DevOps East 2017 - Scaled Agile Development
Sunday, November 5
Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training
Certified ScrumMaster Training
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile
Agile Test Automation—ICAgile
Monday, November 6
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...
Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices
PreviewLean 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...
Leading Successful Organizational Change Efforts
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...
Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven Development
PreviewDefining, 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
Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices
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...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
Preview Sold Out!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....
What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile
PreviewMaybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all of the customers who derive value from it, you can make...
Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development
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 to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams by combining test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection,...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
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...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
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...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. If you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get the most out of them—we...
Leading Your Agile Transformation: A Workshop
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...
Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies
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...
Wednesday, November 8
Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software
PreviewThe machine learning age is well underway. Today’s software can see novel patterns that humans are unable to see and improve task performance based on experience. Learning algorithms are widely used for varied purposes, including loan approval, intrusion detection, fraud prevention, risk analysis, and online sales optimization. Yet, like the proverbial cobbler who left his children shoeless, software practitioners have been slow to apply the benefits of machine learning to their own work. Join Stephen Frein for a tour of the current machine learning landscape and its most popular...
You Might Be an Agile Leader If...
PreviewIn 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...
Measure Anything: The Quality, Productivity, Predictability, and Engagement Model
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...
A Customer Value-Driven Model for the Agile Enterprise
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,...
The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team
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...
The Mass Extinction of Manual Processes: A DevOps Success Story
PreviewLarge organizations can be filled with manual processes, and many people feel they are stuck with them. Bill Roberts and James La Spada tell the story of how Capital One used DevOps culture and kanban principles to significantly increase the speed of feature delivery—while lowering risk. Their team took the name Meteor, inspired by the big one that took out the dinosaurs, because they wanted to cause the mass extinction of these manual processes. Work at Capital One was previously completed manually, and many inefficiencies were evident. Bill and James helped drive the...
The Top Five Agile Concepts That Most Companies Completely Miss
PreviewOrganizations 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...
They Said, We Said: Bridge the Communication Gap with Behavior-Driven Development
PreviewHave 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...
A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development
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
Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value
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...
We Are Doing Agile But, But, But …
“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...
Awesome Agile and How We Did It: Halogen’s Journey
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)...
Agile Testing Is All about Risk—Not Bugs and Quality
PreviewMany 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....
To Estimate or Not to Estimate, is that the Question?
Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice, or why you would want to move toward NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz or read Vasco Duarte’s book. Maybe you simply want to understand how you can spend less time estimating and more time delivering working software—all while providing your customers with some understanding of predictability. If so, Matthew Phillip will help you understand through lessons learned with NoEstimates what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. Join Matthew to learn how to move from upfront intuition-based estimates to create a data-...
Sustaining Agility—After the Consultants Leave
PreviewOrganizations 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...
Put Agile to the Test: A Case Study for Test Agility on a Large IT Project
PreviewAgile 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...
Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication
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...
Scale: The Most Hyped Term in Agile Development Today
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...
Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile Transformation
Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...
Help! The Scrum Master *is* the Impediment
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...
Design by Discovery to Stop Building Bad Software
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...
Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile Teams
PreviewA 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...
Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile Game
PreviewMetrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to...
Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile Teams
PreviewAs 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...
Friday, November 10
Building an Agile Organization at Light Speed
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...
Transform a Product Team to Agile—and Live to Tell About It
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.
The Yin & Yang of Agile Success at Dude Solutions
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.”
Leverage Big Wall Planning for Truly Aligned Organizational Execution
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...
Aligning Toward Business Agility–360° of Freedom
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...