Agile + DevOps West 2023 - Concurrent Sessions
Concurrent sessions offer attendees the flexibility to explore a variety of topics throughout the conference on Wednesday and Thursday in order to customize their learning experience. Learn both enterprise foundations and new methodologies to grow your skills, supercharge your knowledge, and re-energize your career growth.
Wednesday, June 7
Being a Courageous Leader
Have you ever felt like you needed to defend your leadership principles or approach? Where the momentum and status quo seems to be counter to your goals? You would not be alone. Once during a tense re-organization discussion, Tricia was warned to step back with “We have real leaders here. Not ones that focus on the fluffy stuff you do. We don’t have time for all of that.” Although she was tempted to respond with things that would be very inappropriate, Tricia understood that evolving the world of leadership required courage. In this session, expect to consider and adapt several tips for...
Everyone...Is an Agile Coach
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,...
Avoiding the Chaos of an Agile Transformation
Agile is not a fairy tale. You have to face real life challenges and be well prepared in order to succeed. The reality is the bigger and older your organization is, the more difficult it is to pass through process level changes and that's when chaos is born. Resolving all the issues with chaos could potentially take years. In this session, Peter will share his story of one of his projects where he had to face numerous obstacles as a Test Manager in achieving proper agile implementation and to raise the quality of the products of his client. Some of the obstacles included: - Agile...
The Art of Defensive Programming
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...
DevOps, Development Cadence, and the Product Lifecycle
In many DevOps initiatives, the DORA metrics are treated as the gold standard. When teams have good scores on deployment frequency, lead time for changes, time to recover, and change failure rate, we assume that we are on track, but this steady-state view doesn’t align with the fact that innovation and delivery are often episodic and have cadences that vary cross the product lifecycle. In this session, we’ll look at the general issue of development and delivery cadence, and explore a model based on Kent Beck’s 3X which allows us to interpret and target DORA performance in terms of the...
Full-Stack Psychological Safety: Go Beyond the Front End
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 –...
Where the Rubber Meets the Road: How to Integrate DevOps with Development Teams
More engineering teams are adopting the use of DevOps practices in their product delivery, but sometimes it can be a struggle to integrate DevOps engineers into their organization and benefit from the investment they make in doing so. In other words, how can product owners gain a return on their investment in DevOps practices, which will lead to the benefits that DevOps promises? The solution begins with the DevOps engineers themselves and how they interact with the teams they support. It continues with the way their solutions are presented and adopted by their development team, and how...
Three Steps to Digital Transformation
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."
Shifting Left the Right Way–Improving DevSecOps
"Shift left" is the mantra of DevSecOps. The closer to our developers that we can move the prevention of a security vulnerability being introduced to our codebase, the cheaper and faster it is for our organization. However even in 2023 old vulnerabilities find their way into new pull requests and merges. We can't continue to "shift left" and hope for the best. Instead, our focus needs to turn to providing the right tools and resources to our developers at the right time. Proper techniques need to be as friction free as shortcuts, workflows integrated, and correction offered in clear...
You Want to Test What in the Build Pipeline? How to Move Integration, E2E, and Other Large Tests Reliably into the CI/CD Pipeline
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...
Build Containerized Applications Using Docker and Azure
This session will cover the development & deployment of containerized ASP.NET Core 6 apps using Docker and Azure and architectural design & implementation approaches using .NET and Docker containers. The different services to deploy on Azure like Azure Container Registry, Azure Container instance, Azure Container Apps, and Azure Kubernetes Services as an orchestrator will be reviewed. We will also create the different resources and explore the different tools and properties if attendees prefer not to use Docker-Compose.yml. Then we will deploy our application that's based on...
Rethinking Career Development
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...
Are You Scaling Agile or Just Failing Agile?
One of the limitations of standard agile methodologies is that they are designed to operate primarily at the team level, with product owners, developers, testers, and other disciplines working together as a single team. So when you want to adopt agile practices on large programs or within large organizations, you will need to think about how do you scale your agile processes. However, many of the “off the shelf” agile processes are not really agile at all, resulting in organizations breaking one of the cardinal rules of the agile manifesto - individuals and interactions over processes and...
Driving Innovation in Agile Organizations
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...
Cloud Computing 101
If you've always been curious about the cloud, or have had questions about how to start building in the cloud, this session is for you! You’ll learn what the different resources and services are available in the cloud, when to use them, and how to deploy them in the cloud. You'll also learn how to solve common challenges via cloud compute. You’ll get an overview of Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Software as a Service and how each service can be used when you build on the cloud as well as tips on how to best set up your cloud security. We'll also do an...
What Are Your Automation Strategies?
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...
