I often suggest to teams that they should be using all sorts of tools in their pipelines- from simple static analysis checks and automated builds to security scans and performance testing. I've done presentations and talks at conferences. I've lobbied to clients. I've commiserated with my colleagues. But I've never put together my dream pipeline in one of my own projects.

There are always reasons that some tests and tools get left out- our policies won't allow them, they will take too long to get approved, we don't have time, we have bigger problems to deal with, it just isn't what the client is looking for right now. And I usually think, if only I were in charge, I'd make sure we were using those...

In late 2017 I took over maintenance on an open-source project. Now I have no restrictions. The sky's the limit. No one is around to tell me what I can't do. So why don't I have my dream pipeline in place yet?

I'll talk about the trade-offs and compromises I made when building out the pipeline. Why I decided to focus on some tools and tests but skipped others, and what I need to do or change to make this delivery process the pipeline I've always dreamed about, now that I have no one else to blame.

Elevator Pitch:

Agile Transformation is harder than it needs to be because we often find ways to consciously or subconsciously sabotage our efforts if we can recognize this behavior it is possible to intervene and make a change for the positive.

Abstract:

Have you ever been on a project where it seems like team members are preventing the team from getting better? Why do they do that? I don’t know either- a psychologist might have to answer that. What I can tell you about is my experiences in seeing teams become their own worst enemies and unwittingly sabotaging the projects they are trying to make successful. My goal is to help you realize when you or those around you are behaving in a way that is going to lead the team plateauing or even failing. I have often found that many teams can get stuck, or plateau, at a certain point along the continuum of agile maturity. These teams can meander around without getting better or even changing anything for long stretches of time. I have also worked with teams that put so many hurdles in their own way that they had no option but to fail. They often fell back into old patterns and gave up hope that things can get better. As an Agile Coach, I have often felt that one of the most valuable things I can share with the people I coach are my failures. I have worked on Agile projects for a long time, and I have failed in many different ways. Having been through failure, I have learned that to keep getting better you have to recognize the things that you do that lead to plateaus and failures to overcome them. This talk is for coaches and team leads who want to make sure their team isn't getting stuck in a rut, or who are trying to get out of a rut with their health and sanity intact.

Failure signs and examples

No process is defined and followed

• ex. Projects that claim to be agile without any experience or training, or doesn’t have basic agile practices such as retrospectives, I.e. we are agile because we have hour long daily standup meetings.

Process practices are ignored or removed with no compensating practices

• ex. Agile practices hold each other together, supporting each other by the value they bring to the project, some teams decide to not do some practices without doing something else to get that value, for instance pair programming provides code review and knowledge transfer, many teams don’t pair program and don’t do code reviews and or knowledge transfer.

Automation is not valued or planned into work

• ex. We will automate tests later. Often that later never comes and the team is left with a code base that is hard to maintain and change because you don’t know what your changes break.

No stakeholder expectations management

• ex. The only way a project can negotiate scope and or schedule is to actively manage stakeholder expectations. An example of unmanaged expectations is the PO that never says no to a feature request or the executive that decides what must to delivered and when it must be delivered.

Quality and testing practices are an after thought or short changed on schedule

• ex. Teams that don’t complete sprint commitments because the testers get coded stories too late in a sprint to do all the required testing and the rest of the team isn’t held responsible to help test.

No negotiation allowed in deliverables and or schedule

• ex. Executives that dictate all of the terms of a project before a team is even selected.

The team doing the work didn’t estimate the work but are held to an estimate

• Many government projects have such a long procurement cycle that no one from the proposal team is put on the project.

Part time team members are in the critical path

• ex. Sometimes people with special skills are needed for a part of a project. If the person is part time but their work is in the critical path the project is in trouble.

Heavy team turn over

• ex. Heavy turn over is a sign of a project that isn’t on track, even if it hits its deadlines the quality and output will suffer.

Political motivations more important than team’s ability to do work

• ex. If the team is setup to fail for reasons outside the team, they will most likely fail.

