Agile + DevOps East 2019 - Project Manager
Customize your Agile + DevOps East 2019 experience with sessions covering project management.
Monday, November 4
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
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...
Learning How to Lead High-Performing Agile Teams
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, training, and even the empathy—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized at best, and in the worst cases even vilified. But Bob Galen and Mary Thorn contend that there is a central and important role for managers and leaders within agile environments. Join Bob and Mary as they explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders. Examine why those who understand servant leadership know how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team's...
Unleash Your Organizational Superpowers With Liberating Structures
NewUnleash 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...
What's Your Leadership IQ?
Have you ever needed a way to measure your testing leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine and Jeremias Rößler as they share a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies and the evolution of testing and testing leadership. They will explore a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how...
Tuesday, November 5
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Sold Out!Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
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...
Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and LEGOs
PreviewOrganizations today can no longer afford to deliver new features to their respective markets once a year or even once a quarter. In the attempt to catch up with the competition, they jump onto DevOps journey starting with the "How" and losing the sight of "Why" and "What". Join this gamified simulation tutorial to gain a solid understanding of foundational principles of the DevOps culture. Experience the benefits of DevOps transformation even before initiating one in your enterprise! This tutorial is ideally designed for organizations that are evaluating their approach to DevOps...
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
Sold Out!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 becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics,...
Wednesday, November 6
Journey without Fear: Leading Your Teams to High Performance
Psychological safety has been identified by Google’s Project Aristotle as a top condition for creating high-performing teams. Yet many organizations are affected by fear in the workplace. It manifests itself in employee disengagement, lack of innovation, a toxic working environment with gossip and rumors, and the best people resigning. How can we start taking the first steps away from the culture of fear and toward a culture of psychological safety? Join this interactive session to experiment with a Fear in the Workplace game and start these difficult conversations in a fun way. Experience...
Fixing Your Scrum - Practical Solutions to Common Scrum Problems
Broken Scrum practices limit your organization’s ability to take full advantage of the agility Scrum should bring: the development team isn’t cross-functional or self-organizing, the product owner doesn’t get value for their investment, and stakeholders and customers are left wondering when something—anything—will get delivered. Learn how experienced Scrum masters balance the demands of these three levels of servant leadership, while removing organizational impediments and helping Scrum teams deliver real-world value. Discover how to visualize your work, resolve impediments, and empower...
What “Good” Looks Like: The 4 Quadrants of Product Ownership
The product owner role was introduced in Scrum in 1993, so the role has been around for more than twenty-five years. Yet we still struggle with the nature of it. Is it simple or complex? Is it inward- or outward-facing? It is about backlogs and stories, or something more? And is ownership the whole point? Bob Galen will share his 4 Quadrants model for what "good" product ownership looks like in the real world. It will start with balance, because the role is so broad and deep in its nuance. There are product, project, analyst, and leadership parts to the product owner role, and we’ll...
Where Does Data Come From?
With all the tools available on the market, it can be overwhelming to figure out which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best for you to create a high-performing team. Join Jennifer Bonine as she explains the relationship between the DevOps cycle and your environment, and how a hub-and-spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She'll identify opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to...
DevOps for the Agile Practitioner
As an agile coach, ScrumMaster, or product owner, you interact with technical teams every day, even though you may not have a technical background yourself. You hear and read about DevOps all the time, but the truth is that you’re not really sure what DevOps is or exactly how it can help your company. You also have a feeling the executives in your company may be questioning whether their massive investment in agile is paying off. Lee Eason will help nontechnical agile practitioners understand exactly what DevOps is and why it’s valuable. You will leave understanding the background, key...
Continuous Delivery Dojo: From Doing Agile to Being Agile
PreviewState Farm adopted an innovative approach to a common problem many organizations face with agile transformation: How do you influence, nurture, and support a whole scale culture of agility? How do you move from doing agile to being agile? The solution was to institute a continuous delivery dojo. State Farm is going on its third year of supporting delivery teams at scale in enhancing agile maturity and establishing a continuous delivery culture. The dojo represents a dedicated place to work with teams to change mindsets, skill sets, and toolsets. It also represents an opportunity to...
