The focus of this highly interactive online conference is on the interoperability of Agile, DevOps and Testing. They have shared 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 & responsibilities, team structure, and tools & processes.
The four days are on Agile, Testing and DevOps’ current topics and practices the event is designed to connect a wide range of stakeholders and provide informational as well as and educational experience for all. The expert practitioners and thought leaders over these days will help you to develop your business case and build the foundation towards getting significant return on investment.
There will be sharing of practical experiences, extended knowledge-sharing presentations in the “Round Table” sessions for sharing insights and industry trends; you can put your questions directly through Slido to the presenters and panellists . This coupled with networking on online discussion groups has the scope for open-mindedness and sharing throughout the conference. There is an exhibition alongside featuring leading service providers, consultants and vendors within the areas on Software Testing, Automation, Quality Assurance, various aspects of Agile and DevOps.
Daily Event Schedule in EST (December 1-4)
8:00 – 8:15 am: Virtual Community Days Welcome and Introductions
8:15 – 9:00 am: Agile Keynote
9:00 – 9:15 am: Q&A
9:15 – 9:45 am: Track 1
9:45 – 10:00 am: Q&A
10:00 – 10:30 am: Break
10:30 – 11:00 am: Discussion Panel
11:00 am – 11:30 am: Track 2
11:30 – 11:45 am: Q&A
11:45 am – 12:15 pm: Track 3
12:15 – 12:30 pm: Q&A
12:30 – 1:00 pm: Break
1:00 – 1:30 pm: Discussion Panel
1:30 – 1:45 pm: Wrap Up and Daily Prize Drawing
“Thanks to everyone who hosted the conference and who made the last two days really enjoyable, watching and learning from the agile leaders in the community. It was great fun talking to an amazing group of experts today and taking part in a fun panel discussion with Sarah Saunders and Laveena Ramchandani.”
“Thank you to UNICOM Seminars for organising such a great fully remote conference with a lot of interaction, engagement and interesting content. It was a pleasure to speak and participate in the panel discussion too! Look forward to the next one!”
“Technology in action!! Online conference and a successful one! Well attended with lot of interactions. Great Panel discussion. Learnt different perspectives!
Kudos to Unicom”
“For the third time I will be part of the #Agile, #Testing & #DevOps Showcase. First time online and I’m very excited!”
“Great panel discussion we had! Loved it. Thanks.”
“Vivit Worldwide was proud to sponsor such a fantastic event! Thank you UNICOM Seminars!”
“Thanks. Really enjoyed been part of this superstar line up!”
“Awesome presentation with great insights on unknown facts and issues facing in Agile.”
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.
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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.
Chief Scientific Officer, Cognitive Edge
Different types of knowledge, community and techniques for sharing.
Paul Gerrard, Principal, Gerrard 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?
Giles Lindsay, Founder and CEO Agile Delta
As a technology and agile leader, I am always being asked the question about agile people in many different settings, by different groups of people, so the points from this talk come from my own experiences, successes and failures, leading agile adoptions over the last 10+ years, understanding the roles of the agile people that I have worked with during that time, 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.
Eran Bachar, Senior Product Management , Functional Testing, Micro Focus
Test Automation is considered one of the key aspects to deliver the speed and reliability of any continuous delivery pipeline and yet, according to the 2019-20 World Quality Report, organizations recognize that less than 19% of their testing is fully automated.
When asked about their major challenges to increasing automation coverage, the lack of proper skillsets combined with the cost of building and maintaining automation assets are at the top of the priority list.
Eran Bachar explains how Micro Focus is using Artificial Intelligence to deliver revolutionary advances in functional testing that will enable testers to easily keep up with the speed of application changes across multiple devices and platforms while reducing the cost of building and maintaining automation assets.
Steve Watson, Senior Test Manager, Octopus Investments Ltd
They say that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but the same could be said about quality. If you ask 100 people what quality means to them, you’ll get 100 different answers, so how can we as testing professionals judge whether something is of good quality? In this session, we will discuss ways in which we can assess quality from different perspectives.
Parveen Khan, Senior Test Engineer, Square Marble Technology
Just when we, as testers, got a handle on what Agile means for us, the landscape changed yet again to a DevOps culture. Words like continuous integration (CI), continuous deployment (CD), and pipelines are now ones we’re hearing on a daily basis. As a tester, I’ll admit, I had no clue of what these words meant, and how was I to change the way I tested to fit within this DevOps culture.