Distraction from issues outside the work that needs to be done

• ex. Scrum Masters that don’t shield the team from issues outside the work that needs to be done during a sprint will end up with a team that doesn’t hit the mark.

Examples of what can be done to avoid failed projects:

Focus on shielding the team from outside influence

• Have the team focus on the things they can control and prevent outside issues from distracting the team.

Negotiate delivery with the team

• The team can develop an understanding of what it can deliver. Trying to make the team do more is going to lower quality and potentially make the project take longer.

Management of stakeholder expectations

• Stakeholders always want more, that is their job. Let them ask for anything but set their expectations on what is really going to happen.

Focus on technical excellence, quality, and automation

• If you want your teams to get better, have them focus internally on things they can control like technical aspects of the project including quality and automation.

Hire motivated team members and make it possible for them to work

• People who care about what they are doing will always be better than the cheapest people that don’t care. Hire people who care.

Maintain a progressive planning pace for getting requirements ready

• Agile requires planning at different levels, skipping a level for any reason means there are going to be disconnects between your stakeholders and the people doing the work. Disconnects means the project will not product the results you want.

I spent January in Antarctica hanging out with penguins, whales, and seals. It was about as different from my day-to-day work as can be. And yet, on my long flight home, I couldn’t help but reflect on how well my trip aligned with one specific value of the Agile Manifesto: “Responding to change over following a plan.”

Antarctica is a place that truly drives home why we need both planning AND, even more importantly, the ability to respond to change. This trip helped me fully appreciate how true this value is - and not just in software development. And after being stuck in Antarctica six days longer than planned, it also built up my empathy for team members struggling with dynamic situations!

In 2001, a group of software developers got together in Snowbird, UT, and created the Agile Manifesto. The Manifesto was a statement of core value and principles. The core values are:

• Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
• Working software over comprehensive documentation
• Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
• Responding to change over following a plan

These four values are supplemented by 12 principles of agile software. The original 17 signatories were joined by thousands of additional people with the ability to sign cut off in 2016.

These principles are the foundation of much of the work in agile that has occurred in agile development, but have been mostly frozen as practices and agile has evolved.

Modern Agile has been created recently to update the underlying foundational values and to provide a focus beyond software delivery. Those four values are:

• Make People Awesome
• Deliver Value Continuously
• Make Safety a Prerequisite
• Experience and Learn Rapidly

This talk will walk through this reimagining of the agile values and what they mean for delivery within a government context. We will take each value and look at government cultural and technical challenges and opportunities to advance modern development practices.

The software delivery pipeline is the process of taking features from developers and getting them delivered to customers. The earliest tests should be the quickest and easiest to run, giving developers the fastest feedback. Successive rounds of testing should increase confidence that the code is a viable candidate for production and that more expensive tests—be it time, effort, cost—are justified. Manual testing should be performed toward the end of the pipeline, leaving computers to do as much work as possible before people get involved. Although it is tempting to arrange the delivery pipeline in phases (e.g., functional tests, then acceptance tests, then load and performance tests, then security tests), this can lead to problems progressing down the pipeline.

In this interactive workshop, we will discuss how to arrange your pipeline, automated or not, and so each round of tests provides just enough testing to give you confidence that the next set of tests is worth the investment. We'll explore how to get the right types of testing into your pipeline at the right points so that you can determine which builds are viable candidates for production.

DevOps needs to consider many different aspects of software quality, including security. The term DevSecOps was developed to highlight that security is a focus of the pipeline, not a second-class citizen.

Fortunately, we can define done for our pipeline so that it includes security. Continuous integration can invoke static analysis tools to test for security errors and check if we are using components with known vulnerabilities. Automated deployments and virtualization make dynamic environments available for testing in a production-like setting. Regression tests can drive traffic through proxies for security analysis. From the code to the systems where we deploy the software, the process can be designed to make sure that we follow security best practices, and not produce insecure software.

Participants will learn how to construct a definition of done that focuses on security in a DevOps pipeline. They will see how to define security practices that build confidence that they are doing DevSecOps, and how those practices and criteria might mature over time.

