DevOps East 2017 - Career/ Personal Development

An agile development mantra—Test early and test continuously—is rapidly becoming the mantra for DevOps as the business demands frequent releases of compelling functionality. As testers, our efforts to “shift left” and support continuous integration with automated (and manual) tests are disrupted by a number of factors. Access to constrained system components is one of the greatest challenges. Research has found that an application under test interacts on average with more than fifty separate components—less than half of which are reliably available when testing. So, how can we ensure that...

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....

In the past decade agile development has become mainstream in software development and now is spreading beyond software to other domains. It is important for leaders and managers to understand how to build, develop, and lead agile teams—not just for the organization but for their own careers. Ray Arell introduces a cohesive set of methods, practices, and principles to maximize business results from agile and lean development, while also cultivating a workplace where people thrive. The workshop topics are highly dynamic and customizable, and more than 80 percent of the discussion will be...

In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces—and even Lean Coffee “meetings.” Channeling comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and the...

Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team dissatisfaction, shares techniques to uncover hidden issues, identifies the most common traps project managers fall into, and offers general tips to avoid them. Now that you understand what could be impacting your team’s performance, Larissa guides you on how to minimize the dissatisfaction and keep the team...

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...

As software organizations grow, maintaining quality is vital. As digital transformation gains strength in the industry, both clients and IT demand increased delivery speed. Thus, traditional test methods are being challenged, and a paradigm shift is required that emphasizes testing and recognizes the need for expanded skill sets to meet this demand. However, quality is not all about testing. Niranjalee Rajaratne believes it is important to create a culture that supports a quality organization and understands the value it brings. She describes why we must choose and encourage processes that...

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...

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

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...

Automation is vital to modern testing. But if you listen to what testers complain about, problems with test automation is a recurring theme. We complain about how hard it is to add, run, or change tests. We grumble about how difficult it is to keep up with developers who keep breaking tests and bemoan the number of bugs missed by our automation. Dave Westerveld digs into some of these frustrations and shares real-life examples of automation anti-patterns. These include test bloat and some of the reasons for it, or what happens if we don't leverage automation in the right places....

Diversity is becoming the norm in everyday life. However, introducing global delivery models without a proper understanding of intercultural differences can lead to difficulty, frustration, and reduced productivity. Priyanka Sharma and Thena Barry say that in our diverse world, we need teams with people who can cross these boundaries, communicate effectively, and build the diverse networks necessary to avoid problems. We need to learn about cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural quotient (CQ). CI is the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is the cognitive,...

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.

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...