Release Management

The deployment destination for today’s applications is going through its biggest transition since the rise of the application server. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and other cloud service offerings are putting pressure on every stakeholder in the application lifecycle, forcing us to modernize both our skill sets and tool stacks. Mik Kersten describes the key cloud technology trends and demonstrates how the coming wave of cloud-friendly application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and practices will become the defining factor for productivity and ultimate success. Discover the new challenges developers face when deploying and debugging multi-tenanted applications on hosted infrastructures. Learn how continuous integration loops require testers to learn new tools that connect them directly to running applications.

Businesses demand high levels of product quality, development productivity, planning reliability, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And yet, people and organizations often ignore all those goals and focus on building systems with as many features as possible delivered by a specific due date. When the work is complete, retrospectives surface the dissatisfaction concerning missed dates, poor quality, technical debt, and more. Richard Hensley describes his last three years at McKesson, where they have delivered 103 production releases with no significant defects, fulfilled sixteen multi-million dollar contracts, maintained high employee morale, and trained 5,000 users. Employing the Kanban approach for change management, McKesson implemented new tools selected from RUP, XP, Scrum, and lean-daily focused planning, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, TDD, information radiators, user stories, etc.

During Greg Pope’s forty years in the industry, many great processes and new tools have been promoted by incredibly gifted people. It seems that someone is always promising a cure all-the proverbial “silver bullet”-for software woes. Still, the most common request Greg gets from software developers and managers is to “look at our development process and tell us how to make it better.” Greg’s goals for this presentation are for us to understand what “better” really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group’s practices better. He examines valuable ideas that seem to reincarnate themselves periodically and explores the challenges of today’s modern software.

Whether it is controlling interplanetary spacecraft, managing medical records, or "merely" staying in business, it seems that more of us are facing the pressure of building and managing mission-critical systems and teams. Although it's tempting to think that reliability is all that matters, we're also forced to adapt to constantly advancing technologies, shifting priorities, and relentless competitive pressures. What can we learn about agility from great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and the pioneers at NASA who risked everything to change the world? Is it wise to embrace innovation and take risks when so much is at stake? Can you afford to be agile when failure is not an option, or can you afford not to? Jeff Norris explores key principles of agility from a fresh and entertaining perspective by drawing on inspiring stories of people who demonstrated agile work practices long before anyone had heard of a ScrumMaster.