agile

Conference Presentations

Agile DevOps East Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
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Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote presentations for the price of one—and have some fun at the same time.

Bob Galen
STARWEST 2018 Being More Agile Without Doing Agile
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The most common requests Dawn Haynes gets as a consultant these days is to help testers transition to an agile development process, or to help testers be more effective in “agile-ish” environments. But Dawn recognises that transforming the process and the environment is not enough. Interestingly, the core answer to these questions starts with forgetting the process for a moment and focusing on yourself and what you’re trying to accomplish. Being agile starts with a mindset and an attitude that drive focus, approaches, and solutions. When you start there, the path to improvement can almost always be summarized as “being more agile”—which is surprisingly independent of whether your team follows an agile process. Join Dawn as she shares with you what it means for a tester and a test team to be more agile (whether or not you do agile) and what benefits you can experience if you decide to increase your agility as a tester.

Dawn Haynes
STARWEST 2018 Agile Performance Testing in the Real World
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Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information into actionable defects. As part of this, his team created process and procedures to execute performance tests on a regular basis and pass/fail builds based on thresholds. Join Amit to learn how to build a successful production feedback loop, align internal stakeholders, and implement holistic performance engineering.

Amit Patel
STARWEST 2018 Delivering the Goods: Harmonizing Regulated and Agile Practices
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Agile testing is hard. Testers contend with terse requirements, minimal process, little documentation, continually evolving business, technical and organizational factors. Auditors demand proof of compliance. Some teams have trouble conforming to regulations while preserving agile practices. Griffin Jones, a tenured regulated software testing consultant, says “not only can agile practices blend with regulatory compliance - they can be harmonized with them leading to high quality and more agility.” Griffin feels that regulators are project stakeholders, who join the product owner in defining value. Griffin shares examples, methods and techniques of implementing regulatory compliant testing as a graceful part of an agile workflow. Learn the five-part harmony binding regulated and agile practices.

Griffin Jones
STARWEST 2018 Compliance and Agility—How It Can Be Done
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Delivering a compliant product is a resource intensive and challenging activity for most teams. Whether a team is trying to adhere to company, industry, or international standards, it needs to produce deliverables under tight deadlines with the right level of quality. When you work with Forensic teams the stakes are high! Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new forensic DNA sequencing technology which can result in increased detection ability for degraded and complex mixture samples. It can also provide ancestry and physical trait information which help's narrow down suspects. Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares how her team successfully built the first Forensics, NGS “sample-to-answer” platform at illumina, working in a cross-functional team, using a scrum-based methodology, yet in a compliant environment.

Aprajita Mathur
STARWEST 2018 Troubleshooting and Understanding Modern Systems: Tools Testers Need
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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.

Chris Blain
STARWEST 2018 What You Can't Measure, You Can't Improve: Measurements for a Continuous Delivery Organization
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Ashwin Desai has faced the daunting challenge of using measurements and metrics to assess and improve product quality through process change. Join him as he shares what he learned on the journey to move the sports technology firm Hudl from a reactive approach to quality to quantitative, data driven, proactive means to improve product quality. Just as Hudl itself provides the ability for coaches and teams to analyze and improve their performance based on data, they wanted to move the teams building Hudl to use the same approach to improve quality. Ashwin shares how they selected measurements, the work agile teams completed to get buy-in for the measurements, and how the data was normalized to provide understanding of the quality of each initiative and the variance between them.

Ashwin Desai
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Removing Impediments and Cultivating a Culture of Feedback
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As agilists, we know the importance of open, candid feedback for agile teams to be continuously improving. This talk will share how impediments, such as unconscious biases and a person’s level of self-confidence, can impact the feedback and learning cycle. Participants will learn why there are positive and negative reactions when feedback is given, the difference between a defensive (fixed) and accepting (growth) mindset, how age, self-confidence and gender biases influence an individual’s mindset and other impediments that can impact a team member’s ability to provide candid feedback.

Joanna Vahlsing
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 I Manage an Agile Team. Am I Obsolete?
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Agile and Scrum Teams are self-organizing and self-managing. As a line manager, what's left to do? Traditionally, managers are responsible for the output of their teams. Sometimes they're even responsible for the for a team's delivery that they do not have direct oversight. This model is flawed. People are complex, a team of people is a complex system. May as well try to manage the weather. To get a handle on the complexity of teams, managers need to act differently in how they lead others. In other words, managers of agile teams will fail if they do not shift their thinking from management to leadership. We can't manage the complexity but we can help people navigate it. Just as we can't stop it from raining, we help teams find umbrellas and take supportive actions when things begin to flood.

Robert Pieper
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Collaborative Curiosity
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Let's try an experiment. Rather than trying to figure out what you need or want to hear from a keynote, we propose your taking over as the product owner and driving the discussion? Join Ryan Ripley and Faye Thompson as they take your most pressing, real-time questions and craft them into an inspiring keynote that is relevant to you and your needs. They will take on all agile topics: How does a team optimize their learning? How do you make it safe to explore, experiment and fail? What should you do when your teams aren’t “buying” self-direction and accountability. What do you do when those pesky senior leaders aren’t cooperating? Does DevOps magically improve our capacity? Why is scaling so hard and how does SAFe solve it? And anything else that’s on your mind. Bring your questions, as we celebrate your curiosity about what it takes to become truly agile yourself, in your teams, and in your organization.

Ryan Ripley

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