The Transformation Mindset: A Leader's Guide to Embracing Agile
Many leaders want to transform their organization to become more agile, adaptive, and responsive to the market. However, most do not deeply understand how to lead their organization through such a massive change. They install prescriptive scaling frameworks and send employees to training, but discard the elements of true transformation that are difficult. When the inevitable failure ensues, they switch frameworks, fire people, and revert back to what worked for them in the past. What these leaders fail to recognize is that the mindset they used to build their organization conflicts with...
Small Batch Sizes Enable Everything—Even in the Government
PreviewLean practices teach us that small batch sizes optimize flow of value to market. Small batch sizes also help organizations focus on building quality into systems by enabling the power of continuous integration, encouraging faster feedback cycles, increasing our ability to debug, emphasizing a focus on simplicity, decreasing lead and cycle time, and discouraging "snowplowing" testing efforts. These practices are critical for building quality into our products. In the government sector, it also enables the alignment of traditional cost accounting methods, such as earned value...
Example Mapping: The New Three Amigos
Example mapping is a collaboration technique used by teams to help refine requirements. Every team should have a set of “ready” criteria that includes some kind of workshop between development team members to establish a shared understanding. In a time-boxed example mapping session, rules will summarize examples or constraints about a user story, and questions about outcomes or dependencies are documented for future refinement. The end result is requirements written as user behavior, with a shared understanding among all roles on the agile team. Come ready to participate in a live example...
Story Mapping Forward and Backward with DevOps
PreviewUser story maps capture the journey a customer takes with your product, including activities and tasks needed to make that journey a successful one. Typically they begin from the point where the customer has a problem and continues until the feature solving that problem is built. However, rarely do we see the story map include DevOps themes such as release and configuration management activities, or even feature activation. Join Catherine Louis as she guides you through the anatomy of a user story map, including DevOps aspects. You will create a story map from problem discovery to...
An Agile Fireside Chat with Linda Rising
Come get your questions answered by an agile expert! We won't have an actual fireside, but Linda Rising will be on hand to answer your questions and discuss the topics that are most important to you. Linda is an internationally known presenter on topics related to agile development, patterns, retrospectives, the change process, and the connection between the latest neuroscience and software development. And she wants to discuss whatever interests you. Bring your questions and be ready for a lively, interactive discussion.
Engaging Leadership: The Missing Piece for Enhancing Agile Adaptation
As W. Edwards Deming wrote, "It is not enough that top management commit themselves for life to quality and productivity. They must know what it is that they are committed to—that is, what they must do. These obligations cannot be delegated." To build and lead an agile organization, it’s crucial that senior leaders develop a new mindset and capabilities to transform themselves, their teams, and the organization. Join Reha Malik Gill as she discusses how to introduce the practices of design thinking, decentralization, and empowerment to assist you with transforming an agile organization. It...
The MVP Mental Model
Here is a question we should all ask ourselves when building new software: Am I building in small chunks? Thinking and actions around the minimum viable product (MVP) are vital in creating a shift to full team and organizational agility. Agile methods work great when building, testing, and learning in small, discernible, discrete pieces is the norm. If there is not a shift to smaller increments or even an understanding of how to do that, the agile transformation is going to be in trouble. Jim Grunder will show how to move team and organizational planning approaches to fundamentally smaller...
DevOps Panel: Compliance While Moving Faster
Do you want to move at the speed of DevOps, but need to show compliance to your organization, a governing body, or through regulation? Are you already struggling with compliance and want to know how DevOps could help? Come listen to our panelists as they answer questions about compliance and security in DevOps without slowing down. This panel is looking to answer your questions about all things Compliance, so be ready to participate.
