Helping teams transition to Agile ways of working is not a one-size-fits-all solution, and traditional learning methods are often not sufficient in helping teams and organizations embrace and refine their Agile practices.

This session explores one organization's approach to sharpening its teams' technical skills by designing an immersive, collaborative learning experience that embraces Dojo-Style learning principles. 

Results from our pilots are highly promising.  During the session, we will explore this approach, highlighting successful elements, areas that required adjustments, and offering valuable insights that can be applied in your specific context. These insights aim to empower you in designing learning experiences that are not only more effective but also lasting, in contrast to conventional methods.

As agile adoption broadens and matures within organizations, an area that is often overlooked is evolving a holistic software testing strategy keeps pace with the rapid evolution of software and help teams fit testing into our modern continuous software development world.

In this session, we will explore the basic elements of an agile testing strategy based on a holistic testing model, what a well-rounded test portfolio should look like to be responsive, reliable and maintainable, and provide tools and ideas to help you develop/refine a strategy that’s fit for purpose within your context. We will revisit original metaphors such as the Test Pyramid, Test Quadrants, and provide a fresh perspective on how you can put these concepts to use when crafting a modern test strategy that leverages the power of cross-functional teams and left shifts testing concerns throughout the software development lifecycle.

Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) always begins with a conversation. At times, a simple conversation is enough to convey the essential business need, but sometimes a little more structure is needed to really understand the problem we are trying to solve.

 

In this interactive session we introduce Features Mapping, a structured, intuitive approach for business stakeholders and team members to collaboratively discover essential product requirements.  Using concrete examples, we will illustrate the technique and how it can help teams not only build a deeper understanding of the problem they are solving, but also help define more actionable acceptance criteria, and a better set of test cases.

 

Maybe you’ll find Feature Mapping to be a more compelling alternative to the typical freeform requirements discovery sessions.

Gherkin holds the promise of being an easy to implement and easy to understand tool for getting teams to be Test Driven. And it should be. But in our experience working with and coaching many teams, we have found significant differences between theory and practice. Too often, Gherkin scenarios are difficult to understand, difficult to maintain, and not valuable.

We will go over the following anti-patterns and discuss strategies to overcome them:

-Scenarios that focus on implementation rather than expected behavior
-Scenarios that are too long and too complex
-Misuse of the Gherkin keywords
-Poorly organized feature files and scenarios

After this interactive session, you will be able to go back to your teams with some practical lessons for refactoring your Gherkin scenarios so that they are manageable, durable, and valuable.

Good news: Test-driven practices have jumped the chasm to general acceptance! The bad news, though, is that while TDD, BDD, and ATDD are prominent buzzwords in the industry today, they are rife with misconceptions, with many people incorrectly assuming that being test-driven is all about testing.

In this talk, learners will leave with a clearer understanding of Test-Driven Development (TDD), Behavior Driven-Development (BDD), and Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), and gain practical insights into how these practices can help teams develop better software. We will gain an appreciation for TDD as being primarily a specification and design technique, and how to get the whole team involved earlier in the delivery cycle using a BDD approach.

Writing good acceptance criteria is key to effective software delivery. But, it can be difficult. This session introduces participants to Example Mapping, a low-tech, no-fuss technique that harnesses the power of collaboration to help teams dramatically improve their story refinement conversations and write higher quality acceptance criteria more easily.

With the increased adoption of BDD tools such as Cucumber and SpecFlow, more and more teams are beginning to use the well-known Given-When-Then format for expressing story acceptance criteria. But, not everyone finds the Given-When-Then format easy or natural. It is prone to misuse, especially in the hands of those new to BDD.

Example Mapping provides a structured approach to help teams tease out the essential business rules and examples that clarify a user story and improve shared understanding of story “doneness”. Acceptance criteria that the business can relate to, that can then be automated.

Experience this technique in this workshop, and perhaps you too can use it to sharpen the conversation that clarifies and confirms acceptance criteria, before you pull a user story into development.

Any kind of planning is an exercise in uncertainty. Especially so in large enterprises where delivering value to the customer involves multiple teams within and across organizational silos. Although made popular by SAFe’s PI planning event, Big Room Planning has been used successfully by many organizations to connect the work of their agile teams to the overarching business strategy and to what they can deliver.

In this session, we will share our recent story on how Big Room Planning ideas were used in a large Fortune 100 company to align teams, stakeholders, leadership on desired business capabilities, surface uncertainties, dependencies, and reach shared understanding and consensus on achievable outcomes in the near-term.

It is our hope that some of the ideas discussed and resources shared in this session will help you and your teams with your near-term planning horizons, especially those attempting to drive agility in large, complex organizations.

Despite the incredible proliferation of tools and processes aimed at minimizing barriers and reducing friction across the daily life of teams, do you find yourself struggling to make sense of the information hairball and constantly asking, "How's the deployment going?", "Who's responding to that incident?", "Is staging green?", "Why do I have 9999 unread emails?"...

STOP! ChatOps can help your teams communicate and collaborate more efficiently by providing a unifying platform across the disparate tools and processes to disseminate knowledge across everyone on the team and provide visibility cross the board.