Kubernetes is quickly gaining popularity, but does the technology deserve so many accolades. In this talk we learn what exactly kubernetes has to offer in the DevOps world. We see that as a service it can provide resources for your DevOps pipeline, automated tests, and the application you are trying to build. We visit an example implementation of such a pipeline and discuss some lessons learned about how to balance these three needs. Additionally, we look at what design considerations your application needs to make, you should consider for your automated testing infrastructure, and how all of this can be leveraged to keep consistent CM while deploying rapidly. Lastly, we explore how threading it all together can help you fail fast and recover quickly as well.

This talk is intended to help folks who are managing technical projects avoid common pitfalls, and help technical teams better prepare managers for overall project success.

The best way to learn Scrum is by doing, but it can be difficult to simulate Scrum and see how well Scrum helps team overcome technical hurdles without actually building something technically challenging. Lego's have always been a fun option for introducing Scrum, but it's difficult to recreate technical impediments, the need for spikes and managing technical debt with our tried and true friend, the box of Lego's.

Arguably, a better alternative might be Snap Circuits, a toy designed to introduce children to electronics in a fun and easy-to-understand format. Like Lego's, adults gravitate toward Snap Circuits because they are colorful, quickly understood and snap together with ease.

But, Snap Circuits have the added advantage of requiring a small amount of technical learning during the simulation that make it a closer match to the technical obstacles faced by a typical Scrum team.

In this workshop, you'll learn one "Scrum in a Snap" simulation exercise. In addition, we'll provide you with a few other "Scrum in a Snap" ideas and encourage you to experiment on your own. Four lucky attendees will also win their own Snap Circuits kit so they can develop their own Scrum games.

Past participants in "Scrum in a Snap" have said "The best Scrum exercise I've ever done", "I can't believe how much it's like coding - without actually coding", "What a blast - I'll never forget this activity!" and "Where can I buy one?"

Attend this workshop to see why.

We have all been there, a shiny new and improved framework is released and we must implement it, but is this always the answer to improve your Agile organization? Frameworks are needed and provide guidelines for teams but if the teams/companies do not follow the principles and fundamentals of the Agile Manifesto it makes it very difficult for the framework to be successful. The belief is that switching up the specific framework is the answer but they soon realize that the framework is not the main issue that is the driving force. This can leave the teams/companies in a tough situation after committing to a framework that they are not ready for.

I will be sharing my experiences across multiple different companies on how this assumption has let them down and how we had to return the teams back to the fundamentals to solve the issues they are experiencing.

Communication chaos under looming deadlines - sound familiar? We'll level up our teamwork, practice rapid learning, and identify ways to calm the chaos and focus on getting to done, all using Spaceteam, a chaotic and collaborative card game.

You'll work with your teammates to repair a failing spaceship before it falls into a black hole. in order to escape, you'll communicate problems, request help, assist colleagues and respond to constant change -- all in five minutes!

You'll learn from your failures, improve as a team, and gain insights into what helps organizations and teams collaborate effectively and achieve flow.

Are you lying to yourself? Do you keep using Scrum even though you should have switched to Kanban months ago? Scrum is a popular Agile development methodology, but if it doesn’t make sense for your team, then you might be better off switching to Kanban. I will describe my experience working with a team transitioning to Agile and attempting to use Scrum. We initially did a good job at planning, but external dependencies and unplanned work disrupted our commitments. We stopped planning and fell into the pattern of moving most of the stories to the next sprint at the end of every sprint. I will discuss some telltale signs to help you identify when you shouldn’t be using Scrum and might benefit from a Lean methodology like Kanban. I will also provide you with some practical suggestions that you can use to help your team make the transition from Scrum to Kanban.

Sure, we would like everyone to have an agile mindset and focus on continuous improvement, but sometimes as Agilists we need to work with stakeholders who don’t agree with our priorities or our methods. When you need to get something done in a bureaucracy, how do you adapt? Every place you operate has a unique combination of people, processes, and problems. We'll discuss general principles that will help you navigate successfully.

