As an industry, we’re not very good at managing tech debt. Yesterday's big balls of mud are likely to become tomorrow’s big buckets of glue. Wouldn’t it be nice if we had strategies that helped us to:

• Balance and evolve quality while delivering features?
• Pinpoint hotspots in code? At multiple levels of detail?
• Heighten situational awareness of system health and hygiene?
• Conduct data-driven, constructive critiques within our team?
• Automate (useful) measurement, putting quality gates in place to self-govern as a team?

In this talk, I’ll share my lightweight approach and toolchain for realizing these aspirations. Expect lots of tips and tricks for combating entropy in long-lived, software-intensive products shared by teams and large organizations by creating strategies and tactics that help visualize, prioritize, and manage digital product evolution.

The Dojo movement is growing in popularity as an approach that helps enterprises transform into world-class product development organizations. Dojos represent a departure from the classic agile focus on delivery, bringing learning and a product mindset to the forefront.

We'll share the emerging Dojo model by way of specific examples and mini-case studies. You will see how Dojos have taken shape at Fannie Mae and other large companies in the last several years. Think of this as a tour of the Dojo for two, main audiences: teams and leaders. Attendees will leave understanding how Dojos can benefit their group, portfolio, and/or organization.

As an industry, we’re not very good at managing tech debt. Yesterday's big balls of mud will likely become tomorrow’s big buckets of glue. Wouldn’t it be great if we could:

• Balance and evolve quality while delivering features?
• Pinpoint hotspots in code? At multiple levels of detail?
• Heighten situational awareness of system health and hygiene?
• Conduct data-driven, constructive critiques within our team?
• Automate (useful) measurement, putting quality gates in place to self-govern as a team?

In this talk, I’ll share my lightweight approach and toolchain for realizing these aspirations. Expect lots of tips and tricks for combating entropy in long-lived, software-intensive products shared by teams and large organizations. Some of these tools can be a little daunting for beginners, so I’ll take a demo-driven approach sharing the cheat codes I use to get to value as quickly as possible.

Ultimately, I'll show you how to start building a system for visualizing, prioritizing, and managing your software product's evolution and technical debt side by side with new feature development.

In 2016 I had the good fortune to join a massive DevOps initiative as a head coach. The goal was to, in a 7000+ person technology organization, get product development teams fluent in topics such as CI/CD, automated testing, and product management. Over the course of six months our team tuned an initiative a successful, impactful program.

In this talk, I’ll share the experiences and learnings from my 6-month journey. We’ll start with the concept of a DevOps Dojo and explore it from four perspectives: product, place, process, and, most importantly, people.

Product: Elaborating on the classic “coder’s dojo” - where the focus is on building technical skills - to a “DevOps Dojo” where we perfect technical skills while delivering on product learning goals.

Place: We’ll go on a virtual tour through of a massive engineering space designed to promote collaboration, learning, and rapid product feedback.

Process: How we managed to scale the program to 12 concurrent dojo teams of 4-16 people with a custom pull system (kanban) featuring unusual-but-realistic WIP limits.

People: What skills (some quite surprising) does it take to make a program like this succeed? I’ll share the framing tool we developed for rapid team alignment during onboarding.

In the early 2000s, eXtreme Programming (XP) introduced agility to software engineers. Contemporary cultural and technical innovations - container technology, distributed version control systems, the proliferation of free and open source software, and the DevOps movement - have significantly expanded our possibilities.

In this one day, hands-on workshop, we’ll build a modern continuous deployment pipeline based on Git, Jenkins, and Docker. Starting with continuous integration, we’ll practice Git workflows enabling parallel development with pull requests and explicit dependency management through the use of forked repositories. We’ll then extend the ecosystem to support ad-hoc testing environments, multi-versioned deployments, and build promotion. We’ll survey tools and techniques for production deployments touching on Docker Swarm, Google Kubernetes, ChatOps, and emerging tools used in serverless architectures such as Amazon Lambda.

While technologies change, values and principles continue to guide our choices. We’ll end with reflection and a guided discussion on how core XP values - simplicity, feedback, communication, courage - can serve as a compass for environmental and workflow decisions that impact our customers and teammates.

This workshop readies developers for success with Test-Driven Development. Together we’ll take small steps toward working a full, double loop TDD workflow. Over the course of two days attendees gain comfort with the TDD workflow, integrating it with other important practices such as pair programming, source control, emergent design, domain-driven design and lightweight modeling.

It’s two solid days of intense work — over 60% hands-on, iterative exercises. The rest of the time is a mix of fast, dense lightning talks, case study reviews, chalk-talks and facilitated group discussions.

As an independent agile coach, I encounter a lot of developers frustrated by their home team culture. The same questions come up time and again: "how do I get my team to adopt XYZ?" This question assumes a solution instead of framing a problem and involving a group in conceiving and developing an answer. With a little conscious work, we can hone our skills as influencers and stop operating from unconscious, unexamined motivations. When we reframe effecting change in this way, our efficacy improves dramatically.

In this talk, I'll share a mindset for improving effecting change through ethical influence and group involvement. I'll end by sharing a toolbox of simple change tools you can apply to your teams the very next day.

Pyramids? Quadrants? Cupcakes?! There are a wide array of models that describe approaches to test automation strategy and their possible positive (or negative) outcomes.

In this talk, we’ll survey the landscape of testing models: models that range from technical to product to cultural mindsets, including best practices and anti-patterns. I’ll add detail and nuance to each of these models in the form of professional experience, real world example, and case study. 

With a new lens, focusing on testing strategy as an act of curation, I'll share a new approach to evolving a testing strategy appropriate for your product development team's specific context.