Agile and DevOps share environments that facilitate working together. Spurred by greater demand for excellence, these methods are more than simply adopting new tools and processes. The synergy involves building an evolving and a stable Continuous Integration (CI) Infrastructure, as well as an automated pipeline that moves deliverables from development to production to meet users’ expectations. They can work together, and the entire build process should be transparent, and it should enable and support development and operations. This transformation depends on: significant changes in culture; roles and responsibilities; team structure; tools and processes.
There will be sharing of practical experiences, extended knowledge-sharing presentations, “Round Table” discussions for sharing insights and industry trends. This coupled with networking has the scope for open-mindedness and sharing throughout the day. There are pre and post conference workshops too on specific topics. An exhibition alongside featuring leading service providers, consultants and vendors from the three topic areas – Testing and Agile & DevOps.
Topics to be covered:
We are inviting speakers – thought leaders, subject experts and start up entrepreneurs – to share their knowledge and enthusiasm about their work and their vision in the field of Agile & DevOps Expo.
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 a very important topics of discussion / panels that you can present. Talk to us about both, we welcome your input.
Please complete the speaker’s response form and submit a proposal to present at this event.
UNICOM’s Code of Conduct & Views on Diversity
We at UNICOM strive to be a leading provider of knowledge to the business community and to engage the global business community as a specialised provider of knowledge. We strive to do this maintaining a culture of co-operation, commitment and trust. We want every UNICOM conference and training day to be a safe and productive environment for everyone – a place to share research and innovation and to build professional networks. To that end, we will enforce a code of conduct throughout all our events. We expect cooperation from all participants to help ensure a safe environment for everybody.
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.
Dave Snowden, CTO, Cognitive Edge
Ensuring closer collaboration between business, development, operations and testing has been a long term goal of DevOps, Lean and Agile alike in many manifestations. But are silos's always a bad thing? What is the right balance between specialist knowledge and general understanding and capability? How far can any such integration use models and methods that originate in manufacturing? How to we deal with outliers and unintended consequences?
Gary Moore, Vice President, Sogeti
The demands on QA are evolving at pace, this is creating new challenges for QA departments and test practitioners, requiring a new focus on outcomes, speed of delivery and predicting the future. This keynote looks at the key trends that are effecting the software testing industry, and the key findings that are changing the way that we operate, and need to operate. We will focus on:
* The focus on Customer outcomes and consumer trust that is now a must 
Jay Livens, Senior Director, Product Marketing, Actifio
Does it make sense to test today's code with last year's data? Learn how full fidelity virtual databases delivered on-demand via orchestration tools and RESTful APIs can help you build better quality applications faster.
Mark Lines, Enterprise Agile Coach, Disciplined Agile Consortium
Despite claims to the contrary, the need for governance does not disappear for agile projects. Your project sponsors have a right to know the status of the health and risk of their investments. But trying to blend traditional agile methods such as Scrum with traditional stage gate approaches can cause frustration for both project teams and their stakeholders. In this talk Mark Lines will share how to apply lightweight agile governance using the Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD) framework
Deepak Sharma, RPA Evangelist
The Design Centric approach to RPA that focuses on top-down development, object-orientated implementation, and collaborative processes between operations and IT. This holds tremendous potential for enterprise customers to reach the next level in business process optimization and to act as a catalyst for digital transformation & business model innovation.
Dan North, Principal, Dan North Associates
In 2001 a group of programmers proposed the word "agile" to describe a set of values they shared. Several of these programmers had already developed methods based on these values. The values are universal, that's how they were chosen. The methodologies, however, were designed for the technology landscape of the 1990s. Think of all the changes in technology and business practise in the last 25 years. If that seems too daunting just think about the last five years. In taking "Agile" mainstream, we adopt these ancient practises on faith while losing sight of the values that inspired them.
How do agile values map to the modern landscape of massive computing power and storage on demand, languages that compile faster than you can type, computers in your pocket more powerful than the previous generation's mainframes, home broadband fast enough to stream high-definition video?
