Agile + DevOps USA 2024 - Agile & Lean Practices
Sunday, October 13
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification
Agile & DevOps Leadership—ICAgile Certification
Agile Fundamentals - ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP)
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Monday, October 14
Facilitating Team Decisions
One of the agile manifesto principles is “Build projects around motivated individuals. Give them the environment and support they need, and trust them to get the job done.” Tricia Broderick wishes this principle was written to say, motivated teams. Because leaders giving the environment and support for individuals to make team decisions is anything but trivial. Achieving effective decisions goes beyond bringing people together for consensus. This approach may lead to groupthink or repeating decision meetings. Instead, leaders facilitate collaboration by building and tapping into the co-...
Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings
Many teams have been following the same few patterns for facilitating sessions such as daily scrums, sprint reviews, retrospectives, and backlog refinement events for decades now. However, while these well-trodden approaches can be good starting points, there are ways to make them tremendously more effective with minimal effort. You will learn to design agile meetings that account for your particular circumstances and goals while wasting as little time as possible. First, Arlen will cover: exploring the true purpose of agile meetings – Is the daily scrum more about status or planning? Is...
Badass Agile Coaching Skills for Everyone
Some perspectives imply that Agile Coaching is for a small set of specialized agilists who serve to improve everyone else or that it’s a unique role that others, including managers and leaders, shouldn’t do or will find difficult to master. This talk intends to debunk those notions by illustrating the power and impact of Agile Coaching skills for everyone. In this workshop, Bob Galen will explore the nuance associated with Agile Coaching to demystify it. He’ll share and explore the Agile Coaching Growth Wheel as a competency model for agile coaching. We’ll do a deep dive into the critical...
The Liquid Agility Framework: Toolkit for Product Leaders
Agile Methods like Scrum, Kanban, and SAFe provide strong guidance on engineering, team management, and productivity…but what about product management? Most agile methods have little to say about how exactly roles like the Product Owner should go about evaluating, ordering, or refining work and nothing about how to assess the impacts post-delivery and drive an effective feedback loop. Building the wrong thing quickly is of little value. Arlen introduces a set of robust but simple tools, some unique and others extensions of existing approaches, meant to “fill in the blanks” of most agile...
Tuesday, October 15
Creating a High-Performance Agile Team
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually, a few classes, some tools’ introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward fairly efficient execution. However, these teams are quite often simply going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from their experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen and Mary Thorn explore high-performance team patterns, which are the thinking models of mature agile teams, including large-scale emergent...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
The Craft of Highly Effective Agile Leadership
Based on the learning objectives from the iCAgile, Leading with Agility workshop, this ½ day version will explore the craft of agile leadership in guiding your journey to becoming a catalyst leader. Along the way, we'll explore the why of leading with agility, how to develop and grow your personal agility, tactics for developing and deepening your organizational relationships, and approaches for leading cultural and organizational transformation. Critical topics include your responsibility in shaping a culture that is inclusive, safe, empowered, aligned, and results/impact-focused. We also...
Wednesday, October 16
Holistic Testing Strategies in an Agile World: Integrating Shift Left and Shift Right
In today's dynamic software development landscape, the pursuit of customer-centric, high-quality products is essential. This session delves into the art of aligning shift-left and shift-right testing strategies to ensure comprehensive and effective validation throughout the software development lifecycle. Explore real-world obstacles encountered by development team in traditional testing, prompting their transition to a modern approach. This transition led to significant improvements in software quality, cost efficiency, and led to a more dependable product delivery. Shuchi will discuss...
AutoOps: How Generative AI and Prompt Engineering Turn Engineers into Superheroes, Not Replace Them
Envision a DevOps realm infused with AI-driven superpowers, where a reliable AI companion revolutionizes the way we approach development. This companion doesn't just assist; it transforms the adventure of creating software that spanning the full spectrum of SDLC possibilities and pinpointing bugs in the most unexpected places. This is the essence of AI-augmented with human-in-the-loop, a paradigm where AI elevates engineers to maestros, orchestrating a symphony of enhanced augmented subject matter intelligence. By turbocharging the testing process to be quicker, smarter, and more efficient...
From Vision to Velocity: Accelerating Agile Testing with Generative AI
In the rapidly evolving landscape of agile and DevOps, traditional methods of testing business-facing features often struggle to keep pace with the demands for faster and more thorough testing. However, the fusion of traditional testing wisdom with cutting-edge AI presents a unique opportunity to enhance software quality and delivery speed, offering innovative solutions to longstanding challenges. Join Philip Daye and examine key test design techniques—such as equivalence partitioning, boundary value analysis, decision table testing, and state transition testing—and explore how Generative...
Don’t F*ck Up the Culture: Operationalizing Experiences for Customers and Employees
In a world full of choices, both consumers and employees are inundated with numerous options. How we allocate our spending power, time, and money reflects our thoughts and emotions, all of which are heavily influenced by our experiences. Yet, it's all too common that the experiences offered by companies for both customers and employees are disconnected from the core mission of creating successful products. The methods used by organizations to measure these experiences often fall short, with employee experience reduced to an annual, self-funded Top Workplace Survey, and customer...
