DevOps West 2017 Focus - Development | TechWell

Conference archive

DevOps West 2017 - Development

Monday, June 5

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
MA

Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Git clients and the GitHub cloud have achieved an enviable adoption rate. Major corporations as well as open source projects now host their code on GitHub. Developers, DevOps, and non-technical writers alike now use Git to work with text files in a way that enables them to go back to specific versions at any point in time. Websites at GitHub.io are proliferating. Job interviewers look to GitHub to gauge each individual's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Join Wilson Mar in this hands-on tutorial to become immediately productive with these vital tools. Wilson has...

Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton & Associates
MB

Great Product Design with User Story Mapping

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Monday, June 5, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer and user...

Tuesday, June 6

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
TG

Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX): Keep Your Users Coming Back

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Tuesday, June 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you do that? With a UX that...

Wednesday, June 7

Neal Ford
ThoughtWorks
K2

Modern Evolutionary Software Architectures

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later.” Modern advances in architecture have shown that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. Neal Ford describes a family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, how we can build evolvable systems, and how to retrofit existing ones. He discusses three key concepts that support evolutionary architectures. Incremental change covers engineering practices to support continuous delivery and DevOps. Neal explains how fitness functions build...

AW2

The Future of Scrum

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

In the past two decades, Scrum has become the standard for agile development, with more than 90 percent of teams today using Scrum to deliver working software. But, as Scrum starts into its third decade, it’s not the fresh-faced process framework that came into the world in the summer of 1995. In an industry that survives on the bleeding edge of trends will there continue to be a role for Scrum, or will its events, artifacts and roles be consumed by other process frameworks? What really is the future of Scrum? Dave West reviews the past, present, and future of Scrum, using real data from...

BW1

From Monoliths to Services: Paying Your Technical Debt

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Ever since distributed software became popular, developers have been choosing whether to use monolithic architectures or service-oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier. David Litvak describes how a monolithic application—due to its ever increasing technical debt—can become too big to support. He explores how to gradually reduce the size by extracting its components into smaller services, so ultimately the application is decoupled and highly...

Ken Johnston
Microsoft
BW9

Drive Product Improvements with Telemetry

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Wednesday, June 7, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Do you want to know how real users are interacting with your product? Do you want to know which features they don’t use? Would you like to understand how your product works internally under real operational conditions? Then you need telemetry—the instrumentation of your product to record this information and transmit it back to you for analysis. Windows 10 implemented this capability. Today, there are more than 450 million devices running Windows 10 providing constant feedback on its operation. Ken Johnston says Microsoft learned a lot about what they did right for that launch—and what...

Thursday, June 8

Melissa Tondi
Disrupt Testing
BT1

Finding Efficiencies in Your Development Lifecycle

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares...

Nichole Vanderlaan
Amway Corporation
AT5

Visual Management Gone Wild

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

A visual management system is a low-tech tool with a simple mission—to visually represent the work that the team is doing. When used regularly and correctly, it can be a project acceleration tool. However, teams often go wild with visuals, decorating every inch of free wall space with gridlines, Sticky Notes, and project stats until it looks like the arts and crafts store vomited all over the office. Nichole Vanderlaan refers to this as “wallpaper,” which is often static and fails to provide much benefit. She highlights common failure modes that result in wallpaper such as not huddling...

Max Guernsey
Net Objectives
BT5

Six Ways to Improve Class Design for Better Software

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Decomposing a system design into small classes with narrow responsibilities is essential for creating a maintainable software product. However, without guidance, it can often be difficult—especially for new software developers—to see how a large class might be broken down into smaller pieces. The problem usually isn’t knowing how to make a change, it’s knowing what change to make. Max Guernsey shares six techniques that can ease the burden of identifying smaller design elements. These include direct examination of code qualities, modeling real-world entities, responding to code smells,...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
BT6

The #NoEstimates Movement

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

When will you deliver that feature? How much will this project cost? What can I have right now? All of these are reasonable questions that both management and customers want answered. The problem is that when developers try to answer these questions, often more harm than good results. Estimates turn into commitments, dollars are committed based on misinformation, and all parties involved end up feeling cheated and confused. Ryan Ripley explains that the #NoEstimates movement is a critical look at how estimates are used in the software industry. Are estimates needed at all? Is getting...

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions
BT7

Improv(e) Your Requirements

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created spontaneously, in the moment. Successful improvisers learn and use a variety of skills and techniques which allow them to better extract ideas, expand on them, and make them meaningful and manifest. Now, reread the previous sentence but replace the word “improvisers” with “analysts.” In many ways, improv is a great analogy for requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In this highly interactive session, Damian Synadinos uses his extensive experience with improv and...

Janelle Klein
Open Mastery
K5

Identify Development Pains and Resolve Them with Idea Flow

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Thursday, June 8, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in software development is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos? Janelle Klein presents a novel approach to...