In a complex, interdependent eco-system, where each service is evolving rapidly, we typically end up with an Integration Hell .i.e. the myriad problems that occur when API integrations break down

• Provider and consumer integrations break when their understanding of the API endpoints are out of sync
• Working integrations break when the API developer makes a change without informing the consumer
• Development and testing slow down when the consumer depends on the provider API running in a staging environment:
  • The network may be down
  • The environment hosting the API may be down
  • The staging API may crash, or may not even be started
  • Development can be delayed if the staging API is not kept up-to-date
  • API changes can come in at the last minute, resulting in breakage on the consumer side
  • The provider API may break backward compatibility, resulting in breakage on the consumer

Instead, what if we could make the dependencies between the provider and consumers explicit in the form of executable contracts. These executable contracts provide a common, clear definition of their API endpoints. They give instantaneous feedback about accidental breakage to the teams so that they can work independently. These executable contracts are:

1. Kept up-to-date and acts as a single source of truth
2. Used for service virtualisation, keeping consumers in sync with the contract
3. Run as tests against the provider API to validate it's request and response type definitions
4. Tightly integrated with CI
5. Capable of pinpointing any backwards-incompatible changes to the contract

This is Contract Driven Development, and it heralds the Death of Integration Hell.

Here's a sample contract:

This session will demonstrate all the key points of Contract Driven Development as implemented by the teams using an open-source tool called Specmatic.

The principles of chaos engineering have been battle-tested for years using traditional infrastructure and containerized microservices, but how do they work with serverless functions and managed services? In this session we'll cover the motivations behind chaos engineering, how we perform chaos experiments, what some of the common weaknesses we can test for in our serverless applications are and run some actual experiments in a serverless environment. Join as we move from talking about principles to performing real chaos engineering experiments for serverless!

Unique opportunity to get trained by the author of one of the most effective DevOps Culture simulation, prepare for DevOps Culture Certified Trainer exam (DCCT) from CertiProf© and gain competitive advantage in DevOps training marketplace.

First time in India! The latest 2020 version of this popular simulation (ran at 45 conferences in 15 countries).

This train-the-trainer workshop will prepare you for many successful facilitations of DevOps Culture simulation and give you access to the licensed training material (PowerPoint slides, handouts, flipcharts design etc). You will learn to run effective debriefing with your groups and help them connect learning from the simulation with solutions to the real-life challenges in their organization.

The simulation is designed for a broad audience, enabling participants to gain the insights into the “Why” and the “What” of the DevOps before jumping into the “How”. Through this powerful role-based simulation, participants experience the benefits of cross-training, learn to eliminate silos, "shift left" on security, adopt systems thinking and practice optimizing the flow of value from business to development and to IT operations.

Become one of the DCCT holders - DevOps change agents who are able to create the DevOps Culture simulation experience, providing participants with additional insights into taking the next steps to embracing DevOps mindset and leading organizational change. Guide your workshop participants through the experiential discovery of the following practices: optimizing flow, amplifying feedback loop and growing safety culture. Deliver real-life examples from medium to large size organizations, latest findings from the State of DevOps report and key ideas from “The Phoenix Project” by Gene Kim.

This unique simulation uses cognitive neuroscience principles, game design theory and elements of “Training from the Back of the Room” framework.

Learn from the game creator, prepare for DCCT exam from CertiProf© (included in your registration) and help make DevOps culture experience accessible to all – business stakeholders, C-level executives, IT management, techies and non-techies alike.

In this talk, we utilise the tools of Functional Programming to provide robust and resilient software components. We start off by defining Functional Programming and investigate how this itself can improve the quality of software. Once we have committed to programming in this style, we explore some of the tools that naturally arise. These tools will be explored using a variety of programming languages, since these techniques are available in many popular programming environments. Some examples will also introduce Haskell syntax.

1. Using static types to provide a reliable indication of the behaviour of software, including up to proof of correctness. We will use the technique of parametricity to demonstrate this reliability[^1].
2. Using property-based testing for high coverage testing with minimal programmer effort.
3. We will also have a look at the trade-offs that are made between types and tests and discuss a reasoning framework on making optimal decisions on when to use each.

[^1]: Wadler, Philip. "Theorems for free!." FPCA. Vol. 89. No. 4. 1989

At the core of the agile mindset is learning. Continuous learning is only possible through active feedback loops. Linear approaches do not support learning and are doomed to fail in a world of uncertainty. The key is maintaining healthy feedback loops which incorporate new knowledge which enables learning leading to success. An iterative approach with broken feedback loops is similarly doomed.

