Agile + DevOps East 2021 - Project Manager

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...

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...

The concept of “progressive delivery” using feature flags has taken the world of software delivery by storm in recent years, but what does this mean for enterprise software development operations teams, and how they should change their technology and practices? Like many things, the application of progressive delivery in the enterprise setting is much easier said than done with disparate technology and teams around the world.

This talk will cover the state of progressive delivery, the potential benefits and use cases unlocked by adding feature flags into the release management...

Today, it’s not uncommon for teams in large organizations to be inundated with requests from enterprise stakeholders, leadership, and anyone other than customers. These requests take the form of mandates to ensure compliance with various standards as they relate to information security, architecture, and other areas that position teams to be “well-managed”. The requests often pile up like traffic on Los Angeles’ Harbor Freeway at rush hour, pre-covid, of course. The end result is that this work takes priority, steamrolling all the product-lead development requirements, and therefore...

The truth is, no one really likes being measured, especially devs. But business leaders like looking at numbers, so they grab what’s easily available - # of code changes, agile velocity, individual developer metrics. These types of metrics are unbalanced, exclude context, and hurt engineering culture as a whole.

Measuring should start by answering the question “What is the most valuable outcome?”

Why? Because what you measure is what your team will produce. If you start measuring the number of code changes as a key performance metric, you are going to see coding time, PR size...

Organizations implementing agile to drive digital transformation and technological advancement to enhance the digital experience of customers often face challenges from investing more in technology than human capital. While agile is a proven method for improved software development, its hidden power is how implementation transforms how humans think, learn and interact. Company culture is hardest to change in organizational transformations—starting with individuals. When I joined an organization struggling with employees fulfilling responsibilities of the agile roles to implement agile...

In this session, Hope will be walking through a Value Stream Management retrospective about a team and an organization I worked with a few years ago. This team’s work had an outsize impact on the larger organization due to issues with value streams. Now, Value Streams can seem like a huge topic but they can be very straightforward. I hope today is an opportunity to reframe the concept of a value stream in a more approachable way and provide some insight on how you may be able to take action to improve yours if you find yourself in similar circumstances.

As more organizations move towards continuous delivery with DevOps pipelines becoming the norm, where is the right place to do different kinds and levels of testing? In this presentation, I will provide a blueprint for test managers in how to think about shifting left and shifting right while keeping the overall QA picture and goals in mind. Firstly, Adam Sandman will outline how you can improve the testing being done during development in CI by adding early testing for functionality, usability, performance, security and accessibility (shift left). Then, Adam will outline how you can...

How to go from Waterfall development with annual releases to Agile Scrum with more frequent releases on the mainframe. Starting with why waterfall isn't working, and the problems that can cause for the entire organization. I give practical advice on how to break through the resistance to Agile and move at a much faster pace while improving quality. I will lay out 10 steps to mainframe agility. Examples are drawn from personal experience and working with several mainframe organizations. Attendees will leave with the knowledge that it can be done and have a roadmap for how to implement it in...

Jack Welch said it well: “If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” That’s a scary thought when we consider just how quickly the world of technology is innovating and changing. All of us are striving to help our organizations embrace that change and become more innovative, but it’s easier said than done. Legacy technology, leaders with limited experience and perspective, entrenched processes, overworked teams, and rapidly changing regulatory and market conditions all contribute to making transformation incredibly difficult to adopt....

Using metrics in Agile has been an elusive endeavor, and how to use those metrics for good, not evil. Too often we see metrics used to compare agile teams, and question the wrong things. Too often we solution before we understand what the true need is. We took a different approach of not just using the standard agile metrics to help teams with efficiency, but working more closely with our leaders on data needed to help drive decisions around staffing, work prioritization, and value delivered. Through interviews and a focus on educating different levels of business and IT leaders, we were...