It's time to revisit what agile software development really means. The previous generation moved the delivery horizon from years to months. Now we need to think in days or even hours.
Comparing the leading Agile Enterprise Frameworks: SAFe, Disciplined Agile, LeSS, and Spotify?
Scott Ambler + Associates
Continuous Testing for DevOps
Perfecto
Distributed Agile development and automation best practices
coMakeIT
Five secrets of building a successful DevOps career
Savinder Puri, DevOps Evangelist, UK & Europe,Zensar Technologies (UK) Ltd.
Increasing software reliability: traditional vs. new methodologies and technologies
Dr Greg Law, CTO, Undo
How Intelligent Automation can be industrialized by applying a collaborative methodology between Business Operations and Technology
Deepak Sharma, Jidoka
IT teams guided by the following principles:
♦ Empowering Business Operations
♦ Engaging Technology Development Teams
♦ Embracing AI technologies
♦ Promoting industry good practices for Software engineering , i.e. Agile, DevOps
How to accelerate and automate DevOps cycles
Actifio
Can AI replace management?
Dan Hooper, Piccadilly Group
Mitigating business disruption and life on-call improved
PagerDuty
Keith Watson, Director of DevOps, ADP UK
Often the impression is given that a DevOps transformation mainly relies on the adoption of new tools and techniques. However, this adoption is done by real people within the context of the cultures and structures of the organisation. It is also dependent on the maturity and diversity of the product codebase and the in-built architectural design. Technology can only be adopted quickly if the culture and leadership in all departments involved in development and delivery of software are supportive of the changes required. This presentation uses various experiences from different projects to explore how to address these challenges. It is important to have a clear vision and strategy which aims to achieve holistic outcomes across these various dimensions. It also requires a mind-shift across the organisation to put in place the technical and cultural building blocks for the permanent transformation of the delivery pipeline.
Dan North, Principal, Dan North Associates
How do DBAs fit into the world of DevOps? We usually think of DevOps as a collaboration between developers and operations or support engineers so it's easy to forget the database admins who occupy both the development and operations space.
Organisationally they are often separate, sometimes geographically as well as organisationally. How does the database fit into the DevOps or Continuous Delivery story, both technologically and culturally?
Dan North has been helping a number of large organisations at various stages on their journey to continuous delivery and in every case their legacy database dependencies are a major stumbling block. Where do you start unpicking the database? How can you tell if it is working? Is the Matrix just a very big Oracle instance?
Sashikanth Pochimcharla, EVP - Customer Success and Delivery, coMakeIT
For many years now, agile practices have been the bedrock for repeatable software development and delivery. The rapid advent of cloud, IoT, AI & ML and the likes are presenting the software companies a new set of challenges wherein Innovation is rapid, evolutionary and continuous. In the light of continuous innovation becoming a norm, not having a sustainable, automated and repeatable software development and delivery street is a perfect recipe for disaster.
Agile development, continuous everything, DevOps and delegation of repeatable processes to Bots is the way to go and this can be made simple and effective by orchestrating things right and you want to know how? Come aboard and join the session on Agile, DevOps and Bots.
Shabbir Naqvi, Programme Delivery Lead, YOOX NET-A-PORTER GROUP
YNAP has experienced incredible growth in the past 2.5 years and scaling teams to match the increasing complexity of work has been a challenge. This talk explores what happened as the company grew, the challenges faced, the changes needed to be made to work in an Agile manner and trying to find the best way of working for our teams.
Colin Deady, Head of Product and Innovation, Capita Application Services
Learning, leading to successful delivery counts. Conversely, "being Agile" has often become the goal, rather than an aid to achieving success, with the Agile Manifesto treated as immutable regardless of business, and personal, context. Discovering our "Manifesto for agility" that encourages personal and team ownership can change "we want to be Agile" to Excellent Engineering.
