Agile + DevOps USA 2024 - Consultant
Customize your Agile + DevOps USA 2024 experience with sessions for consultants.
Monday, October 14
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
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
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...
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...
Scale Test Environments Using Cloud Infrastructure for Continuous Testing
PreviewThe challenges of managing test environments in the fast-paced world of software development are numerous, ranging from complexity and resource limitations. Traditional on-premises solutions often offer limited scalability and cause bottlenecks that hinder continuous testing. This presentation tackles these challenges head-on by proposing a shift to cloud-based test environments underpinned by Infrastructure as Code. By embracing the cloud, organizations can dynamically create and tear down test environments as needed, freeing up valuable resources. Integration with CI/CD pipelines...
Designing Resilient Event-Driven Data Mesh Architecture
Most enterprises deal with large scale data. There are common challenges involved in managing data. One such challenge faced by distributed applications is effective processing, identifying transactional boundaries, and exchange of data across disparate systems, where governance, modeling, ownership, and consumption considerations are tenets. An event-driven data mesh provides capabilities to power both operational & analytical use cases, in both real time & batch. It provides the framework necessary for creating, communicating, and using data. In request-response architecture,...
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...
Becoming the Bottleneck - Embrace the Challenges of Testing in an Agile Environment
PreviewTesting has a bad reputation for being slow & costly. Speed, price, quality—pick two, right? How can we ensure that testing does not become the bottleneck? We first have admit that we have a problem, and then look at the root causes of why testing is slow and expensive. Among these are: lack of clear requirements and priorities, unclear testing processes and delivery procedures, misaligned goals between product, development, QA, & Ops teams, unreasonable expectations (such as 100% test coverage), inefficient (or unreliable) test automation, lack of ability to parallelize...
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...
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...
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...