DevOps East 2017 - Managing Risk | TechWell

Conference archive

DevOps East 2017 - Managing Risk

Sunday, November 5

Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 5:30pm

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification. Find out 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.

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.
Arlen Bankston
LitheSpeed

Certified Scrum Product Owner

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Learn the skills needed to assume the hardest role in Scrum, a Product Owner. Taught by leading agile practitioners, this course provides real-world techniques that have been proven effective. Successful participants are registered as a Certified Scrum Product Owner (CSPO) with the Scrum Alliance.

Monday, November 6

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
MK

Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions

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

You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster—ready to take on the world. Then reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from What is management’s role on a scrum project? to How do we manage dependencies...

Tuesday, November 7

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TC

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders

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

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....

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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

Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...

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...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TI

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
TL

Leading Your Agile Transformation: A Workshop

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tim Lister
Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
TM

Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Tim Lister, along with five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild, have compiled project patterns from their combined 150 years of consulting, and have described them in their Jolt Award winning book, Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. We all talk about best practices but only a tiny minority of organizations actually practice them all. Not to worry, think of “best practices” for human health. We know all about them, but very few of us actually practice them all. Maybe if someone did arduously practice all health practices, they...

TN

The Lost Art of Live Communication

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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. 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 competencies and see how you...

Wednesday, November 8

BW1

Keep Engagement High in Difficult Projects

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

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...

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...

Mario Moreira
Vistaprint
AW4

A Customer Value-Driven Model for the Agile Enterprise

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

Are you looking for ways to ensure your teams are always working on the highest customer value ideas? Do you want the ability to quickly adapt to microchanges in the market? Do you want end-to-end visibility of work across the enterprise from inception to delivery? If so, this session with Mario Moreira is for you. Discover how to operate in an agile manner at every level of your enterprise and gain the business benefits it can bring. Mario explores innovative concepts such as enterprise kanban, lean canvas, cost of delay, agile budgeting, discovery mindset, incremental thinking,...

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...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
BW4

The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team

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

Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us...

Niranjalee Rajaratne
Third Bridge
BW6

A Holistic Approach to Software Quality: Yes, You Can!

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

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...

Rob Keefer
POMIET
AW8

Fail Smart, Not Just Fast: Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

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

You’re a professional project manager or ScrumMaster. Your software development projects never fail because you follow all the best practices. Right? We all know better. Unfortunately, many projects fail, and they fail due to issues outside the team's control. The reality is that we need to reconsider what failure looks like and plan for it when it happens. Rob Keefer introduces a tool—Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)—that has been used in engineering disciplines for many years and successfully applied to software development project management. FMEA shines a light on the...

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions
BW9

Word Smatter: Exploring Semantics, Testers, and Problems

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

“Testers [do|don’t] (help) [prevent|detect] problems.” Throughout his career, Damian Synadinos has encountered many variations of this phrase, which uses just a few small words to express many big ideas. It is important to understand what each word means individually to better understand the ideas they convey collectively. The study of the meaning in words is semantics. Damian begins with a brief and broad overview of semantics and some related ideas, which set the stage for deep analysis of each individual word and its potential meaning. We consider: Testers—What might this word mean in...

Thursday, November 9

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
K4

Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

For decades, product development has been focused largely on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the true goal—delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value...

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....

Logan Daigle
VersionOne
DT4

Measure DevOps for Objective Continuous Improvement Practices

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

Logan Daigle says DevOps has brought about unprecedented changes in the way organizations solve problems and break down silos. DevOps is empowering employees to automate expensive processes and leverage the power of cross-functional teams to benefit development and operations culture. DevOps is helping bridge a culture gap and focuses on providing shorter feedback loops with more responsiveness to failure. But are we missing something here? Do we really know how much all of these process and automation improvements cost? Do we really know if we are improving our products, processes...

Siva Katir
PlayFab, Inc.
BT5

Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse

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

Most of us dread failures. But things go wrong. We can become paralyzed by the fear of being the creator of the next outage or critical bug. After a failure, we often hold a postmortem, but this rarely addresses how we can be more proactive in preventing catastrophes. Considering our missteps, failures, and outright crash and burns, we can learn how to ask the right questions at the right time. Siva Katir has thirteen years of experience causing and surviving failures—from the mundane to the maddening. Siva shares the lessons he has learned analyzing his, his co-workers, and his...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
BT11

Putting the “Story” Back into the User Story

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

If you're using user stories for your agile requirements, you're not alone. They seem to have become the ubiquitous vehicle for communicating customer requirements to agile teams. And they work incredibly well in this regard. However, many teams are experiencing problems with them. Bob Galen does not believe it’s the story’s fault. Bob says we often forget the “conversation” part of the story—and more importantly, the storytelling part. When Kent Beck first described the idea of the user story, his original intent was to initiate or inspire a story-level conversation between a stakeholder...

Gene Chorba
Ionic Security
BT12

Implement Practical and Proven Encryption Practices

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

From its earliest times, software development has featured commercial and government-grade encryption libraries. Encryption libraries make it possible for organizations to protect data with the highest level of security. Gene Chorba says that despite a big push in the past few years to use encryption to combat security breaches, lack of expertise among developers and overly complex libraries have led to widespread implementation failures in business applications. Although any developers believe they know how to implement crypto, they haven't had any specific training in...

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...