Thursday, November 7
A Festivus for Leadership Alignment
One of the biggest problems facing organizations that are moving to an agile mindset is leadership alignment across the concepts, principles, and tactics. On the face of things, every leader says they understand agile and that they’re aligned. But saying it is one thing and being it is quite another. On top of that, it seems like feedback between the leaders has become nonexistent. Mary Thorn faces organizational misalignment nearly every day in agile coaching journeys. She has come up with an approach to detect, discuss, and realign organizations cross-functionally around their agile...
KonMari Your Backlog: Tidying Up Those PBIs
Have you tidied up your personal life with Marie Kondo and are now wondering how to achieve the same effect in your work life? Do you have the feeling that the most valuable product backlog items (PBIs) are getting lost under a mountain of old stories, bugs, and tasks? If so, join Julie Wyman to learn how to adapt the KonMari method to tidy up your product backlog. Julie will share a short quiz you can use to gauge the current state of your own backlog and walk through five easy steps you can take to get started in your tidying process. She'll also share real-life examples, call out...
The 7 Deadly Sins of DevOps
Do you know teams that are merely doing "cargo cult DevOps"? Near the end of WWII, the Allies had airstrips on many islands in the south Pacific. The natives on these islands noticed that when the Allies put the "coconuts" on their ears and spoke into the "banana," the gods would send down a magical flying creature with food and supplies. When the war ended and the Allies left, the natives put the coconuts on their ears and spoke into the banana, and they wondered why the gods failed to bless them, too. They didn't understand headphones or radio transmissions or that someone must be...
Agile Assessment: Helpful Remedy or Harmful Toxin?
PreviewAgile is a set of values and a mindset. As such, it can be hard to answer questions that leaders often ask, like: How agile are we? Are we getting more agile? What are the growth opportunities for our team? Many organizations use assessments to determine their level of agility. Dan Neumann will introduce several assessment approaches and tools that, like medicine, can be toxic when used incorrectly. We will explore the merits, potential uses, and possible downsides of each approach. Dan will help you understand more about your options for framing an assessment that fits your needs...
Continuous Deployment for 'Mature' Codebases
When starting up a greenfield project, it’s easy to take advantage of the most modern development practices. But what about the rest of us, who are working on codebases greater than five minutes old? How do you take code that’s four years and hundreds of thousands of SLOC, and turn that into a lean, mean, continuous-deploying machine? In this talk, Melissa Benua will walk through what continuous integration and deployment means for teams working on mature code bases, and what the roadmap looks like to get from a release cycle that may take weeks or months to one that deploys on-demand....
DevOps without Measurement Is a Fail
PreviewThe primary goal of DevOps is to provide velocity and quality through improved collaboration. However, without a tailored measurement framework to direct efforts to the problems that matter to the customer and the business, these goals are meaningless. DevOps teams must outline relevant KPIs to measure the impact of their efforts. While keeping the end goal of a DevOps transformation in mind, it’s important to have a canonical source for the relevant metrics that is visible and understandable to all stakeholders. Focusing on success metrics empowers organizations to determine if...
Agile+DevOps Feud!
Join us for a game of Agile+DevOps Feud, where two teams of thought leaders compete to name the most popular responses to survey questions to win bragging rights and to share their experiences. Questions and voting will be in the TechWell Hub leading up to the conference, where community members will name their greatest concerns, best practices, etc. Our two teams of panelists, will do their best to guess the community’s viewpoint, and the winning team will get to explain how they deal with those concerns. Our panelists are competing...
Transforming a Team of Agile Skeptics into Agilists
Teams can hesitate to adopt agile practices, even when there’s a clear desire for transformation at the executive level. But there are strategies for coaching agile-skeptical teams into an agile mindset. Scott Weiner will detail an approach in depth, including working with leadership to create transparency and space for the team to experiment and learn, adopting a retrospective process and using it as an engine for change, educating the team on agile’s value while focusing on a small set of goals, and building trust and shared understanding by problem-solving collaboratively. We’ll discuss...
So You’re Using Docker. Now What?
