The sixty-eight words in the Agile Manifesto, written in 2001, revolutionised software development and also business in general. Almost every business sector is “doing Agile” in some form or another. But there has also been criticism of the approach and some have struggled and failed. Twenty years on, a 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 change the Agile ways of working and investigate how they adopt and use new agile practices. They also need to examine the practices of others and see the values that could be adapted to suit their particular needs. Based on that, they can decide and define their technical needs and methods.
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. DevOps encompasses a number of technologies that weren’t initially considered, but that have now become quite essential. Industry analyst Gartner says that this evolving discipline “demands a linked tool chain of technologies to facilitate collaborative change”. So, the question to you is “What will you 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
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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.
Matthew Livermore, Principal Solutions Consultant (EMEA), PagerDuty
DevOps is about more than just pipeline. It’s also about culture. Find out how Morgan Stanley leverage PagerDuty to optimise feedback loops and reinforce ownership, improve team visibility into incident management processes, and better understand metrics and observability to make real-time operations a reality.
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.
JONATHON WRIGHT, CTO and Co-Founder, Digital Assured and President, Vivit Worldwide
Thirteen years ago, the concept of DevOps was first introduced with a focus on the culture. However, over the last 10 years DevOps has been ‘Dev-centric’ approach to build operational capabilities to enable Continuous Delivery and Deployment (CDD). In this session, we will explore the reversely named ‘Ops-centric’ approach where OpsDev is “driving Ops actions with Dev concern” especially as operation is customer facing and carries impact to brand perception. So if customer expectations is the only reality and actual business value & revenue is generated by operational capabilities. Then why have we been focusing on the ‘Application Delivery’ and not ‘IT Operations’? will this be the end of ‘Information Technology’ (IT) projects and the shift to ‘Product Engineering’ by joining the business with the power of IT i.e. ‘Business information Technology’ (BiT).
Clemens Reijnen, CTO Cloud and DevOps Leader, Sogeti Global and Darren Coupland, VP, Sogeti UK
Transforming IT into an enterprise-wide DevOps delivery model is not easy. Microsoft together with Sogeti have launched the ‘Enterprise DevOps Report 2020-21’. It reveals six key areas of enterprise-scale IT that face significant challenges as part of this DevOps transformation. The report is based on the McKinsey Developer Velocity study (which yielded the Developer Velocity Index) and a research study involving Sogeti Cloud and DevOps practitioners.
The findings of these two studies have been combined to reveal key areas of enterprise-scale IT that face significant challenges as part of Enterprise DevOps transformation.
You’ll learn about:
Anaïs van Asselt, Test Automation Engineer, deTesters
In this session I will take you on a voyage of discovery through unknown gardens and greenhouses.
What can we learn from greenhouses to get the most out of test automation? How can you visualize the health and added value of test automation with an Influx database and Grafana dashboard?
You will be provided with an approach, tools, lessons learned to start your own journey of building confidence in quality assurance through visualizing test automation.
Werner Oosthuizen, Testing Team Lead, Fastcomm
I created a framework using Appium and Selenium doing the heavy lifting for me and coding my Automation tests using Ruby.
I created this structure to enable any willing tester to become an automation tester with very little to no coding experience required.
I am able to automate Android, iOS and Portal (Web) & parallel automation using one Appium server and three emulators running either the same test or different test steps on each individual emulator using a very simple method.
Natty Gur, Founder, Galaxies
Complexity and uncertainty challenge any aspect of our personal and professional life. It’s a modern challenge, a by-product of our progress in any aspect of life. Agility considers being one of the best ways to deal with complexity and uncertainty.
Several agile frameworks, based on the Toyota production system, are available helping companies to become more agile. But there are inherent challenges in all Agile framework. Challenges that prevent all agile framework to provide their promises.
In this talk, we will understand the challenge that drives the creation of Agile frameworks, explore the current agile framework challenges, understand what are the alternatives, explore a case study, and equip you with the first three practical steps to achieve agility without using Agile frameworks.
Seb Rose, BDD Advocate, SmartBear
User stories are one of the most visible artefacts of most agile methods and, as such, have generated large quantities of expert advice. In my experience, much of that advice is open to misinterpretation.
In this session, we’ll explore several classic pieces of advice, to see how misunderstandings can cause problems, despite the best intentions
Colin Deady, Head of Agile Development, Capita Digital Development Centre UK & Ireland
It’s 2001 and the team says, “let’s do Agile and automate our tests!” They start layering the cake reducing net feedback time between Tester and Developer. Roll forward to 2010 and the mantra “automate our tests!” is now established and practiced. Yet, feedback loops often began to increase again. Teams were delivering untoward complexity by adding too many layers to the cake. They had lost sight of the goal: valuable, actionable, fast feedback.
Today, software complexity far outstrips the pace of traditional test automation. With the use of TDD and BDD coupled to hexagonal architectures we should be stripping layers from the cake. Our automation should be faster and leaner with the gaps between Customer, Developer and Tester virtually eliminated.
Instead, and in many cases, complexity increases and value slips away.
In this talk we will examine reasons why, discovering that it is often trust, delegation of responsibility, literalism to a cause (“Testers test…”) and counting volume not value of work that is causing a divergence from our goals. Instead, we need to accelerate the provision of valuable information to enable technical and business actions of value.
We need to leanify our feedback.
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.
Danny Higler, Senior Agile & DevOps Coach, Wemanity
How NOT to do DevOps: Real life situations as a DevOps Coach.
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.
Arun Narayanaswamy, Director Engineering, Amadeus Labs and Veeresh Erched, Senior Director Engineering, Amadeus Labs
If we thought transforming to Agile was tough, scaling it is obviously tougher. This talk covers various challenges that SaFe poses in organizational transformation.
We cover use cases in a large SAFe implementation – the bumpy journey and the lasting benefits it brings. We would also try to highlight the various roles that get disrupted and how to play it SAFe in this journey.
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.
