Agile + DevOps USA 2024 - Tutorials

Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of Agile + DevOps USA. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into the topics below so that you can learn more to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you. View the Packages & Pricing page to see to learn more on which passes include Tutorials.

Monday, October 14

Tricia Broderick
Ignite Insight + Innovation
MA

Facilitating Team Decisions

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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-...

Philip Daye
EMARKETER
MB

A Quality Engineering Introduction to AI and Machine Learning

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Although there are several controversies and misunderstandings surrounding AI and machine learning, one thing is apparent — people have quality concerns about the safety, reliability, and trustworthiness of these types of systems. Not only are ML-based systems shrouded in mystery due to their largely black-box nature, they also tend to be unpredictable since they can adapt and learn new things at runtime. Validating ML systems is challenging and requires a cross-section of knowledge, skills, and experience from areas such as mathematics, data science, software engineering, cyber-security,...

Adam_Auerbach
EPAM Systems
MC

How to DevOps Your Testing Strategy – An Exercise in Value Stream Analysis

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really...

Arlen Bankston
Grow-Lean LLC
ME

Designing (Much) Better Agile Meetings

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tricia Broderick
Ignite Insight + Innovation
MF

Leading Change

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Leading change requires something other than issuing directives and using checklists to validate execution. As much as I love a checkmark, no one wants the role of "did you do it?" over and over. Leaders have significant influence on whether a change is understood, embraced and retained within the organization. In this deep dive session, discover and examine the aspects necessary for creating and building a culture of change and resilience. Expect to walk away with practical alternatives to the dreaded "trust but verify" implementation approaches.

Philip Daye
EMARKETER
MG

Leveraging Generative AI for Software Productivity

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Executive leaders across the globe have been asking a relatively simple yet profound question: Can we leverage generative AI to transform our business, enterprise, or industry? For software-based companies, focus has either been on differentiating their product and service offerings using this new technology. But how about leveraging generative AI to improve team productivity and efficiency? This may be possible but how do you measure its success? What are some of the key use cases within business analysis, development, and testing that software teams can use? Are there any pitfalls...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
MH

Badass Agile Coaching Skills for Everyone

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Rob Myers
Agile Institute
MI

Essential Test-Driven Development with AI/LLM Assist: A Hands-On Workshop

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Will AI take over developer and tester roles? Rob's investigations found that an AI/LLM bot can write effective implementations but will need very clear, descriptive specifications. Yes, we humans will need to write the tests first! Test-Driven Development (TDD) has allowed developers to do just that—to "think in tests"—for over 25 years. TDD combines engineering specification, developer testing, coding, and design in a fast feedback cycle that greatly reduces defects, debugging, and rework. Test-driven teams write a failing automated test that defines new behavior, then the "...

Arlen Bankston
Grow-Lean LLC
MJ

The Liquid Agility Framework: Toolkit for Product Leaders

Monday, October 14, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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

Derrick Roach
Coveros
TA

Supercharge Your Workflow: To GitHub and Beyond

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

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...

Mary Thorn
S&P Global Ratings
Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TB

Creating a High-Performance Agile Team

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Rob Myers
Agile Institute
TC

Wrangling Your Untested Legacy Code: A Hands-On Workshop

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Although most agile developers would prefer to use Test-Driven Development (TDD) on everything, their products or systems usually contain existing untested "legacy" code which resists and stifles good TDD practices. Untested code is easily broken and can hide those defects for months. Even with TDD, a developer adding new behaviors to legacy code can quickly run into problems when that untested code must change. Characterization Testing (i.e., testing existing behaviors) is the ancillary technique that allows teams to strengthen their safety net of fast, automated tests. But adding tests...

TD

Getting Started with AI and Machine Learning

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Are you a software professional who would like to learn to use AI and machine learning (ML), but don't know how to get started? One of the best ways to get into ML is by designing and completing small projects. Although you will ultimately need to understand the fundamentals of AI/ML, there's no reason why you can't learn foundational terms, concepts and principles as you put them into practice.  Join Kaushal Dalvi as he introduces you to the world of applied machine learning. Kaushal will guide you through a series of ML projects end-to-end, enabling you to gain experience with creating...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TE

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Mary Thorn
S&P Global Ratings
Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TF

The Craft of Highly Effective Agile Leadership

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Jeff Payne
Coveros
TG

MLOps: DevOps for Machine Learning

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tom-Stiehm
Coveros
TH

Web Security Testing: The Basics and More

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Web applications are often security critical or serve as front-ends for security critical applications, making web testing for vulnerabilities an essential part of software testing. Unfortunately, most software testers have not been taught how to identify web security issues while testing applications. Join Tom Stiehm as he shares what you need to know to security test web-based applications as part of your overall testing process. Learn about the most common web security vulnerabilities and how they are introduced into web code and exploited by hackers. Explore test techniques for...

TI

An Agile-Not-Fragile Introduction to Microservices

Tuesday, October 15, 2024 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

The microservices architecture provides guidance for decomposing systems into small, loosely coupled, independently deployable and scalable services. Microservices align well with agile development and DevOps practices because they enable new increments of the system to be delivered earlier, more frequently, and even continuously throughout the lifecycle. However, as with all new paradigms, there are pros and cons that must be considered when transitioning onto a new landscape. Join Kaushal Dalvi as he gives you an agile-not-fragile introduction to microservices. You'll learn the...