Over the last 5 years, Agile approaches have seen widespread adoption across the US Federal Government. Where real commitment is given to proven Agile frameworks and techniques, programs do see significant improvement in value delivery and speed. But unfortunately often, ‘Agile’ nomenclature is used while perpetuating behaviors that make real improvement impossible, and may actually make the lived experience worse for participants or stakeholders. And where Agile approaches fail, they add to a narrative that real methods won’t work in this environment. Many of the anti-patterns I’ve seen working as a Coach in the Public Sector are rooted in decision-makers clinging to 5 myths about Agile in Government. This talk will explore these 5 myths, where they come from, and some ways out of them.

The process of rapidly addressing cybersecurity attacks and data breaches have become a big challenge for Federal Cybersecurity teams. The agile methodology has been known to work well for Federal software development projects. But, its time for cybersecurity teams to fully adopt agile and the DevSecOps approach to effectively increase transparency, promote security readiness and better secure data within Federal systems. Let's protect the public's data through reducing vulnerabilities, reducing insecure defaults, and increasing code coverage. If cybersecurity teams adopt agile they can begin to break team silos and enhance their risk management processes.

The resistance is real in federal programs. We often hold back the power of DevOps by blocking access to production. We’ll see how DevOps leaders bridge the gap in federal delivery, with leadership lessons from lightning.

Lightning overcomes air’s enormous resistance in short bursts. Government DevOps proceeds in the same way, with significant cultural and policy barriers forming resistance – but also with local champions and moments of alignment that allow DevOps programs to begin to cross that resistance in abrupt, sometimes jagged progression. We'll discuss what helps reduce that local resistance to rapid deployment in federal programs:

• Breaking governance silos
• Changing the culture of “No”
• Decoupling release authorization from deployment authorization
• Team managed deployments
• Ongoing security authorization

Our Agile transformations can feel like Sisyphean efforts – but do not abandon hope! In this talk we will discuss nine circles of Agile Hell. Each hell is an example of a common problem programs encounter.

We'll ask the audience to prioritize their pain points, and focus on the six Agile hells closest to their experience. We will discuss real examples for “escaping” out of each Agile Hell - from Agile Coaches that the Dave(s) know.

By attending this event, Agilists will expand their toolbox of techniques to help their organizations.

Elevator Pitch:

DevOps and Continuous Delivery call for a new look at agile software development best practices in order to maximize the efficient delivery of value.

Abstract:

Is your agile team “using DevOps” but still struggling to successfully deliver quality software to Production repeatably? Are you part of an agile team struggling with how to best support your DevOps (CI/CD) pipeline? As your practices mature it is natural to adopt best practices to improve the team. As the team gets better, the practices they follow need to change as well. Initial agile software development practices are designed to help the team bring order to the chaos of their projects. These practices help them become predictable and deliver working software on a regular basis. As a team progresses to continuous delivery, they need to focus on a new set of practices that leverages their build pipeline to build confidence in each build of the software. This session will lay out the best practices and process evolution to move from delivering at the end of a release, to delivering at the end of each sprint, and finally to delivering on a continuous basis.

DevOps Maturity levels

0 - Ad Hoc- rare builds with limited, if any, reliability. There is no build pipeline or any automation. Provisioning, deployment, or test are ad hoc.

1 - Continuous Build - builds happen on a regular or continuous basis but without tests. Teams know the software compiles but nothing else.

2 - Continuous Integration - Sufficient level of unit test coverage and static analysis gives the developers a high level of confidence that the software works as they intended it to work.

3 - Continuous Delivery - Software is deployed to an environment automatically based on passing CI and automated tests are executed in that environment. You have a build pipeline or are in the process of putting one together. The team has confidence that if the software passes all tests and inspections that the build might be a release candidate. The team will start experimenting with techniques like feature toggles to have selectively activated code in specific environments.

