unit testing to help programmers and other team members get to consistently done working code, testing beyond the code. Rob approaches unit testing from the viewpoint of completing all the technical work required to fulfill a requirement, exercising the entire vertical technology stack and going beyond raw code. Programmers learn when and how unit test design can be implemented blending white box and black box techniques...

Susan Lin
Enable Agile
AT4

Sustaining Agility—After the Consultants Leave

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Organizations transitioning to agile often hire external consultants to help them become more agile. However, what tends to happen six months after the consultants leave is that the organization is often left with more—and different—problems than they had before. Susan Lin says this happens because the organization was not set-up to deal with the new challenges. Susan shares the Help Agility Stay framework and shows how you can help your organization grow and sustain agility by applying the three main principles of the framework—create a shared vision of agility, co-create a...

Todd Jones
Westfield Insurance
AT5

Put Agile to the Test: A Case Study for Test Agility on a Large IT Project

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Agile practices, although applicable to a variety of situations, are most commonly applied to IT projects, generally for software development. Can you apply agile methods to just part of a software implementation project? Todd Jones presents this case study where agile techniques were applied to the testing phase of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar IT program that included replacing a legacy system, new software development, creation of a new enterprise data model and document management solution, and complex financial balancing. After briefly describing the challenges faced by the...

BT4

Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Ever sit in a strategy review session and get little or no participation from others? Or feel like you left a planning session with a different understanding of what was agreed to? If you feel there must be a more effective way to communicate important information around your strategy and plans and you want a better way to document it so your stakeholders will both understand and engage in providing useful feedback, Jennifer Bonine has a solution for you. Join Jennifer as she describes mind mapping tools and techniques and explore how mind maps can help increase team velocity and...

Dave West
Scrum.org
AT7

Scale: The Most Hyped Term in Agile Development Today

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Scrum is everywhere. More than 90 percent of agile teams use it. But for many organizations wanting to scale agile, one team using Scrum is not enough. Dave West says the Nexus Framework, created by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, provides an exoskeleton for Scrum. Nexus allows multiple teams to work together to produce an integrated increment regularly. It addresses the key challenges of scaling agile development by adding new yet minimal events, artifacts, and roles to the Scrum framework. Dave discusses Nexus, addresses its boundaries, and explains what else is needed for agile...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AT9

Help! The Scrum Master *is* the Impediment

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The change in mindset necessary to become a servant leader is incredibly hard for a scrum master who comes from a command and control background. As a newly minted Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), Ryan returned to his team excited and ready to get underway with a scrum adoption, but he had not fully grasped the concept of servant leadership. Instead of being a change agent, he was an impediment. Ryan’s cautionary tale is a common one. Attendees will learn about the difficulties of becoming a scrum master, how scrum team members need to embrace the scrum values to promote healthy team...

Matt Wallens
Artifact
BT8

Design by Discovery to Stop Building Bad Software

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Two common situations lead to bad software—the project team isn’t aligned on the problem or the customer isn’t involved in the design process. Either way, you end up with a product that the business didn’t ask for, the tech team struggles to deliver, and customers don’t want. So, how do you increase confidence in the direction of your product and work together to build innovative solutions that bring the business, technology, and customers together? Garren DiPasquale and Matt Wallens introduce, a process to understand business goals and customer needs. It isn’t about designing screens or...

Jeff Dalton
Broadsword Solutions
AT10

Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile Teams

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton...

Steve Berczuk
Fitbit
AT12

Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile Teams

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

As teams grow, organizations often draw a distinction between feature teams, which deliver the visible business value to the user, and component teams, which manage shared work. Steve Berczuk says that this distinction can help organizations be more productive and scale effectively, but he recognizes that not all shared work fits into this model. Some work is best handled by “specialists,” that is people with unique skills. Although teams composed entirely of T-shaped people is ideal, certain skills are hard to come by and are used irregularly across an organization. Since these...

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
K5

Individuals, Interactions, and Improvisation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

As agile practitioners, we constantly strive to better ourselves, our team, and our delivery. A great way to achieve this is simply being open to learning new ideas from other disciplines—including improvisation. Jessie Shternshus shares her story of realizing the uncanny similarities between agile team principles and the pillars of improvisation. Effective improvisers give their teammates unconditional support, practice active listening and accept (and build on) each other’s ideas, see and use mistakes as opportunities, learn to embrace the unknown, and always consider who their audience...

Friday, November 10

Josh Anderson
Broadvine
SMT1

Building an Agile Organization at Light Speed

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 9:00am to 10:00am

Everyone loves the idea of explosive growth. Unfortunately, explosive growth often lives up to its name. Everywhere you look, things are blowing up. Josh Anderson shows you how to corral the chaos and provide your company with the growth it desperately needs.

The two key challenges of explosive growth are diametrically opposed: protect and support your existing teams and processes, while simultaneously growing an organization around them. To make that happen, you must walk the tightrope of process evolution as you grow your team. Josh shares real-world strategies you can use to...

Kevin Stilwell
Dude Solutions
SMT2

Transform a Product Team to Agile—and Live to Tell About It

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 10:15am to 11:15am

The idea of transformation can be both exciting and frightening. How do we shake off old ways of thinking? What will emerge when the transformation is complete? How will I know the transformation is finished? These are questions and challenges that many product teams face as they make the transformation to agile.

Kevin Stilwell shares his experience and techniques for shaking off old paradigms and practices to break the organizational “muscle memory” that exists in many companies. What emerges will be a high performing product team—and the reward will be well worth the effort.

Kevin Stilwell
Dude Solutions
Josh Anderson
Broadvine
SMT3

The Yin & Yang of Agile Success at Dude Solutions

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:00pm

In this mini-panel discussion Kevin Stilwell and Josh Anderson share their from-the-ground-up experiences building an agile organization and field participants’ questions. From their unique perspective Kevin and Josh share tactics and practices they used to build a high-performance agile organization. They are essentially sharing the “secret sauce” that made Dude Solutions a great example of “agile done well.”

Laura Burke
Ipreo
SMT4

Leverage Big Wall Planning for Truly Aligned Organizational Execution

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 1:00pm to 2:00pm

Love it or hate it, the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) was found to be the most used framework for enterprise-level agility in Version One’s annual survey. That said, many aspects of SAFe—including effective portfolio management—are difficult for organizations to implement.

Laura Burke Olson shares Big Wall Planning, a technique that Ipreo uses to “seed” their release trains with high-priority, high-value, and balanced portfolio-level epics. Big Wall Planning engages all aspects of company leadership in deciding the product roadmaps. This is a huge challenge in organizations that...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
SMT5

Aligning Toward Business Agility–360° of Freedom

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Friday, November 10, 2017 - 2:15pm to 3:15pm

What happens when the product vision is unclear? Simply put, your teams struggle to build valuable features and your customers are not happy. This lack of alignment eats away not only at the value you’re trying to deliver but also at your customers’ good will—and it can demoralize your teams.

Ryan Ripley examines the why behind your current practices and shows you how the agile values, principles, and ceremonies of an agile organization are designed to create and maintain alignment all the way from customers to individual team members. Drawing from real-world examples, Ryan explains...