Conference Presentations

Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Measuring Flow: Metrics That Matter
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Are you considering kanban but not sure how you’ll predict delivery without story points, velocity, and a burndown chart? Or are you part of a Scrum team but feeling like your team could benefit from improved flow within your sprints? In this session, join Julie Wyman and Hunter Tammaro as they explore key kanban metrics for measuring team flow and predictability. In the first half, they will introduce metrics including lead and cycle time, throughput, and the cumulative flow diagram. They’ll review what each represents, discuss easy ways to collect them, and show how they are similar and different from common waterfall and Scrum metrics. In the second half of the session, Julie and Hunter will provide a couple of different sample sets of these metrics for you to work in small groups, practicing how to read them in order to find opportunities for team improvement.

Julie Wyman
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Creating an Innovation-Rich Culture
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It's important to create a culture that inspires and infuses your development team with great ideas. But ideas are not action. Ideas in and of themselves are nothing more than unrefined, random thoughts, and worse, most ideas never get implemented. Even when you do follow through on some of the best ideas, they can cause great harm without proper planning and execution. While creativity is an asset, unbridled creativity where disparate ideas abound outside a sound decision-making and execution framework will create distraction and chaos. In this session, Melissa Petak will show you how to transform your organization into a value-creating machine. Using Forbes 15 elements of spurring innovation, Melissa will show you how to balance your innovation portfolio, establish a competitive advantage, and drive business engagement. You'll learn how to create a corporate culture that turns ideas into innovation.

Melissa Petak
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Methods for Handling Key-Person Dependencies in Agile Teams
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On any team, from infrastructure engineering to development to HR, there is always a looming danger of one individual being the only person capable of performing a key task, either because of their technical skills, domain skills, or business experience. The risks of having key-person dependencies—reduced productivity, inaccurate project estimates, morale problems, delays, and business-impacting defects and downtime—are hard to identify and can be even harder to resolve. Lee Eason is a leader and coach who has experienced this problem for so long, he finally decided to do something about it. He will reveal a technique that helps him identify and fill those skill gaps and eliminate key-person risks. The approach helps you realize how skills and expertise are distributed on your teams.

Lee Eason
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Testing with AI for Agile Teams
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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. AI changes the game so that agile teams can move faster, with less risk or worry about breaking the app. Jason Arbon walks you through real world running examples of AI-based UI flow verification, and shares which machine learning approaches work the best. If your agile team struggles with testing and worries about quality, see how AI is changing the game and freeing up teams to move faster, with higher quality.

Jason Arbon
DevOps West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018 How DevOps Drives Product Innovation
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Customers are demanding faster delivery of software products. Unfortunately, many organizations have not figured out how to automate their delivery process so they can deploy software applications on demand. In this session, Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan will discuss how Varian Medical Systems uses DevOps capabilities, AI, and chatbots to improve the operational aspects of its 360 Oncology care management platform and enable innovation by shortening time to market. As with any DevOps infrastructure for cloud-native applications, 360 Oncology's infrastructure is complex and has multiple streaming sources of information. You'll learn how bleeding-edge technologies and tools are leveraged to enable the DevOps team to make more informed decisions quickly.

Shivakumar Gopalakrishnan
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 A Case Study in Building a Culture of Continuous Improvement
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Continuous improvement is the goal of agile teams. But what does it look like when we create a continuous improvement strategy beyond our agile teams and bring it to the company level? Working at Spotify, Kevin Goldsmith saw the benefits of its fantastic continuous improvement culture. When he joined Avvo as its new CTO, his primary goal was to help Avvo create that culture for itself. In this session, Kevin will show what Avvo has done to build a foundation for a continuous improvement culture. He’ll explore the frameworks used to create highly engaged teams and share the organizational and process models that support and empower individuals and groups to own and drive improvements to make themselves more efficient and the company a better place to work. You'll leave with a template to help you build a continuous improvement culture in your company.

Kevin Goldsmith
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Outcome Over Output: Don't Be a Backlog Lumberjack
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As agile goes mainstream, many organizations are only focused on mastering different elements of agile frameworks. Progress is measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts. These metrics can turn agile teams into backlog lumberjacks! Teams, ScrumMasters, and leadership must realize that while speed to launch is crucial to delivering software, speed to learning is even more important. To accomplish this mindset shift, product owners need to learn to change their focus from mastering the art of writing user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products and the problem they are trying to solve. This involves concentrating on user personas, behavior, and needs. Taking teams to the next level of satisfying users through the continuous delivery of valuable software requires an alignment between the development team and the customer.

Kalpesh Shah
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Testers
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Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In many organizations, testers continue to be marginalized. In others, testers are active but rarely understand or reach the full potential of their role. In this session, Shaun Bradshaw, an experienced agile coach and tester, will explore the practices and mindset of fully empowered agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Throughout Shaun’s agile coaching experience, he’s seen it all—from total dysfunction to high performance and everything in between. He’ll share with you real-world tactics to help you guide your team toward improved performance. He’ll explore the notions of QA ownership, test planning, test automation, and test case development and execution in agile contexts, as well as look at different risk-based, exploratory, and other testing practices.

Shaun Bradshaw
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Leadership from Within an Agile Team
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Teams struggle for many reasons, leaving people frustrated, complacent, and content to exist in mediocrity. There is a secret sauce that propels individuals, teams, and entire organizations to be really successful. And that secret is effective leadership! And not just the executives, managers, or those with leader titles get to lead – everyone does. The real benefits of agile emerge when each person embraces their personal leadership. By embracing our inner leader, we are able to engage our team, improve the value and quality of our deliverables, and gain the competitive edge the agile methods intended. In this talk, join Selena Delesie as she explores the value and purpose of the agile practices. Showing you the specific leadership behaviors that will make a big impact on any team, and what these behaviors look like within the agile practices.

Selena Delesie
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 When Continuous Improvement Feels Like Constantly Failing – An Introduction to Design Thinking
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Do your Retrospectives feel like a repeat of the last one? Are they moan and groan sessions? Want to try something new to give your team a boost? When design principles are applied to strategy and innovation, the success rate for innovation dramatically improves. Great design has that “wow” factor that makes products more desirable and services more appealing to users. Why not try using known design principles during your retrospectives to get that "wow" factor for your teams! In this session Catherine Louis will provide a Design Thinking overview. You’ll roll up your sleeves up and try it. You will learn how to Empathize with your team's issues, how to Define a point of view, construct a challenge, Ideate towards Prototyping and Test a retrospective solution. We will move from problem space to prototyping in one super-duper hands-on Design Thinking retro session.

Catherine Louis

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