From Todd’s background as a Chemical and Petroleum engineer the idea of feedback and control loops was natural and to a large extent how he got involved in the agile community. Todd will explain the basics of feedback loops and how they can enable agility and learning, or when broken they can destroy agility and enable other behaviors such as organizational politics.

This workshop covers Knative, Kubernetes-based open-source platform to deploy and manage modern serverless workloads. It provides a set of middleware components that are essential to build modern, source-centric, and container-based applications that can run anywhere: on-premises, in the cloud, or even in a third-party data center. Knative components are built on Kubernetes and codify the best practices shared by successful real-world Kubernetes-based frameworks.

Each of the components under the Knative project attempts to identify common patterns and codify the best practices shared by successful real-world Kubernetes-based frameworks and applications. Knative components focus on solving many mundane but difficult tasks such as deploying a container, orchestrating source-to-URL workflows on Kubernetes, routing and managing traffic with blue/green deployment, automatic scaling and sizing workloads based on demand, and binding running services to eventing ecosystems.

The workshop goes into details of how Knative enables you to focus just on writing interesting code without worrying about the boring but difficult parts of building, deploying, and managing an application. It shows how developers can even use familiar idioms, languages, and frameworks to deploy any workload: functions, applications, or containers. We also touch upon Cloud Run (a managed Knative offering) and software architecture patterns for modern serverless applications.

DateTime: This workshop is scheduled on Oct 17th from 9 AM to 1 PM IST and 18th from 10 AM to 12 PM

For the last few years, I have been diving into what Collaboration really means. I have been collecting stories and examples and discovering patterns across our industry.

In this session, I walk the room through a Collaboration workbook where participants think about Collaboration via a series of different lenses. We will ask ourselves what collaboration means to us, and share our stories of great collaborations we have been a part of.

I will also share aggregated data from my research and share my own insights.

Little’s Law has been used in queuing theory for over half a century. It is an elegant explanation of the relationship between average throughput, Work in Progress (WIP), and cycle time. In a stable environment it gives us a good understanding of the performance of the system which can used for forecasting.

But where are the story points and estimation? Certainly, size must matter. But does it? In this workshop we explore Little’s Law through theory and the experience of simulations. Each attendee will come away with a better understanding of Little’s Law and the core assumptions necessary for it to be applicable and useful in forecasting. Through the simulation you will experience why estimation of individual items is often not necessary in an environment where Little’s Law applies.

How do you allow teams the freedom to pollute the data lake, and protect the security, privacy, sanity and usability of data?

Giving teams the power to choose what they measure means giving them the power to drive org-wide changes.

Gatekeeping through Data engineering is too slow and centralized.

Totally DIY, you can't control costs, privacy or integrity.

This talk will cover both the organizational and technical structures we use at Grofers to enable agile data governance and analytics in a team of over 300 in tech and analytics.

Effective organizational security is a shared responsibility and yet, a big number of organizations suffer from testing security issues at the last minute or not at all. In this talk, we discuss secure best coding practices for developers to improve an organization’s security posture.

Chaos Engineering is an up and coming method used by SREs for autonomously introducing random failures into a system and measuring whether the service degrades or fails. This talk discusses how security teams can use Chaos Engineering principles to develop, test, and maintain resilient log pipelines.

Mangle is an open-source project that enables you to run chaos engineering experiments seamlessly against applications and infrastructure components to assess resiliency and fault tolerance. It is designed to introduce faults with very little pre-configuration and can support any infrastructure that you might have including K8S, Docker, vCenter or any Remote Machine with ssh enabled. With its powerful plugin model, you can define a custom fault of your choice based on a template and run it without building your code from scratch.

In this workshop, you will learn how to inject faults on infrastructure and on a running Java application.

Chaos Engineering is the discipline of experimenting in a distributed system to identify the weakness in the Architecture and Design of a system which helps in building the resiliency to attain High Availability. Kubernetes being a de facto standard for container deployments and orchestration the applications running on Kubernetes platform should be highly available and resilient to failures.

In this talk will walk through a real-time use case of how we encountered an issue with Kubernetes platform that impacted applications running on it and we built resiliency for it. With Nodes and Pods being ephemeral in Kubernetes there are high chances for application users/clients to get network connection errors, such as 5xx in case of HTTP requests, when a node restarts or a pod gets terminated and how we resolved it.

There are many tools available that create chaos in Kubernetes. This talk covers about the need to do chaos engineering in Kubernetes based on the use case discussed and how it can be done.

This workshop will first introduce Functional Programming concepts using the Haskell programming language syntax and tools.

We will then present a series of exercises that utilise the static type system of Haskell and with some guidance, solve the exercises. Subsequent exercises will introduce property-based testing using the hedgehog library. Finally, we will tackle some exercises where a trade-off must be considered, and solve those using both types and property-based tests.

