Design & Code

The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, development organizations have been filled with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. Adam Auerbach says this has to change. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding in order to stay relevant and add more value to the business. Based on his experiences at Lincoln Financial and Capital One, Adam explores what the DevOps movement is all about, its core values, and proven patterns for how testing must evolve.

Successful agile testers collaborate with programmers as code is written, isolating problems, troubleshooting defects, and debugging code all along the way to getting the product to done. But modern systems are scaling beyond what traditional teams are able to understand using familiar tools. New appreciation for systems and complexity theory, as well as disciplines and tools around emerging areas such as observability and resilience engineering, are offering solutions that allow teams to actively debug their systems and explore properties and patterns they have not defined in advance. Chris will share the basics of the theory of these new ideas, as well as some tools that support this type of work. He'll show how dynamic analysis can be used to isolate and understand puzzling system behavior.

Peer-to-peer Discussion: How Do I Make CD Work in My Environment? Building a successful continuous delivery pipeline is very context specific. Large organizations with legacy code, existing physical environments, regulatory constraints, large monolithic applications, or stove piped organizations often struggle to find a continuous delivery approach that will work for them successfully. If this sounds familiar, this session is for you. Join facilitator Lee Eason as conference participant’s work together to identify and solve difficult continuous delivery challenges. Learn how other participants and speakers have dealt with the issues you have within their own companies and how you can apply their lessons learned. Share your successes and help others solve their DevOps problems. Expand upon questions you’ve asked during others sessions so you leave the conference with even more ideas for addressing your CD challenges.

For years, people have made recommendations for how to develop software in an agile way based almost entirely on intuition, folklore, and anecdotes. They've never been able to quantitatively show the accuracy or applicability of these recommendations. This session quantifies those recommendations in the most precise and objective terms, including a presentation of general findings in Larry Maccherone's research correlating agile practices to performance along the dimensions of productivity, predictability, quality, and time to market. These data can be used to make general decisions about what to focus on. The presentation also includes the numbers, so that instead of just saying that A is better than B, we can say that A is a 24 percent improvement in quality but a 10 percent reduction in productivity compared to B.