The sixty eight words in the Agile Manifesto written in 2001 had revolutionised software development and also business in general. Almost every business sector is “doing Agile” in some form or another. But there also has been criticism of the approach and some have struggled and failed. Twenty years on, recent survey shows a high level of Agile immaturity as it appears that the simple principles are hard to do well. One reason could be the uncertainty in the current work world, so organisations need to shift the Agile ways of working, and investigate how they adopt and use agile practices. They should examine how others have done so and what practical value they found – adapt agile-based, practices suited to their particular needs over technical practices and defined methodologies.
The term DevOps is about eight years old but it continues to gain momentum as big organisations have made validating investments in it. This isn’t exactly new. Many industry watchers believe it’s no longer a question of if your organization will adopt these practices, but when. And yet DevOps is still evolving, as are the tools and technologies that support it. There are, now, a number of technologies that weren’t initially considered, but are now have become quite essential. Industry analyst Gartner says of this evolving discipline now “demands a linked tools chain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change”. So the question to you is what you’ll be adopting.
Testers have always been at the coal face of ensuring that “stuff works as it should”. Is there anything different in the actual testing of new digital products, new interfaces with clients which must always provide the optimum user experience? How are testers coping? What are the stories coming in? What is working well and what can be done better?
Popular DevOps tool chain products and supporting technologies: Jenkins continuous integration server ● Docker containerization platform ● Git version control system ● Apache Maven Build Management Tool ● New Relic analytics platform ● Splunk operational Intelligence Platform ● Puppet, Ansible ● Chef Configuration Management Systems.
UNICOM’s Code of Conduct & Views on Diversity
Our approach is that our events are dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of gender, gender identity and expression, age, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, race, ethnicity or religion. We do not tolerate intimidation, stalking, harassing photography or recording, sustained disruption of sessions or events, and unwelcome physical contact or sexual attention. We do not tolerate harassment of conference participants in any form. Sexual language and imagery is not appropriate for any conference venue, including talks, workshops, Twitter and other online media. Event participants violating these rules may be sanctioned or expelled from the event without a refund at the discretion of the conference organisers. Please bring your concerns to the immediate attention of the event staff.
Diversity: In our endeavour to be the provider of knowledge to the business community, we understand that this depends on hearing from and listening to a variety of perspectives that come from people of all races, ethnicities, genders, ages, abilities, religions, sexual orientation, and military service. We welcome diverse speakers for all our events, we do not always fully achieve this goal, but it is an ongoing process.
Read more…
We are inviting speakers – thought leaders, subject experts and start-up entrepreneurs – to share their knowledge and enthusiasm about their work and vision in these three fields. Please let us know too if you would like to participate in panel sessions only. Please also get in touch if you would like to participate in the Round Table session.
We understand that successful projects are written up as “White Papers”. Please share these with us. But projects that did not achieve their targets – “Black Papers”- are of interest to us too. They can be important topics of discussion / panels where you can present. Talk to us about both, we welcome your input.
We are also planning short “how to do” sessions or full-day workshops to run as pre or post conference events. Let us know if you have a related topic that you want to run as a workshop or an extended briefing.
Please complete the speaker’s response form and submit a proposal to present at this event.
Zuzana “Zuzi” Šochová, Independent Agile coach and trainer
In order to change organization, leaders have to change first. Be one of them and turn your organization into the successful Agile organization.
Organizations are constantly evolving, they change their structures, processes, and rules. Last decade they’ve been changing into Agile, and surprisingly despite all the effort and money they put into transformation, they’ve been often failing. The same way as culture follows an organization, the culture follows leaders. Companies were trying to break that rule for years and change the culture without changing leadership style. Nowadays this rule seems to win and organizations are moving towards different leadership styles and surprisingly becoming successful. In order to change organization, leaders have to change first. Be one of them and turn your organization into a successful Agile organization.
Rainer Heinold, VP Technology & Services, Aservo
Since the first notion of the term DevOps we have seen a lot of change in the definition of the term, and how individuals, teams and organization define and implement it.
