Agile + DevOps West 2019 - General Management

Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...

Unleash innovation with the simple rules of Liberating Structures. Using a subset of these 33 micro-structures, you'll learn how to enable groups of any size to work at the top of their intelligence. Liberating Structures offer a revolutionary solution to collaboration in groups by using a handful of simple rules to unleash and involve everyone. Learning to use Liberating Structures is like learning a new language. We will start with the basics - "1-2-4-all". Then we'll put them together into simple structures using "Appreciative Interviews". Finally, we'll move to advanced structures like...

DevOps is about creating alignment across the value stream for an application, service, or product. DevSecOps integrates security into this process, making the entire team responsible for delivering secure code that works and can be deployed and used securely. But how do you actually do that? What tools do you add to your DevOps pipeline to help make your software secure and provide your stakeholders with a high level of confidence that the software meets all security requirements & standards? In this tutorial Tom Stiehm will explore what security tools you can add to your DevOps...

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. Ryan Ripley says that 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...

What do you mean, who owns quality? The quality assurance team, of course—the kings and queens of quality, the masters of the tests, the lords of the sign-off. People often used to look down on quality assurance as less technical, the last to get their hands on the code, and the first to be blamed when things go wrong, but of course, agile adoption has changed the industry. These days we have cross-functional teams and develop test automation. But we also do "Scrummerfall" and have hardening sprints and stressful deadlines. Despite all of that planning, testing still often comes as an...

Technology is complicated and changes every day. Even leaders with a technical background and deep understanding of tools and processes have trouble keeping up, and it’s virtually impossible to be an expert on every single aspect of a product. How can you help your team if you have no idea what anyone is talking about? Engineers and developers have all experienced the frustration and difficulties of being led by someone deemed “nontechnical,” from promising a customer unrealistic deadlines or solutions to a lack of trust and a complete breakdown in communication. Victoria Guido will...

We set out to transform the world of work with agile, yet we've heard the Scrum sprint cycle described as a “hamster wheel,” an endless conveyor belt of backlog and sprint reviews that developers cannot escape. Join Melissa Boggs in a discussion about the pitfalls of a competitive culture and how we in the Scrum community, even with the best of intentions, could be accidentally responsible for continuing to spin the hamster wheel. Hero culture has been discussed before, but have we addressed our own potential culpability in creating it? We need to make sure that the principles and...

The challenge: Taking a newly formed distributed team from mediocre to high performing despite language/cultural/time zone differences, misunderstanding of Scrum and the "us" vs. "them" mentality. Join Kimberly as she walks through her journey with challenges in relationship building, shifting the agile mindset, lack of focus, and sad ceremonies. Kimberly has experimented with various ideas to bridge these gaps and has created an extensive toolbox to share with attendees and agile peers. Attendees will leave with real-world strategies on how to cultivate team identity, educate on agile...

Organizations are moving to Agile and DevOps to build and deploy software more rapidly. As they break down organizational silos to bring together testing, development, and operations, they often avoid or exclude security in their transformational efforts. Highly-regulated organizational leaders are often left wondering: Where does my traditional security organization fit into this new Agile/DevOps world? How do I know that my applications are becoming more secure, while still getting the advantages of rapid incremental, deployment? Alan will talk about his experiences with financial,...

Join Al Shalloway when he discusses the critical role that managers have in Agile adoptions. While teams need to self-organize, they need to do so in an effective eco-system which enables them to collaborate, communicate, and work across teams-effectively. Creating such an eco-system is management’s responsibility. Lean-thinking tells us to focus on the systems where the people are operating. We can do this because we trust them to be motivated and do their best. Lean provides a holistic view for the work done in an organization, which is even more important when a company doesn’t already...

Are you in a large, plodding enterprise but beginning, in the midst of, or considering a move towards DevOps? Unsure how or even if it will work, but know you have to make a move anyway? Do you want to hear from your peers on how they've managed so far? A pyramid discussion starts as a series of one-on-one conversations between the participants. After each pair hashes out their thoughts with each other, they join another couple to refine their points and hear pros and cons. After a while, those four join with four more, and so on until there is only one discussion with everyone sharing and...