Agile + DevOps USA 2024 - Agile Team Member
Sunday, October 13
Fundamentals of AI—ICAgile Certification (ICP-FAI)
Agile Fundamentals - ICAgile Certified Professional (ICP)
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-...
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...
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...
Tuesday, October 15
Supercharge Your Workflow: To GitHub and Beyond
Whether you are new or experienced with GitHub this class is for you! Supercharging your workflow caters to anyone who wants to enhance their agile and DevOps process with the capabilities of GitHub. GitHub has long been the premier site for open-source projects and is now turning a pivotal corner into becoming the predominant platform for all aspects of the development lifecycle. Some examples of this include; protecting company code through various GitHub Products or curating marketplace actions and workflows prior to use. This tutorial will look at how to leverage GitHub Actions (CI/CD...
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...
MLOps: DevOps for Machine Learning
Much attention is given to machine learning model training and testing in the industry. While these activities are essential for producing a production-ready machine learning model, organizations face some critical business challenges that must be addressed when building and testing machine learning models. Things like the reproducibility of results, accuracy of predictions, reusability of components, and trackability of experimentation are all vital to the success of any application. The term MLOps has emerged as a method for applying DevOps practices and automation to the machine...
Wednesday, October 16
Everything Old Is New Again: Using What We Already Know for a Safer Future
Our world is filled with complexities and unknowns, and when these collide with emerging technologies, the resulting risk seems insurmountable. We accept this increased risk as a cost of using the new technology, assuming that previous lessons learned don’t apply and that a blank slate is required to gain the most benefit. However, this never turns out to be true. Time and time again, we realize that much of what we already know is still relevant to these emerging technologies, regardless of how advanced or paradigm-shifting they are. This is good news for reducing the risk in innovation...
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...
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...
AI & The Impact on How We Work
Our industry has been transformed by new technologies, radically changing how we work. Thirty years ago, deployment cycles took 3-5 years; today, they happen in seconds. This rapid pace is largely due to our focus on investing in tools that boost developer productivity. We're still driven to create tools that simplify developers' work and make it easier for others to join the field. Many companies are heavily invested in enhancing productivity. However, the abundance of productivity tools doesn't automatically lead to increased productivity. Companies need to examine and adapt their...
Continuous Integration of AWS Serverless Applications
The primary draw for implementation of AWS serverless applications is the supposed simplicity. Anyone that has attempted to implement testing within a CI pipeline on a serverless application, however, knows that it is anything but simple. Serverless technologies allow for the faster construction of more complex applications with more complex integrations while also providing new technologies and execution environments, all of which pose a challenge to those used to testing in a more traditional way. This presentation looks at an API-based serverless application as an example and introduces...
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...
Navigating the Path to Agile Excellence: Metrics that Matter in DevOps Transformation
PreviewIn today's rapidly evolving tech landscape, transitioning to agile and DevOps practices is crucial for organizational growth. However, many teams struggle to gauge their progress effectively within these methodologies. In this insightful session, Cholette will explore the key metrics that drive success in agile and DevOps adoption, focusing on best practices that can be applied across various organizational settings. Delving into essential metrics drawn from industry best practices, Cholette will shed light on the critical indicators for understanding progress and fostering...
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...
Beyond Boundaries: Own Your Career Journey
Join Trish Cappiello for the 'Beyond Boundaries: Own Your Career Journey' workshop. Understand the stages of your career in technology, while tackling the challenges and embracing the opportunities. Learn to overcome self-imposed limits, prioritize continuous learning, and adapt for success. Gain practical tips to craft your personalized career plan. Redefine your journey with Trish in a psychological safe space where she encourages participation either through sharing examples or active listening.
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...
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...