The presentation tries to summarize the trends from a practical perspective, explains why we are not all in the cloud (yet) and provides an outlook what organizations should be prepared for in the coming years.
Pavlo Serdiuk, DevOps Team Lead, Accenture, Riga, Latvia
DevSecOps is the integration of security into emerging agile IT and DevOps development as seamlessly and as transparently as possible. It could be done without reducing the agility or speed of developers or requiring them to leave their development toolchain environment.
Jan De Baere, Enterprise Agile Coach, Cegeka
A lot of companies do master the forecasting at team level. Typically in larger organizations this has limited effect. To have effect on the bottom line organizations must have their portfolio/program/project level under control.
In this session we’ll discover what the main issues are, how to overcome them & real live cases. A talk about fat tails, complexity and the impact of your organization on your ability to forecast.
Mike Harris, Tester, Geckoboard and BCS
Choosing to work at a new company involves excitement, possibility and risk. Working with lean and agile teams provides a great framework for testers and it is useful to explore a company’s lean and agile practices before accepting a job offer. My talk will make suggestions about how to reduce risk when accepting a new job offer by using the interview to question a prospective employer about their lean and agile practices.
Gary Hallam, Enabling Channel Partners in EMEA, Delphix
Data is often touted as the new oil, but for many enterprises data is a drag on innovation velocity. McKinsey suggested recently that businesses crammed 5 years worth of digital adoption into 8 weeks and that the road to recovery is paved with data. The road to digital transformation is also paved with data. Making data palatable across the enterprise is becoming more challenging as we extend our multi-generational architectures into the cloud, and as enterprises adopt machine learning and AI.
Gary will address how enterprises can transform data availability, rapidly increase innovation cycles and speed time to market.
Jonathon Wright, CTO and Co-Founder, Digital Assured and President Vivit Worldwide
Inviting all testers to get involve with the “COVID Patch Check Foundation” MIT project and help fight against COVID 19 by empowering people to keep themselves and their families safer. Lets make a real difference together!
Act now and you can help save lives with the newly launched Google and Apple Exposure Notification system ‘GAENs’ (https://covid19.apple.com/contacttracing). Join Jonathon as he will explain how you can get involved as a volunteer tester (no previous specialist experience required).
By volunteering on this project, you will be joining a global community of engineers, data scientists, digital privacy evangelists, MIT professors and researchers. All working to fight the spread of COVID-19 by empowering people to keep themselves and their families safer through global, privacy-first, citizen-led, free technology.
During this webinar, we will explore the historical challenges of Contact Tracing utilizing multiple technologies like GPS and Bluetooth. The importance of privacy and transparency to build trust for Medical Privacy and how to synthetically generate and anonymise test location data.
Colin Deady, Head of Agile Development, Capita Digital Development Centre, UK&I
Just over a hundred years ago Wilhelm von Osten toured exhibitions with his horse, Hans. Hans was incredible: he could count, solve equations, read and spell. Everyone agreed that Wilhelm was not cheating, and all believed that Hans was genuinely clever.
Unfortunately, it turned out that Hans was just following subtle cues given unintentionally from Wilhelm. Hans was not “clever”. Hans was a horse.
Today we see well-meaning teams collaborating and “being Agile” yet struggling to deliver valuable outcomes. They are working as their managers want, doing the things that their corporate Agile practices require. We are in effect being driven by Wilhelm, i.e.: we are practicing Manager-Driven Development responding to the subtle (or not so) cues given by our leaders. Our agility and hence ability to deliver valuable outcomes is being constrained by conformance to “established best practice”.
We should change that. We should not be Hans. We should challenge our leaders to enable us to deliver faster, better, valuable outcomes.
Jan De Baere, Enterprise Agile Coach, Cegeka
Concepts of working with knowledge workers with an ever increasing complexity and speed of change.
What can I promise to a client, manager, user, citizen? We are supposed to be more accurate in our forecasts and at the same time we should be more flexible in the execution. On top of that we have to be respectful for all kinds of changing priorities.
