Better Software West 2018

PRESENTATIONS

Removing Impediments and Cultivating a Culture of Feedback

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.
Joanna Vahlsing
Scaling to Infinity: The Quest for Fully Automated, Scalable, Self-Healing Systems

The number of servers in our systems is constantly increasing. With the move to microservices and continuous deployment practices, deployments frequency is higher than ever, yet we are expected to handle increased demand with the same workforce as before. How can we operate clusters at scale with minimum human involvement? The answer lies in adoption of new practices and tools.
Viktor Farcic
Secrets from the Authors of the Agile Manifesto

Agile coach Ryan Lockard interviewed fourteen of the seventeen authors of the Agile Manifesto for a special podcast project. Originally the idea was to capture the intent of authors and to chronicle the story of the Agile Manifesto, but what emerged became much more. This session covers the real story behind the rise and fall of agile in industry and what we can do to reclaim it. Ryan will dive into the history behind the Agile Manifesto and its signatories, what precipitated the manifesto's creation, and what the vision for it was.
Ryan Lockard
Stop Guessing and Validate What Your Customers Want

In agile, everything we do is an experiment. Product development is no different. We think we know what the customer wants, and the customer thinks they know what they want, but it turns out we're all wrong! To get to validated discoveries about our features, we must understand how to write a better hypothesis for our development experiments. This session focuses on challenging the mindset that we are validating options during our experiments.
Natalie Warnert
Strategies for Selecting the Right Open Source Framework for Cross-Browser Testing

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Eran Kinsbruner
Taking Your Automation Framework to the Next Level Using Machine Learning

Automation fails frequently in companies due to a variety of reasons, including poor team communication, lack of skills, flaky tests, and inadequate understanding of test coverage. Even when things are going well, the automated tests sometimes grow to a size where the test suites take too long to execute for the run to be viable. James Farrier is a test automation architect who will show you ways to leverage machine learning to address these challenges.
James Farrier
Taking Your Team from Dysfunctional to Dynamic

Does it seem like your team is the antithesis of agile? Being negative or fearful, resisting change, or hoarding information are common pitfalls that impede progress and can sink an agile team. How can your team adapt to each other, avoid these patterns, and find its greatness? All teams have people with talents and untapped abilities, but it can be difficult for a team to figure out what works for them, what they have, and what they lack.
Michelle Vician
Testing with AI for Agile Teams

Agile teams ship frequently and change things all the time--by design. In the middle of all this, agile teams need to make sure that their core user flows like sign-in, shopping carts and search features still work on every new build. Traditional testing is a poor fit for agile teams. AI changes all that with the ability to create automated verification for new user flows, and automatically maintain those verification steps even when the application changes.
Jason Arbon
The Five Biggest Mistakes Your Team Is Making in Requirements Definition

Google pioneer Alberto Savoia offered this sage advice: Build the right "it" before you build It right. But few software companies take the time to define, much less build, the right "it." The problem starts with a poor requirements definition process. In this session, join Kathryn Campbell as she examines the five most common mistakes that software companies make during requirements definition—and how to avoid them. First Kathryn defines thinking too small as a huge problem and shows you how to broaden your perspectives.
Kathryn Campbell
The Great Debate: The Pros and Cons of Continuous Delivery

The Great Continuous Delivery Debate There is a lot of debate about whether continuous delivery is a boon or a curse. Proponents will sing the praises of being able to deliver software into production very frequently with no manual intervention. Skeptics will highlight the challenges delivering quality, working with legacy code, and the need for intensive system-wide assurance activities prior to deploying into production. So which is it? Can most organizations benefit from continuous delivery and, if so, how?
Jeffery Payne

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