Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Concurrent Sessions

Some perspectives imply Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else. Or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers, Scrum Masters, and leaders, will find difficult to impossible to master. This session intends to debunk those notions. Bob Galen subscribes to several generic notions in agile contexts. One is that everyone has leadership potential and can rise to be a leader. And the other is that everyone is a coach, can coach, and has a foundational responsibility to coach, regardless of their role. The only questions are will,...

With every commit, the threat landscape increases. One single vulnerability is all a hacker needs. Vulnerabilities have multiple sources, and you must have a plan for securing each potential risk vector and identify vulnerabilities early. In this session, we will describe defensive coding techniques you can use as a daily practice and how you can build a security champion program. We will practically cover ways of identifying security vulnerabilities in your IDE using CodeQL as a Static Code Analysis tool. This is an important step in the pre-commit stage to identify security...

When someone says DevOps, you probably think of tools: parsers, scanners, compilers, version controllers, and more. Or you may think of a cross-disciplined team with mix of skills to take a product from idea to deployment and maintenance. While DevOps does include both, tools and skilled staff are a fraction of what is needed to be successful. In this session, we will present the main ingredient for gaining the full benefits of DevOps: Psychological Safety. Unfortunately, Psychological Safety is often overlooked or over-simplified. If spoken about, it is often addressed in binary terms –...

The concept of Digital Transformation has been around for a while now, but COVID is the accelerant that brought it to the forefront of many organizations' minds. It has transformed your customers' habits and behaviors, changing how they want to interact with your organization. Today, the companies that leverage their digital assets and put the customer at the center of their organization are winning. In this session, Brandon will share a simple, three-step process for transforming your organization so that can compete with the "digital natives."

Testing automation has a reputation for being slow and unreliable, but automated tests which are not run as a part of the CI/CD pipeline are often ignored or written off when they don't pass. If nobody pays attention to the results though, automated tests are not very useful. Any tests which depend on another system will eventually break, unless special care is taken, keeping the addition of integration (or larger) tests to the build pipeline just out of reach. During this session, John Jenkins will show attendees how these larger tests can be reliably automated, so that these tests can be...

Careers used to be very linear; a ladder you would continue to climb up until retirement. But today we are discovering that careers are no longer strictly vertical. In this session, Kimberley Miller will challenge organizations to rethink their career development outlines and separate monetary promotions from job titles in order to create a robust working environment that encourages career development in all directions. Other topics Kimberley will cover include: - Do you have a track for individuals who are people vs. craft focused? For example, can someone progress in your company without...

Pause to innovate, and your company will cease to exist pretty quickly thereafter. In the current business climate, “innovation” should not just be a part of your company’s vision, but it also needs to be embedded in the cultural fabric of your organization and must be practiced relentlessly. As companies brace themselves for agile transformation, one key area that needs the utmost attention is—how to build a culture of innovation that can coexist with the agile delivery framework, or SAFe as we know it. In this session, we will focus on the significance of innovation and how an agile...

Everyone in your organization has probably discussed automation at least once. But who is responsible for automation? And what are the automation strategies for your organization? Several factors should be considered before jumping into automation. In this session, Lisette Zounon will share her personal experiences and cover case studies and successful quality transformation. Lisette will also cover what to consider for your automation strategies because it always depends on your organization and what you are trying to achieve. Attendee takeaways from this session include identifying your...

Over the past 25 years, software development has changed drastically due to evolving market demands. To respond to these needs, software development teams must reduce their time to market with releases that are more frequent. This has led the industry to move away from the waterfall methodology to agile development methodologies, thus enabling security to be engaged from inception instead of bolted on at the end of the process. While security methodologies rely more on a systematic and requirement-based approach to development much more conducive to the waterfall methodology, we must...

Júlio de Lima has lost count of the times he's heard people saying that he should start testing as soon as possible when working as an agile tester. However, no one told him how to do this practically. So he started thinking about how to anticipate his tests and managed to find a few ways: 1) Gather refinements and ask questions about quality risks, 2) prepare his testing strategy in advance, and 3) read the code and mentally compile the code and verify that the tests he planned would pass. Júlio can say that #1 and #2 helped him a lot, but #3 had a big impact on the software testing...

You have finally split your monolith into microservices. How do you validate a complex application and make it scale? Instead of having just one CI/CD pipeline, you have several. And as the number of microservices increases, so does the quantity of pipelines. As an outcome, managing pipelines for microservice applications can get out of hand, especially when you try to reuse common pipeline parts amongst different applications. If you apply monolithic solutions to microservice problems, you will have a bad time. If you treat microservices like monoliths, you’ll end up with thousands of...

An engaging and entertaining session that takes lessons from the Titanic maritime disaster and uses them as jumping off points for lessons about software quality. As an example—on the Titanic, the lookouts did not have access to binoculars, which impacted their ability to see icebergs in time to prevent the disaster. What tools are we missing that allow us to see problems coming? By presenting this topic as a series of stories instead of as a dry set of bullet points, people will take away key details and be able to apply them to their own unique situations.

Information Security teams are often viewed as a bottleneck to delivery. They are often viewed as tight fisted, slowing down the process and showing up late to the game. Are there techniques to ensure we have best in class security as we speed up our efforts to deliver customer value? Is there a way to help our InfoSec teams to remove the bottleneck label and feel like a part of overall delivery efforts? Robert Woods, Principal Consultant with Scrum Inc., will be sharing the simplicity of how with the application of the five CLEAR principles of agile scaling and security can have a seat at...

Leaders often don’t realize how their style impacts the people around them or their business results. Effective leaders give their businesses strategic and competitive advantages. During times of transformation, people’s feelings are heightened, from loss of control, interruption of power, fear of failure. We fall into reactive fear-based patterns instead of coming from a place of curiosity and creativeness. Organizations that commit to growing more effective leadership find they attain and sustain high levels of business performance. We are all leaders and can involve our entire...

Software development is hard and poorly implemented or broken tools, techniques, and patterns just make it worse. Learn to spot DevOps anti-patterns and how to work your way back to a sane way of working. Continuous Build is an anti-pattern that Tom Stiehm has seen often, where a team will have what they call Continuous Integration (CI) in place, but it only builds the code. There are no unit tests or static analysis run. Certainly, this is better than not building, but it leaves a lot of health check information on the table that is considered part of CI. Without this information, you can...