Agile + DevOps USA 2024 - Project Management, Planning, Metrics
Sunday, October 13
Agile & DevOps Leadership—ICAgile Certification
Agile Fundamentals - ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP)
Foundations of DevOps—ICAgile Certification
Monday, October 14
Product Ownership 2.0: Navigating the New Demands of Agile Leadership
Many agile organizations wildly misunderstand the crucial role of the Product Owner. Historically the role focused on being the voice of the customer for a development team. However, the exponential pace of the digital age requires today's Product Owners to be genuine product leaders by maintaining continuous alignment with broader groups of stakeholders while utilizing sophisticated techniques that solicit rapid feedback. This interactive tutorial will explore tools for communicating with the Product Owner's three primary constituents - Leadership, Customers, and Development Teams. First...
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...
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
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...
Wednesday, October 16
Gen AI: A Co-Pilot to Better Value Sooner, Safer, and Happier in Digital Transformation
Integrating Generative AI (Gen AI) across the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) signifies a pivotal shift in digital product development, promising enhancements from planning to maintenance. This session explores this cutting-edge approach, revealing Gen AI's capacity to automate tasks, refine product quality, and elevate non-functional attributes like security and usability. From analyzing user feedback for feature development to auto-generating code and optimizing deployment strategies, Gen AI streamlines processes, boosts efficiency, and ensures robust, user-centric products. It...
Thursday, October 17
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...
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...