These days everyone wants to containerize their application, but not everyone understands the best way to go about it. You need a tool to manage your containers, you need tools for image security scanning, you need to completely rethink how your application fits into its deployment environment, and most importantly you need to make sure you’re following good DevSecOps practices. Join Ryan Kenney as he discusses how he has addressed these concerns, among others, for various clients. Ryan will discuss options for container orchestration tools like Kubernetes and its competitors. Then, he...
5 Steps to a DevOps Transformation
For any continuously improving organization, certain actions are commonly applicable when going through large amounts of change. Dan Barker walks through the five steps to transformational change that he's found to be crucial for moving to DevOps processes: establish the vision; create shared experiences; educate, educate, educate; find evangelists; and get feedback. Dan will elaborate on each item with methods he's used in real transformations at multiple companies. He'll also describe how these all tie into the DevOps culture, which is really what is being transformed in the company. You...
We Inflicted DevOps on Our Business—Now What?
It seems that everyone is aflutter with DevOps, the shiny new panacea for all of our software ailments. What technical goodness can DevOps bestow upon us? What riddles does it unlock for us as technologists? How do business goals align in order to wring the true value from DevOps? Delivering value faster is a desire of many business and IT leaders, and it often looks like a win-lose proposition to achieve it. Metrics and edicts seem to have competing interests, like the car racer being told to both "go faster" and "save fuel." Barry Forrest and Allison Pollard will share their experiences...
Maximizing Agile Benefits through Understanding Learning Styles
PreviewThe Agile Manifesto says we value people and interactions over processes and tools. Yet when we talk about the agile methods, we usually end up talking about processes. Agilists use timeboxing as a forcing function to draw out resolutions and decisions. What if we just needed a better way to describe our needs and issues? What if we could actually be more effective with our communication? Join Robin Foster as he explores the relationships between learning, memory, communication, teaching, and the agile framework. Discover the cognitive science behind the process of learning new...
Agile Metrics: Let NUM8ERS Tell the Story
PreviewAgile and DevOps metrics and dashboards enable agile teams and their leaders to measure time to market, quality, productivity, predictability, employee engagement, and customer satisfaction. But the key focus of these metrics should be on the value delivered to customers. Instead of measuring what or how much we are doing, we have to look beyond vanity metrics and measure actionable metrics. Jagdish Karira will provide a practical approach for collecting metrics that enable transparency and help product teams transform their processes. He'll describe twelve metrics in detail, with...
Agile and DevOps Transformation in the Telecom Industry
PreviewThe telecom industry changes rapidly, the competition is fierce, and user experience is the utmost priority. In today's world of digitization and data personalization, effective use of agility and DevOps is the key behind ensuring customer satisfaction. Flawless delivery, optimized time to market, and enhanced customer usability form the backbone of IT to ensure the success of frontline teams in the business. The methodologies adopted in product and feature delivery, the agility adopted in delivering offers and promotions to the customer base, and the steps adopted in ensuring...
Friday, November 8
From Startup to Netflix: Leadership Lessons Learned
While leadership styles may change when moving from a startup to a Fortune 500 company, leadership practices do not! Join Andrew Glover as he discusses his DevOps leadership journey, starting with his own company and ending at Netflix. Learn what works and what doesn’t from someone with hands-on, practical experience leading Agile and DevOps initiatives and teams. Hear Andrew’s lessons learned and how to overcome leadership obstacles during change. Take home valuable tips for leading Agile and DevOps change within your organization.
Decoding Culture: How Culture Can Improve Performance and Increase Joy
We’ve all heard culture is vital to creating and sustaining a healthy organization. It was even Merriam-Webster’s Word of the Year in 2014! We also know culture is notoriously hard to describe in a meaningful way. Even harder than describing culture is demonstrating its contribution to organizational performance. We know culture is important. But for all its importance, we’ve had few tools and limited research to describe or quantify culture. Join Jeff Gallimore as he explores the critical aspects of culture and discusses how a strong culture can improve corporate performance while keeping...