What started as a playful experiment, ChatOps helps foster a culture that embraces the core tenets of DevOps - automation, measurement, sharing - by bringing everyday tools and processes right into the middle of a conversation in a virtual space used by the teams, providing the ability to work not just quickly, but smoothly. The ability to instruct "bots" to perform routine tasks through your chat tools is powerful and perhaps shines a light on what could be the next dominant interface for interaction. There’s immediate value in the visibility, awareness and real-time feedback it offers to the entire team. Everyone can see what's being done, the resulting effects, and provides a strong foundation for deep collaboration, learning and teaching by doing.

In this session geared towards beginners, we will introduce the essential concepts of ChatOps, the benefits, understand the anatomy of a chat application/robot, and demonstrate how ChatOps can be leveraged to help team culture through synchronous communication, speed of action, broader visibility and accurate awareness.

"Can I have my cake and eat it too?  Of course, as long as it is one slice at a time!"

Do you love the idea of capturing customer requirements with lightweight user stories, but are struggling? 

Although user stories have been around since the early days of agile and fairly ubiquitous, teams continue to struggle with creating effective user stories that are truly useful in communicating the essence of the customer need and establishing the shared understanding between themselves and their customers.

In this session, we'll revisit established patterns and principles of user stories and learn concrete strategies for creating user stories that capture our customer's needs, as well as tips for avoiding the most common pitfalls that many teams fall into when they first begin working with user stories.  Leveraging easy to understand everyday examples we will collaboratively apply proven strategies and patterns to create small pieces of useful, testable functionality, and explore strategies for getting stories to “ready” and “done”.

“Every line is the perfect length if you don't measure it.”  - Marty Rubin

So your organization has embarked upon a transformation to be more nimble and responsive by employing the latest tools and thinking in the Agile and DevOps arena.  In this transformational context, how do you know that your initiatives are effective?  Empirical measurements should provide insights on business value flow and delivery efficiency, allowing teams and organizations to see how they are progressing toward achieving their goals, but all too often we find ourselves mired in measurement traps that don't quite provide the right guidance in steering our efforts. 

Rooted in contemporary thinking and tested in practice, this talk explores the principles of good measurement, what to measure, what not to measure, and enumerates some key metrics to help guide and inform our Agile and DevOps efforts.  If done right, metrics can present a true picture of performance, and any progression, digression of these metrics can drive learning and improvement.  

It is our hope that this session inspires organizations and teams to start or take a fresh look at implementing a valuable measurement program.

“Every line is the perfect length if you don't measure it.”  - Marty Rubin

So your organization has embarked upon a transformation to be more nimble and responsive by employing the latest tools and thinking in the Agile and DevOps arena.  In this transformational context, how do you know that your initiatives are effective?  Empirical measurements should provide insights on business value flow and delivery efficiency, allowing teams and organizations to see how they are progressing toward achieving their goals, but all too often we find ourselves mired in measurement traps that don't quite provide the right guidance in steering our efforts. 

Rooted in contemporary thinking and tested in practice, this talk explores the principles of good measurement, what to measure, what not to measure, and enumerates some key metrics to help guide and inform our Agile and DevOps efforts.  If done right, metrics can present a true picture of performance, and any progression, digression of these metrics can drive learning and improvement.  

It is our hope that this session inspires organizations and teams to start or take a fresh look at implementing a valuable measurement program.

As organizations begin to work on numerous services and components many are faced with a new set of challenges.  Adding to these challenges is the ever increasing remote and distributed workforce.  This places a significant operational and tooling overhead on standard development teams. Each team needs its own pipeline, monitoring-alerting, on-call staff, etc.  It is not enough for teams to be agile in coding and systems, teams need to understand how a change can affect a distributed system.  With new service frameworks focusing on community pipelines, enhanced collaboration, and team ownership, sanity can exist.  Pipeline as a Service can help force organizations transformation into Community DevOps.

In this session we will discuss how Community DevOps can enable teams to mange the complexity of modern development from ideation to production.  We will discuss how pipeline as a service provides the right balance of ownership from a single team to an enterprise, the technical components and how to avoid common pitfalls.

One of the risks agile organizations face is an over-reliance on a single omni-present and omni-potent Product Owner.  This critical reliance on a fallible Product Owner often results in a lack of clear direction on how and when to "pivot", with IT falling back on their bias, which is to build more and more features.

In this session, we will explore how lessons and ideas from the Lean Startup movement can be effectively combined with Agile delivery in a 5-step process to drive the right business outcomes. 

• Holistic Discovery: Assessing key customers, problems & markets
• Risk-Driven Product Backlog: Challenging & testing your assumptions
• Exploratory Sprints: Quick, cheap ways to validate your approach
• Data-Driven Sprint Review: Using data to drive decisions
• Validating Product Increment: Analyzing & evolving your production system

Tools and techniques gleaned from the Lean Startup movement will be leveraged to support each of the activities outlined.