Integration of Automated Testing into DevOps
Nowadays, Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) are essential parts of software development lifecycle and are considered imperative to successful software releases. The key challenge for most organizations is the inability to successfully execute and establish Continuous Deployment throughout their process. In order to implement Continuous Deployment, it is necessary to treat DevOps as a culture and mindset, rather than specific teams in businesses. In this session, Arash will demonstrate how to overcome this challenge by integrating test automation into worlds of...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the Agile + DevOps conferences. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists 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. And now, lightning has struck the Agile + DevOps keynotes. Some of the best-known experts in software engineering will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote...
Thursday, October 17
MLOps for Responsible AI: Techniques for Ensuring AI Quality
With the rapid adoption of generative AI, more and more companies are infusing AI models and services into their products. However, many of these companies are likely to lose business and valuable revenue due to their lack of investment in MLOps. Typically, organizations developing AI systems have relied on training metrics like accuracy, precision and recall, but software quality goes beyond that. Now that the barrier to entry for AI tools is smaller, we need to set quality standards, test practices, and think about AI ethics and safety. Ensuring the quality of AI goes beyond traditional...
Designing Agile Plays in a Complex Organization
In today's fast-paced business environment, organizations are constantly seeking ways to adapt and thrive amidst complexity. Agile methodologies offer a powerful framework for managing this complexity, but implementing agile practices in a complex organization can be challenging. This presentation explores the concept of "agile plays" as a strategic approach to implementing agile in complex organizations. Drawing on real-world examples and best practices, we will delve into the key principles and strategies for designing and implementing effective agile plays. Topics covered will include:...
5 Tools for Navigating Regulatory and Risk Mitigation in Agile Processes
In today's highly regulated landscape, organizations encounter numerous hurdles in risk management and regulatory compliance. Regulations are constantly emerging and changing. New risks are emerging all the time and we seek to improve our risk posture with ongoing, internal control improvements. This presentation unveils S&P Global's strategies for seamlessly integrating cross-portfolio regulatory and risk mitigation work into Agile processes. Jennifer will delve into five actionable tips that leverage Agile processes to solve this challenge. The session will address the challenges of...
From Concept to Code: Leveraging LLMs for Agile Excellence
Unlock the next level of agile and XP development by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GitHub Copilot across the software development lifecycle. This presentation unveils how leveraging LLMs from initial ideation to final deployment transforms agile practices, enriching pair programming, test-driven development, and continuous integration with innovative AI capabilities. Learn to automate and refine development tasks, enhance specification clarity, and boost testing efficiency with ChatGPT, optimizing every phase of agile workflows for superior product quality and...
Collaborating Through Silence
"The team doesn't speak up in meetings! They don't participate! What do I do?" I've observed leaders across organizations be frustrated by this. What to do? Just be ok with silence? Make decisions for the team? Here's the thing: silence is not consent. Whether or not people articulate their opinions, everyone has them. As a leader, your role is to help create a supportive, collaborative space where information is shared more openly. So how on earth do you do this? In this combination workshop and talk, attendees will learn two techniques to help facilitate through this challenge, as well...
Top 10 Lessons I Learned for Leading Agile Teams
PreviewAs leaders, we need to show up differently when we lead agile teams. Anyone in the room can be a leader, including the person with the actual title, however, the skills and techniques we tap into can be very different. In this session, Chris Knobbe will share the top 10 lessons that she has learned while leading teams and how she taps into those skills to build highly effective teams and team members. Each attendee will leave with a list of experiments to try in the workplace to enable them to build trust, accountability, and be more effective in their leadership. The approach to...
Navigating Through AI: The Test Manager's Guide to Staying Relevant
Gen AI and LLM topics are currently on heavy rotation and the IT domain is experiencing highs and lows of excitement regarding performance breakthroughs and fears that software engineers will be replaced by prompts tomorrow. Their concerns are not unreasonable—we can think of code development as language-to-language transformation, but what about the project governance and the managers who were shaping it? Where do they fit in the new AI-based IT world? As a Head of European Quality Engineering Practice in a global company with 50K+ employees, Maryna will share her experiences in dealing...
Scaling Agile at Visa: Navigating the Highs and Lows of Transforming a Financial Giant
PreviewDive into the heart of Visa's groundbreaking agile transformation, a monumental project that stands as possibly the largest of its kind in the financial sector over the last three years. Led by a seasoned expert at the forefront with a 21-strong team of agile coaches, "Scaling Agile at Visa: Navigating the Highs and Lows of Transforming a Financial Giant" unravels the journey of integrating a bespoke operating model, an enterprise-wide portfolio planning process, and a new toolset across a global workforce of over 10,000. This concise talk will share the pivotal challenges, triumphs...
Reluctance to Relishing—Rolling Out DORA Metrics to Skeptical Teams
PreviewTeams are rightfully skeptical when faced with a mandate to implement DORA metrics, especially when no effective rollout approach is considered. Kendra will outline the context, conflict, and climax of the story arc to ensure a smooth rollout. First the context: DORA metrics and their importance. A ‘burning platform’ of 'those who do not keep up will get left behind'. Then, the conflict: tension builds when distrust between a team and leadership when leadership mandates change without the why or how. Stories of two project teams will serve as examples. Finally, the climax which include...
Agile and DevOps Leadership
In the dynamic landscape of software development, agile and DevOps methodologies have emerged as cornerstones for achieving efficiency, innovation, and customer satisfaction. However, successful implementation requires adept leadership capable of navigating multifaceted challenges. During this session, Vijay will delve into common hurdles faced by leaders in agile and DevOps transformations. For instance, envision a scenario where a large enterprise embraces agile but struggles with traditional hierarchical structures. This creates tension between established protocols and agile's...