Empowering DevOps with OpenAI
AI is upending everything about the SDLC. For example, Microsoft has monetized GitHub Copilot, their AI development assistant, and now 40% of the code users check into GitHub is written by the AI. However, using Copilot is still highly dependent upon developer adoption and not fully integrated into the CI/CD pipeline and Paul wanted to bring AI into our agile process and DevOps environment. In this session, Paul Klinker will discuss how he and his team decided upon a phased approach for their customers, starting with integrating OpenAI into the CI/CD pipeline to enable greater visibility...
Thursday, June 8
What Does a DevOps Manager Do?
As a DevOps Manager, Jessica Fritsch often finds herself educating people about what she does and why she does it whenever she joins a new team or organization. She also finds engineers have lots of questions about management and if they really want to go down that path in their career. This session will address both of these problems - educating people about what a DevOps Manager's job is like, so that current DevOps Managers and engineers looking to get into management have a answer to the question, "What does a DevOps Manager do?" Highlights from this session will include a day in the...
Balancing Agile and Cybersecurity Implementation
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...
360 Degree View of Agile Mindsets
Agile presentations frequently discuss the difference between doing versus being agile and the importance of shifting to an Agile Mindset. They also mention the role of an organization’s culture in making that shift. But we don’t spend much time trying to understand the underpinning values that shape those mindsets or the influence that mindsets and culture have on one another. For those of us instantiating agility in an organization, the biggest challenge is working up and down the organizational hierarchy to shift individual mindsets. To do that we have to 1) understand the internal...
Collaborating Effectively as a Tester to Anticipate Defects in Code Review
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...
Why Kubernetes Applications Require a New Approach to Testing Using Testkube
Microservices, CI/CD, DevOps, GitOps, cluster networking, etc.—more and more teams are building software fundamentally differently than they did even a few years ago. However, testing approaches and tooling have not caught up yet. At least not until now. What if you could apply the same type of GitOps and DevOps methodologies to your testing activities? Tests could be deployed and stored in a Kubernetes cluster, they could be decoupled from your CI/CD, orchestrated in the cluster in the same way you do with your applications and not in your CI/CD, publish results aggregated in a common...
Best Practices: CI/CD with Micro Services
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...
The Power of Personal Engagement
Two steps forward in professional scrum. Come and explore the advantages of personal engagement. What makes a team thrive? How do you increase the maturity of a scrum team? What tools can you use to wake up from zombie scrum? Do you want to understand how to increase your team's engagement and help your team grow? In this session, we will help you advance forward by using scientific principles and practical tools by starting with personal engagement. We will share how to increase personal engagement, we will provide you with tools to get everyone involved, and we will help you gain insight...
What the Titanic Disaster Can Teach Us About Software Quality
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.
Scaling Agile and DevOps Capabilities
It is important for businesses to understand scaling agile and DevOps capabilities before considering an agile transformation. In this session, Dr. Tawanna Sargent will share her experience joining a business that wanted to go through an agile transformation, but leadership didn't know how to make this happen. Dr. Sargent quickly learned about the organization and discovered that structure and alignment did not adhere. This session will dive into the key lessons learned including creating synergy and autonomy in teams, SAFe improving DevOps, identifying ineptitudes, and embracing the...
The Fast Lane: Security at the Speed of Agility
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...
Migrating Healthcare Data for All 50 States
Is it possible to test millions of healthcare records for the entire country? Sure it is. But what about in an agile environment that requires a quick feedback loop? This session will share a case study on how Dan Reale and his team were up against a tight deadline and struggling to test a data migration. With two testers on their scrum team and constantly shifting requirements, the team tested one state a day for their MVP launch. They realized this was not sustainable if they wanted to test all 50 states, so they implemented an automation framework that could help test faster. Taking...
The Impact of Leadership Effectiveness
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...
Using Neuroscience to Boost Your (Scrum) Events
Inspired by Sharon Bowmans’ Training From the Back of The Room, this session will explore how you can use brain science to keep scrum events live, active, and worthwhile. For example, research shows that our brain 'disconnects' after ten minutes when nothing changes. In a training setting, you would use this knowledge to change the setting regularly, or to make short exercises or chunks of information. In a scrum event, you could use this knowledge also. How? That's what we will explore during this session. You will learn about neuroscience and how you can use it to activate your brain and...
Continuous Build and Other DevOps Anti-Patterns and How to Overcome Them
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...
A Journey in Improving Test Pipeline Stability
Building automated tests is only the first step. The true challenge is building them with high enough reliability that they can be run as part of a deployment pipeline. But understanding how to get to that point is hard, and getting to that point often seems unsurmountable. This session will focus on exactly how Olo went from having a few hundred tests being triggered manually, to having thousands of tests running as part of a deployment pipeline. Brian Kitchener will give concrete examples of what tools were used at each step of the process, what challenges were faced, what tools needed...