Ever solve a jigsaw puzzle?  Do you typically design and document all your pieces before assembling the puzzle or know anything about the kind of picture formed by the puzzle?  Hardly.  Usually, the specifics of the puzzle, as they emerge through the process of solving that puzzle, affect our tactics for solving it.  

This analogy is at the heart of Exploratory Testing (ET) - a fun, focused and powerful approach to testing that has been gaining in popularity in recent years.  While not a new idea, it is often misconstrued as being a random, flailing at the keyboard approach to uncovering problems.  Not quite.  ET is a disciplined practice that involves simultaneously learning about the software under test while designing and executing tests, using feedback from the last test to design the next.  It leverages traditional test design analysis techniques and heuristics, but design and execution become a single inseparable activity.  Within the agile context, there is a need for agile teams to augment their scripted automated tests with a manual testing practice that is adaptable, and ET provides the right fit.

In this session oriented towards beginning explorers, we will gain a deeper understanding of what ET is, what it isn't, and discuss the essential elements of the practice with practical tips and techniques for: learning the system under test and capturing our understanding to design tests; designing tests on the fly using heuristics; executing tests and observing results; and finally, integrating ET into the cadence of an agile process.

If you are looking for a recipe (pun intended) for success, then this session will disappoint you.  For, a tool by itself will not change anything, but how a tool is used can help foster changes in behavior, which is key to organizational transformation.  

So, what is DevOps? Is it just hype? How does it help organizations deliver value to their customers? If these questions are on your mind then this session is for you. While simply a constriction of two terms, "devops" is in essence a stub for broader organizational collaboration and feedback beyond just that of development and operations working together.  It emerged as a grass-roots movement at the confluence of two rising trends - agile development and large-scale cloud infrastructure.  And, like any horizontal revolution, devops is a path of discovery - people and processes do not change overnight.  Agility in coding and agility in systems takes time and effort, but the results can be astonishing.  The feedback and feed-forward loops that devops advocates makes the whole difference in quality and results, while the sharing and close collaboration pierces the veil among organizational silos, blurring their delineating lines. 

In this session targeted towards beginners, we will explore these ideas and principles, framing our conversation within the context of the nascent and evolving CALMS framework and look at what it means to extend  "traditional agile" principles beyond the boundaries of the code to the entire delivered service.  After-all, isn't the principal Agile credo about satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software?

If you are looking for a recipe (pun intended) for success, then this session will disappoint you.  For, a tool by itself will not change anything, but how a tool is used can help foster changes in behavior, which is key to organizational transformation.  

 So, what is DevOps? Is it just hype? How does it help organizations deliver value to their customers? If these questions are on your mind then this session is for you. While simply a constriction of two terms, "devops" is in essence a stub for broader organizational collaboration and feedback beyond just that of development and operations working together.  It emerged as a grass-roots movement at the confluence of two rising trends - agile development and large-scale cloud infrastructure.  And, like any horizontal revolution, devops is a path of discovery - people and processes do not change overnight.  Agility in coding and agility in systems takes time and effort, but the results can be astonishing.  The feedback and feed-forward loops that devops advocates makes the whole difference in quality and results, while the sharing and close collaboration pierces the veil among organizational silos, blurring their delineating lines. 

 In this session targeted towards beginners, we will explore these ideas and principles, framing our conversation within the context of the nascent and evolving CALMS framework and look at what it means to extend  "traditional agile" principles beyond the boundaries of the code to the entire delivered service.  After-all, isn't the principal Agile credo about satisfying the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software?

Ever solve a jigsaw puzzle?  Do you typically design and document all your pieces before assembling the puzzle or know anything about the kind of picture formed by the puzzle?  Hardly.  Usually, the specifics of the puzzle, as they emerge through the process of solving that puzzle, affect our tactics for solving it.  

This analogy is at the heart of Exploratory Testing (ET) - a fun, focused and powerful approach to testing that has been gaining in popularity in recent years.  While not a new idea, it is often misconstrued as being a random, flailing at the keyboard approach to uncovering problems.  Not quite.  ET is a disciplined practice that involves simultaneously learning about the software under test while designing and executing tests, using feedback from the last test to design the next.  It leverages traditional test design analysis techniques and heuristics, but design and execution become a single inseparable activity.  Within the agile context, there is a need for agile teams to augment their scripted automated tests with a manual testing practice that is adaptable, and ET provides the right fit.

In this session oriented towards beginning explorers, we will gain a deeper understanding of what ET is, what it isn't, and discuss the essential elements of the practice with practical tips and techniques for: learning the system under test and capturing our understanding to design tests; designing tests on the fly using heuristics; executing tests and observing results; and finally, integrating ET into the cadence of an agile process.

Despite the belief that a shared context and collaboration drives quality, too often, software testers and quality professionals struggle to find their place within today's integrated agile teams.  This session is a practitioner’s view of testing and testing practices within an iterative/incremental development environment.  We will begin with a discussion of some of the challenges of testing within an agile environment and delve into the guiding principles of Agile Testing and key enabling practices.  Agile Testing necessitates a change in mindset, and it is as much, if not more, about behavior, as it is about skills and tooling, all of which will be explored.