Agile, Testing and DevOps: Are they a Separate conversation or a progression of capability?
DevOps, Testing and Agile have shared environments that facilitate working together. Spurred by greater demand for excellence, these three 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.
The Round Table session is for 45 minutes. The speaker at each table will have a set theme and delegates join any table that they are interested in. They are given all the topics with their joining instructions and again at the time of registration and so make their choice on the topics that they want to attend. This is a discussion group and so no presentation slides are necessary, but please submit a topic if you would like to chair a discussion on a topic related to Testing, Agile and DevOps.
Bulletin [11 March] – UNICOM Showcases: Testing, Agile & DevOps 02 April LondonRe: UNICOM Showcases: Testing, Agile & DevOps
2 April 2020, Holiday Inn London Wembley, London
Due to the prevailing situation of Coronavirus, we appreciate that some attendees because of health security or company policy on travel, may be unable to attend the conference in person.
Alternative Plan
We have therefore decided to run the event in a mixed mode that offers opportunity for attending in person or virtually [part through face-to-face participation and part through on-line video/virtual communication]
(i) The speakers and delegates who do not wish to travel to the venue may broadcast their presentation and/or receive the presentations using their laptops or tablets.
(ii) The delegates and speakers who wish to travel can come to the venue.
A further bulletin with more detailed information will follow.
In the meantime, please contract UNICOM if you have any questions: +44 (0) 1895 256 484 or info@unicom.co.uk
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.
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.
Zuzana (Zuzi) Sochova, Agile Enterprise Coach; Certified Scrum Trainer
The rules of work are changing. Agile Organization – Organization 3.0 reflects Agility, an understanding of tribal leadership models, and a recognition that new rules are needed to navigate new organizations that are changing the world today. Teamwork, collaboration, and positive relationships are what matter. If you cannot adopt the new standards, you will be left behind.
Previous organizational structures and processes also reflected their times. Organization 1.0, showed the mentality of industrialism, with stable hierarchies and rule following the norm. Organization 2.0 rewarded specialization, processes, and structure over teams and groups. The “me first” workplace served the lucky few, but is now being replaced by a new generation, with a more thoughtful organization of our lives and work.
Learning Objectives:
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.
Narayanan Palani, Quality Engineering Chapter Lead, Lloyds Banking Group
Writing automation tests in selenium has been increasingly popular and majority of the tests run after the build getting generated or the code is ready in test environment test. Whereas finding the bugs in test cycle and fixing them takes some amount of time; thus introducing cypress early in the life cycle (in addition to selenium) helps in finding defects earlier and also run selenium tests smooth for any integration failures.
Ken Charman, CEO, uFlexReward
There’s a trend with complex large-scale enterprise IT projects to have a ‘Big Bang’ launch event of a new system on a particular date, but when building something entirely new it is impossible to operate to a timetable at that level of predictability. The chance of knowing when a new system or new way of working will be perfectly right, for the whole company on a specific day is less than remote: a big-bang change can only end badly.
Embracing agile often requires an agile approach to delivery, and DevOps involves too many variables for a “big bang” to be successful in a large IT organisation. Instead, this talk will demonstrate how an incremental, iterative approach, focusing on continual improvements will ensure you deliver better software faster.
TABLE I:Flat organisations
ZUZANA (ZUZI) SOCHOVA, AGILE ENTERPRISE COACH; CERTIFIED SCRUM TRAINER
TABLE II: Business Agility
GILES LINDSAY, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, DIGITAL VENTURES.
TABLE III: What are the barriers to a collaborative approach in Incident Management?
STEPHEN WALTERS, SOLUTION ARCHITECT, XMATTERS
TABLE IV: Agility and Sandboxing
JOCHEM FEEKES, PARASOFT
Hannah McGarty, Agile Manager, Expedia
Cynefin framework has been around for 20 years, but it has only been in the last few that I have truly appreciated the power of Cynefin. From understanding and determining my leadership style, to influencing the flow of work or adapting planning and estimation techniques, Cynefin has guided me to work more effectively and productively in a variety of situations. I will share my knowledge and framework to enable you to think differently about the teams you work with.
Ben Maynard, Founder, Consultant & Coach, Sheev Ltd
Believing that a LeSS Huge adoption is the responsibility or is achievable by a single person is an anti-pattern. Large scale organisational change takes a team focussed on a high value goal with a dogged determination to challenge, support and encourage each other in pursuit of it.
Giles Lindsay, Enterprise Agile Consultant, Disciplined Agile Advisory Council
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.
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
Inder Singh, Portfolio Test Manager, Royal Mail Group
Testing has evolved from being shoved at the end of a development lifecycle to being recognised as a distinct value add activity.
Quality Engineering is the next logical step in the move towards a holistic view on quality, as we aim to shift left and embed it into the fabric of a customer focussed organisation.
Maarten Urbach, Chief Sales Officer, DATPROF
The interesting part of this sentence is representative and availability at your fingertips. Having a set of test data that’s is so representative that based upon all the test you’re able to deploy the new software to production with the least amount of risk. During this presentation we will discuss and show how test data could become an accelerator instead of a bottleneck!
Laveena Ramchandani, Senior Consultant at 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
Use the coupon code "UNI443" when booking.
Holiday Inn London Wembley
Empire Way
Wembley
London
HA9 8DS
UK