When working harder is not going to solve the problem anymore. This is a real story of a department making the journey of thinking differently and working smarter. How did they – and can you – convince their -internal- clients, peers and their upper management of this change?
Dheeraj Nayal, Global Community Ambassador & Region Head – APJ & MEA, DevOps Institute, USA
This session will share some key insights that how COVID pandemic has caused challenges for businesses, families, and individuals worldwide, but there has been an accelerated and bold move by many organizations to shift towards digital channels and new ways of working. This acceleration in digital transformation has resulted in a rapid increase in new roles like Site Reliability Engineers, DevSecOps Engineers along with DevOps Engineers and making HYBRID skills the much-needed skills. This eventually paving way for prioritizing the virtual collaboration for Developers, Operations, and Enterprise leaders because of the need to continuously learn and be resilient in the face of change.
Rainer Heinold, VP Technology & Services, Aservo
Fun and DevOps are not a contradiction. By using quotes from Monty Python the presentation will highlight important aspects, differences and mainly commonalities that you must be aware of, whenever you are somehow exposed to a DevOps transformation in a System Engineering context – and wonder why things might run like an episode from the Flying Circus.
Moderator: Jonathon Wright; Panellists: Dheeraj Nayal, Colin Deady, Jan De Baere, Gary Hallam, Rainer Heinold
Dave Snowden, Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge
The various wars between different types of practice and the commoditisation of scaling have often neglected a wider perspective on development from conception to testing and release, In this presentation Snowden will look at a multi-methods approach with an emphasis on new thinking about design.
Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis,DevOps, SRE and Cloud lead, Accenture Latvia
Generally, we want to know how long the task will take and how much effort will be needed. However, we always get it wrong, don’t we?
We’ll investigate why all projects fail and look into musings of one of the Agile fathers, Donald G. Reinertsen, and his approach to the so-called Cost of Delay.
Also, just join if you like pokemons and looking for some fun.
Giles Lindsay, Founder and CEO Agile Delta
As a technology and agile leader, I am always being asked the questions about what makes an agile transformation successful and what makes it fail, and aside from the usual discussions around the challenges of agile leadership, organisational changes required and frameworks that an organisation is adopting, throughout the conversation, I’m concerned that there’s an obvious missing element that many organisations seem to take for granted when transforming a business to new agile ways of working… the people.
In this talk, using my own experiences from leading agile adoptions over the last 10+ years, I am going to share why we need our people to be agile, who an agile person is, uncovering what makes them tick, discovering the challenges they have to go through to be agile and listening to the advice being given to support them on their journey.
Now, as I will highlight at this session, their journey is not always that straight forward or as easy as some people like to make out…
Arun Narayanaswamy, Director Engineering and Vikalp Kumar, Manager Engineering, Amadeus Software Labs
The Age of Transformation in the technology industry has affected the developers more than anyone. Era of agile transformation, cloud, DevOps etc has transformed the way a developer needs to adapt. This topic covers aspects of how the DevOps tooling has evolved to help the developers adapt to new ways of working better and faster – keeping their edge to deliver the best they can!
Iwona Winiarska, Agile Delivery Manager, Automation Logic
User experience and satisfaction are perhaps the most talked about topics in many organisations both in the public and private sectors. Identifying your users and their needs is crucial for any product or service development. It’s particularly important for DevOps teams to understand who their users are and what value and business outcome they are trying to deliver.
This talk delves into a concept of User/Customer Experience (UX/CX), and how it can be applied within the DevOps environment. We’ll look at how we can satisfy our internal users’ needs within your organisation and apply human-centred design to our DevOps solutions and transformations. You’ll also learn a few useful techniques that will help you focus on your users and become customer-centric.
Mike Harris, BCS
“W. Edwards Deming was a “quality pioneer’ whose ideas have deeply affected how we work in agile and lean teams. Mike’s presentation will give a quick overview of lean and agile, then take the audience through his journey discovering Deming’s influence on quality, lean and agile.