4 - Optimizing Continuous Delivery - making your build pipeline take less time using parallel builds and shifting tests left (doing some perf or security testing earlier in the process). An initial build pipeline is fully established and the team is focused on making the pipeline fast while increasing confidence in the result. At this stage the team wants to use techniques such as build step parallelization to shorten the build cycle and adding tests in targeted areas. The goal of this level is to have a fast build that, if it passes, the team feels it ready to go into production. The team will have defined practices around selectively activated code in defined environments.

5 - Continuous Deployment - The ultimate expression of a build pipeline where the team has such confidence in the pipeline and its ability to determine build health that all check-ins are release candidates and any build that passes all tests and inspections are automatically put into production. This also requires a healthy rollback process that the team has tested and is confident that it will work if needed. Most teams will have adopted practices that support their practice of releasing into production multiple times a day.

The goal of creating a build pipeline is to help the team progressively gain confidence in the software they are building. With each level of maturity the team is focused on developing best practices for delivery of software in smaller chunks. The best practices change with the delivery timeframe. Best practices for each timeframe include:

Release Delivery Maturity

• All work required to release software is completed in the release
• Functional test suite is used to perform regression testing
• Software is production quality by the end of the release with the goal of having software working at all times
• Since the release spans multiple sprints the production deployment timeframe is the release and the team uses progressive planning for a release

Sprint Delivery Maturity

• All work required to release software is completed in sprint
• Software is production quality by the end of the sprint
• Functional test suite is used multiple times a sprint or is continuous during the sprint
• The sprint is the release timeframe for the team but the team may have plans that span multiple sprints
• The team may use branches or feature toggles to mange feature development

Continuous Delivery Maturity

• Software is always at production release quality, the goal is for the software to always be releasable
• All automated tests and inspections are continuous
• Human required processes are still performed but not in the path of release, ex. Accessibility testing
• Feature activation is managed by software techniques like feature toggles
• The release rollback process is matured and tested on a continuous basis

Examples of teams progressing through build pipeline maturity

Forge.mil - started with six month plus release cycle with no automation,through a series of incremental improvements we reduced that to releasing after every sprint using a totally automated process

REProfit - greenfield project that we took over and built out a build pipeline immediately. Developed a Continuous Deployment pipeline that took around 2 hours to go from check in, to released in production.

Abiomed - Embedded medical device with no automated build or pipeline. Created an automated build process including automated testing and a Continuous Delivery pipeline that deployed to test environments that ran test automation with every successful build.

Agile adoptions hit a speed bump when big, complicated organizations expect User Acceptance Testing, and don't see an Agile equivalent. We'll demystify UAT, and show the multiple places in where it can be found in Agile delivery.

Big and complicated organizations -- particularly government! -- conflate two different ideas in UAT: final sign-off of satisfactory delivery, and (badly delayed) user feedback.We'll explain how getting that user feedback early and often dramatically reduces delivery risk and increases user satisfaction. We'll review tips and ideas to change the approach and walk from the term "UAT" safely.

Behavior Driven Development has been around for a while, and it is here to stay. However, the added abstraction levels present in it, pose a technical
problem for writing and managing tests. While it does a great job of marrying the non-technical aspect of test writing, to the technical flow of an application
under test, keeping this information under source control becomes problematic. Frameworks such as Behave, Cucumber or Robot give subject matter
experts that additional ability to write test cases, however, they are often restricted to access to them, as if test cases are treated as code, they stored in
source control repositories. Additionally, frequency these Given, When, then steps soon grow to an extent where they become difficult to manage without
an IDE, and most non-technical people don't want to run an IDE.
Through the use of Management Tools such as JIRA, and VersionOne, Max will show how to simply manage these non-technical steps and keep them in sync
with the automaton in an SCM, such as Git or SVN. Additionally, he'll discuss and show how to link these tests to requirements, and stories in development,
to provide traceability, and continuous integration support. He'll share his hands-on experience developing an open sourced product to help manage these
tests, along with proven workflows at an enterprise level for ensuring full team buy-in on both non-technical and technical aspects of test case development.