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.
With the uncertainty over the complete lifting of the lockdown, at UNICOM, we have devised a virtual event of the previously published conference and have spread out the programme over two days of around four hours each day. Please see the detailed programme.
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.
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
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.
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!
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
Moderator: Giles Lindsay; Participants: Sarah Saunders; Laveena Ramchandani
Use the coupon code "UNI443" when booking.
This event is held online. The timing is aligned with London, UK,
and is in British Summer Time BST (GMT+1) time zone.
