teams

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps East User Stories Are like Onions: Let's Peel Away the Layers
Slideshow

In the world of agile product development, user stories are like onions ... and no, that doesn’t mean they stink or they make you cry (although they have been known to do both). Writing user stories is still one of the hardest crafts in agile product development today. We all know that a good user story can be the difference between a low-performing Scrum team and a high-performing one. Katrina Thacker will introduce the "onion pattern" as a paradigm for creating great user stories, and she will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to practice applying the pattern. In this interactive session you’ll learn a new approach to user story creation and practice peeling back those user story layers in a way that promotes collaboration, co-creation, and understanding and sets up your teams and product for success.

Katrina Thacker
Agile DevOps East Service Virtualization: How to Test More by Testing Less
Slideshow

Agile teams tend to struggle in getting development and testing in sync. Many teams run minified waterfalls, where testers get working code a few days before the end of the sprint—and tools usually can't help. But service virtualization is one of those rare tools that can make a huge impact and accelerate software delivery by limiting the dependencies needed for testing. Join Paul Merrill to get an introductory demonstration of service virtualization with a freely available, open source tool. Learn the five modes of service virtualization: capture, simulate, spy, synthesize, and modify. Return to your workplace with one more tool in your tool chest. Paul will walk through a common scenario for service virtualization and teach you how you can test more, faster, by testing less!

Paul Merrill
Agile DevOps East Create the Self-Directed Team of Your Dreams
Slideshow

You've read dozens of books on agile and hundreds of articles, but no one actually told you how to build the team of your dreams. Josh Anderson brings the real-world experience of growing a team from zero engineers to thirty while shipping five products—and he did it is less than a year. Learn how to build a team from scratch or transform your existing team into a mystical self-directed team, and understand how leadership operates in a world of self-directed teams. You'll be able to take these lessons home and hire, grow, and support self-directed teams, then start changing the world.

Josh Anderson
Agile DevOps East I Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Feedback
Slideshow

The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John Krewson will describe what it means to be a feedback-based organization.

John Krewson
Agile DevOps East The Introvert's Survival Guide to Agile
Slideshow

Open work areas, a focus on collaboration and conversations, and group events that seem to require verbal fluency ... It may feel like the agile ecosystem is designed with extroverts in mind. But science tells us that introverts make up almost half of the workforce, and they may struggle to be productive in an agile environments. In fact, introverts might even shy away from agile opportunities because of the radical collaboration it requires. In this interactive session, Julee Everett will teach you to recognize the traits of an extrovert and an introvert through self-identification. Building on that discussion, you will identify common prejudices and personal biases, then move into busting myths about introverts. Explore how introverts can thrive as leaders by studying lessons from modern, well-known introverted leaders.

Julee Bellomo Everett
Agile DevOps East Bring Your Team Home Safely: What DevOps Teams Can Learn from Aircrews
Slideshow

United Flight 232 should have crashed with all 296 lives lost. Asiana Flight 214 should not have crashed at all. However, the actual outcomes were very different. Peter Varhol and Gerie Owen explain that the critical difference between the two flights was the interactions of their respective aircrews. Cockpit crew members work together to best utilize the skills of every team member to make flights safe. Using these principles, a DevOps team can bring their project safely home. The leader of a team is the final authority, but leaders must acknowledge team members’ knowledge and experience; that can make the difference between success and failure. Join Peter and Gerie to experience how you can apply aircrew practices to your team’s delivery of high-quality applications through complementary expertise, collaboration, and decision-making.

Peter Varhol
Agile DevOps East Dominating DevOps with Distributed Teams
Slideshow

Distributed teams are the norm in Fortune 100 and 500 companies, crossing many time zones and multiple cultures. These teams seldom communicate directly, instead using a point of contact to relay information. While teams don't need to be collocated to deliver significant business value, they must use their DevOps pipeline to their advantage. Through continuous integration and automated testing, stories can be swarmed by distributed teams and completed in a fraction of the time it typically takes. Treasa Overton will discuss how this distributed model allows for faster delivery of business value, which can lead to a greater market share. Learn how distributed teams with dependencies on infrastructure or middleware can integrate continuously, build quality into code, and make feedback and corrections faster, whether for acceptance testing or delivery to customers.

Treasa Overton
Agile DevOps East Embrace Our Robot Overlords: Make CI Work for You
Slideshow

When developing software, teams can often get bogged down with mundane tasks such as code linting, manual testing, or even just deploying code to a particular environment. Everyone dreams of setting up continuous integration to automate this work, but they believe it to be too time-consuming for their current budget. Join Brian Thompson as he discusses how, after many years of manually performing repetitive tasks and occasionally making a mistake in mundane work, he learned to embrace the robot overlords. Learn about a variety of different continuous integration services such as CircleCI, TravisCI, and GitLab CI, and how utilizing continuous integration does not have to be a drain on time. Brian will discuss how CI can be leveraged in a repeatable way so as not to use up project budgets before starting development.

Brian Thompson
Agile DevOps East No One Cares About Your Practices: A Modern Agile Approach
Slideshow

Organizations often declare they are "going agile." This goal is misplaced, misguided, and just plain wrong. In fact, the agile community has become a cult of practice: Teams are too focused on the way to do things and making sure they are doing those methods correctly. We even turned agile into a proper noun so that we could more easily sell it. But what about the outcomes? This workshop will use the Modern Agile principles proposed by Joshua Kerievsky to walk some of those ideas back. The four principles—Make People Awesome, Deliver Value Continuously, Experiment & Learn Rapidly, and Make Safety a Prerequisite—will drive our exploration of what agile can mean today and how to put the focus back on outcomes. Bob Payne will focus on learning and continuous improvement to reach better business outcomes.

Bob Payne
Agile DevOps East Agile Program Management: Measurements to See Value and Delivery
Slideshow

Do you have measurement dysfunction on your program? Are you trying to measure teams and extrapolate each team’s status to the program? That doesn’t work. Teams have personal statuses, and you can’t add them together to understand the program state. But you can use a handful of program measurements that help everyone understand where the program is and where it’s headed. Instead of trying to “scale” measurements, take a new approach. Join Johanna Rothman to learn to use and share quantitative and qualitative program measurements that show everyone the program state. It starts with measuring what you want to see. This simple principle is so effective because it takes your needs into account before you decide on a metric to use. Next, we'll look at the scope. We’ll talk about why you want to measure completed features and how measure at this level can bring clarity to your project.

Johanna Rothman

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