Researching about DevOps provided some information, but it was still fuzzy how testing fits into this process. As opposed to panicking about yet another shift in culture, I decided to approach this with a tester’s mindset and explore it just as I would a new application.
In this talk, I’ll share my journey of how illustrating models to visualize and understand CI/CD pipelines helped me; my various phases of exploration of the DevOps culture; and the thoughtful questions that I posed at each phase to learn more about this methodology. I’ll also share how my new understanding of DevOps influenced my decisions on which automated tests should be contributed to the CI/CD pipeline and at which stages.
Jonathon Wright, CTO and Co-founder, Digital Assured
Bontle Senne, Director of Agile Transformation, Virgin Media
The PowerPoint proposal made it seem simple: Hire the consultants, set up the digital factory, spin up the sqauds, get hundreds of people trained and certified, and wait for the savings to pour in. But how do you shift CXO mindsets when the Board demands they command and control the organization? How do you nurture Agility in complex, large organizations unlikely to change the fundamentals that built their business? Drawing from my experiences of leading Agile transformation across hundreds of teams and leaders on four continents, this is a talk about pragmatic Agile for traditional organisations and how to scale change – not just frameworks.
Stephen Walters, Solution Architect, xMatters
The Phoenix Project brought us “The 3 ways”. For flow, DevOps toolchains and orchestration tools are very good at determining the fastest, best route forward to live. Failures captured early and quickly mean that we have been able to afford the liberty to experiment continually in small units of work. However, in feedback, we can be lacking. In leaning our process as much as possible, and automating our value add activities, we have been excellent in the route forward through the toolchain to live, but what about the route back through incidents in production or defects in testing. As our route to live gets shorter and quicker, the more evident it is that we must be just as efficient in our feedback loops. This talk will look at some of the issues that exist and what we could be doing to improve them
Dean Latchana, Consultant and Coach
Seb Rose, BDD Advocate, SmartBear
In the race towards continuous delivery we’re being tempted by “code free” test automation solutions. I’ll explain why I believe that this is not a good route to take — and suggest a better one.
Colin Deady, CSPO, Head of Product and Innovation – Capita Application Services
This presentation specifically looks at the contexts in which Scrum is a great choice and by definition where it is not using examples I have had to deal with over the years. I then look at some of the Lean principles, ie: “leanifying” Scrum to rebase it to be suitable for alternative contexts. By definition, this topic ticks a lot of the Agile “boxes”.
Jochem Feekes, Parasoft
Laveena Ramchandani, Senior Consultant. Deloitte UK
I have extensive testing knowledge for over 7 years now. Its worth mentioning I have worked in data heavy projects since the start of my career. Data science is a very interesting area to explore and how to bring quality into it.
Therefore I decided to present this to a wider audience, as this could be of interest to someone at the event.
The talk will include the main following points:
− What is Data science ?
− The benefits of using data science?
− What values a tester may need to contribute in a data science team for testing a model?
− How to manage with silos?
− Managing expectations vs what provides more value? ( Make informed decisions)
− How could a data science benefit having a tester ?
− What can we understand from vast amounts of data ?
− Some examples of firms that use data science to perform predictive analysis
− DevOps
− Exercise
− Q&A
Sarah Saunders, Managing Software Engineer, Capgemini
DevOps is not a separate discipline in itself, it is more a recognition of the gap between the drivers of operations divisions (stability) and development divisions (change), and an understanding that automation and architecting for support can bridge that gap. The skill sets of operations divisions (Networking, file systems, OS, memory/CPU allocations, kernels) are a dark art to most developers. This fear of the unknown can lead to budgets ballooning as worried technical leads allocate large amounts of work to “Platform Engineering”, without really understanding what that might be.
I propose that in an age of Cloud Native development, all platform engineering should be delegated to the cloud. We at Capgemini Engineering build Docker containers – our developers must know how to package their applications into containers for testing and deployment. The build pipeline and cloud deployment environments are automated using Terraform, Helm, flux, concourse so reading the config scripts for these technologies is also a dev requirement. But configuring Kubernetes? That’s another skill set!
Giles Lindsay, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Ventures
This talk looks at the challenges that are preventing agile leadership from being successful in the workplace. Giles, an Enterprise Agile Consultant, has identified many of these throughout his 25 years’ experience, working in both small companies and large enterprises. The talk revolves around several big and common challenges, that we as agile champions may face in the workplace and what we should try to do to overcome them, in allowing genuine agile and successful leadership to flourish.
Moderator: Giles Lindsay; Participants: Sarah Saunders; Laveena Ramchandani