As a result of the presentation the audience should gain a better understanding of lean, agile and of Deming’s influence on quality. Knowing where the ideas on agile, lean and quality came from has helped him in his work in software quality and should also help the people who attend the presentation!”
Moderator: Giles Lindsay; Panellists: Dave Snowden, Uldis Karlovs-Karlovskis, Arun Narayanaswamy, Viklap Kumar, Iwona Winiarska, Mike Harris
Matthias Rapp, VP Cloud Partnerships at Tricentis
We know that most organisations today are integrating at least some test automation into their CI/CD pipelines. Most start with unit testing – which, while a great place to start, can’t give you the level of confidence you need to safely deploy into production. In this session, we’ll talk about what you should consider to make test automation a true accelerator of your pipeline throughput. We will share ideas for avoiding some of the most common anti-patterns we’ve identified that make it difficult to scale beyond the unit test level.
You will learn:
Matt Muschol, Chief Technology Officer, Clearvision
Atlassian tools such as Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Bamboo, Opsgenie and Statuspage form an integral part of DevOps pipelines. The implications of deploying classic options — on-premise, private cloud, public cloud (Software-as-a-Service) and third-party managed hosting, are often overlooked by users.
With the onset of Covid-19, new trends emerged, creating challenges which required many to reconsider their approach. In this talk, such trends are explored, along with how the global pandemic challenged DevOps at its core, causing some organisational silos to re-emerge. Matt suggests how certain deployment methods are responsible and how some users are bypassing these challenges by migrating to a fully cloud-based solution.
Niall McShane, Agile Coach / Community Host, Independent consultant
Agile Coaching often involves giving advice, but it also includes the ability to respond with questions that help your team find their own solutions. When you’re next asked for help, would you be able to respond with some agile coaching as opposed to playing the agile expert (in technology or ways to work). This presentation will show you some simple experiments that build your agile coaching capability irrespective of your role title.
During this presentation you will learn:
Ramesh Krishnamurthy, CTO, Indium Software
Security is a growing concern and the Pandemic has made it one of the biggest concern to businesses, CIO, CTOs and all stakeholders equally. Security is everyone’s responsibility but are we building secure products in a secured environment? The talk will highlight the importance of Security in a DevOps environment and detail various scenarios.
Drew Shefman, Software Engineer, Disney Streaming
Much of Agile focuses on the “team”, but Agile is a mindset and a mindset starts with a single person. Whether you are on a fully agile team, transitioning, or agile is not even an option, there are a number of personal practices that can help you become an Agile Practitioner no matter what your environment might be.
Paul Gerrand, Principal, Gerrand Consulting
Test (execution) automation has been a goal since the earliest programs were written. The mechanics of automated tests have evolved with the technology used to build software, but the fundamental problems of test automation have not changed. Establishing a consistent environment, creating integral and re-usable test data, handling genuine failures, false negatives (and positives), tear-down, and clean-up. These are well-understood challenges. Developers and testers battle with flaky environments, test frameworks, and buggy software under test much the same way they always did. There is little debate about these technical or logistical matters. The use of unit test frameworks to test low-level components and integration is well-understood and usually most effective. But where the user interface is graphical and/or where tests of larger, integrated systems are required, test automation is more challenging. These tests tend to be longer, slower, and more complex and as a consequence, they are harder to write, debug, and maintain. These tests also run relatively slowly. All in all, long-winded, complex tests are flaky and far less efficient and economic. Two models dominate people’s thinking in this area – the four-quadrant model and the test automation pyramid. They have some value, but practitioners and managers need something better to guide their thinking.
This is the “state of automation” and has been for many years.
In this talk, Paul sets out a way of thinking about testing and test automation that helps to answer the strategic questions: What does test automation actually do for us? When and how is automation the right choice? How do we justify automation? Can automation replace testers? What new tools and skills do we need to implement automation in the future?
Moderator: Paul Gerrard; Panellists: Matthias Rapp, Niall McShane, Ramesh Krishnamurthy, Drew Shefman