The focus of this workshop will be on introducing the tools for achieving software resiliency and robustness. The techniques learned here may be applied in other programming language environments.

DateTime: This workshop is scheduled on Oct 12th and 13th from 1 PM to 5 PM IST (4 hours each day)

Serverless applications are usually made up of functions interacting with fully-managed services, so you can develop applications without having to think about servers. This enables us to build applications that scale quickly and reliably based on incoming requests, often in the form of events that go well beyond API requests and scheduled cron job type rules. In the event-driven model, the components communicate with events and that helps you adopt some of the best practices for distributed systems by default. In this talk, we’ll explore what events are, the different types of events available to your serverless applications, where they come from and how to utilize them to build applications that can provide more value to your customers. All of this with a lot of architectural pattern examples.

Traditional accounting methods measure and manage innovation efforts but this can in fact be one of its biggest disablers. Internal funding systems and the way performance and progress get measured, demand us to make up facts that can not possibly be predicted far into the future. In return, it all too often makes us build the wrong thing. How can Return on Investment (ROI) calculations, for example even be close to true when the product and even the market doesn't yet exist?

The problem with innovation of course is that we have little to no historical data these approaches heavily rely on. Further, current systems don’t account and adjust for all the new learnings a team gathers. They simply don’t enable honest conversations between those that build products and those that make investment decisions. It leads many people to make up fiction and hide risky assumptions in order to get funding. Many times the best storytellers and politicians get funded, not necessarily those with the best ideas. As a result, organisations fall into the trap of not making corrections early enough before, all too often, the budget is used up before reaching success or ends up with a zombie product on life support.

Innovation Accounting fundamentally ties learning and money together. It bridges the gap between product and finance. It allows for an honest and effective approach to creating, delivering and capturing value.

How do we learn the right thing at the right time and in the most cost-effective way? How do we organise the process, new insides and decision making at scale?

Learning is the core activity in any environment of uncertainty - innovations natural companion and proven by many failed startups and projects. Most managers and teams agree on this but organising, storing and using what has been learned is often a challenge. We will be exploring the fundamentals of how to tackle this issue and make learning more manageable, transparent and shareable. We will explore what it means to gather relevant data in the most cost-effective and fastest way. With the goal to enable decision making in an information-poor environment.

Report Cards are an essential tool for any innovation team that wants to take learning and innovation management seriously. As such many different report cards are in fluctuation. You will be leaving this workshop knowing what the essential parts of a report card are and why. You will use it on a problem yourself to maximise your learning.

Elijah assisting organisations with their Innovation Practice, Management and Strategy.

Imagine you are a Mad Agile Scientist and have a diabolical experiment to conduct - what would happen if you exchanged the brains of a Product Owner and Scrum Master? Mwuhahahaha!!! How would the body of a Product Owner with the brain of a Scrum Master act? And vice versa?

Perhaps the Scrum Master would now treat the team like a backlog? This Scrum Master would be focused on value and maintaining a coaching backlog of team and person improvements. This Scrum Master is refining the team, crafting a group that delivers value.

And perhaps the Product Owner might treat the backlog like a team? Rather than backlog refining, they coach the backlog. They would be focused on nurturing, protecting, and empowering the backlog. The backlog might transform from an irritation into a labor of love.

Although this experiment sounds terrible, this change of perspective might be what you need to reanimate your dead team or backlog.

Join the fun and come learn what horrifying results await!

Just what exactly does an Agile Coach do? Coaches may vary in their response to this question. I would like to think that most Agile Coaches, with some variation, would be fairly consistent in how we perceive our role. However, some companies or orgs or people probably interpret the role of the Agile Coach in ways that coaches never intended.

Let’s explore some of the things that Agile Coaches have been asked to do! Are these antipatterns? Doing what needs to be done? This session will delve into the topic of the role of the Agile Coach and highlight potential challenges and possible solutions.

An interactive and engaging session where we will prioritise a backlog of agile stories and dive deeper into the tales that matter to you, then and there...we may even create some in real time!

As a practitioner and someone passionate about bringing the best out of myself and those around me, these experiences will share knowledge, learning and concepts from real life practice with a number of organisations and teams adopting and maturing agile ways of working.

Initial product backlog:

- Anarchy, Scrum and Kanban.

- Go on then, just change your mindset!

- Aye, it's just commonsense.

- Now that was a great agile team!

- The Super Retrospective

- Here is your 'pizza', now self manage

- Key lessons from the transformation trenches

- WaterScrumBanFall - really!

- I'm a project manager, get me outta here

and a little bit of improv from me and you will go a long way to a rewarding shared experience.