Agile

Ron Jeffries, Chet Hendrickson, Anita Sengupta to Keynote Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2017

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aatc2017Press release for the AATC2017 conference that I am a co-chair for with Brian Button. I am (apparently) quoted in the release as well!

Second annual event in Boston, Massachusetts tailored to Agile software developers will explore current and emerging technical practices

PORTLAND, Ore., Jan. 25, 2017 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — Agile Alliance today announced the program for the Agile Alliance Technical Conference (#AATC2017). The event, to be held April 19 – 21 in Boston, Massachusetts, will focus on new advances, new challenges and new directions in Agile Software Development as applied to today’s technical work.

aatc-scope

This highly-anticipated event will feature keynotes by Ron Jeffries, (RonJeffries.com), Chet Hendrickson, (HendricksonXP) and Dr. Anita Sengupta (NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory).

Other speakers include Bridget Kromhout (Pivotal), Robert “Uncle Bob” Martin (CleanCoder.com), Ron Quartel (Premera Blue Cross), Declan Whelan (Leanintuit), Craig Buchek (BoochTek), Doc Norton (CTO2), Fred George (Fred George Consulting), James Grenning (Wingman Software), Kent Graziano (Snowflake Computing), Jeff Langr (Langr Software Solutions), Jeff Morgan (LeanDog), Stephen Vance (EBG Consulting), Zachary Shaw (Brightcove), Llewellyn Falco (Spun Laboratories), (Kief Morris (ThoughtWorks), Arlo Belshee (Industrial Logic), Pete Cheslock (Threat Stack), Rebecca Skinner (Asteris, LLC), David Grabel (Emergn/Vistaprint), Brian Haggard (Emerson Electric), Sam Livingston-Gray (Real Geeks, LLC), Rebecca Wirfs-Brock (Wirfs-Brock Associates), Andrea Goulet (Corgibytes), Woody Zuill (Independent), Laura Bell (SafeStack), Alex Freire (Industrial Logic), Alan Shalloway (Net Objectives), Daniel Bryant (Spectoabs/OpenCredo), Terran Melconian (Independent), Josh Long (Pivotal), Dave Farley (Independent), Michael Feathers (R7 Research and Conveyance), Brian Felton (Emerson Climate Technologies), Giorgio Natili (GN Studio) and Alan Shreve (ngrok.com).

The three-day conference is built around three themes: Core Technical Practices, Team Technical Practices, and Technical Practices at the Organizational Level. It will explore topics such as new and updated core development practices; integration of user experience (UX) principles; advances in testing practices and automation; the evolution of tools and techniques that bridge development, deployment and operations; and the growing importance of Big Data across the entire spectrum of activities.

“Agile is now a multi-disciplinary field that includes Developers and QA, of course, and also UX Designers, Infrastructure Engineers, Data Scientists, Cloud Specialists and more,” said Brian Button, Co-Chair, Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2017. “This conference will explore the wealth of new Agile tools and techniques, new patterns and practices.”

“Practitioners from all involved disciplines will gather at AATC2017 to address new advances, new challenges and new directions, to learn from world-class experts, and to practice our craft together,” said Craig Smith, Co-Chair, Agile Alliance Technical Conference 2017. “It will be an immersive and deeply engaging experience which unites engineering and architectural ideas under the umbrella of Agile thinking.”

Group discounts are available.

For more information and to register for the event, please visit the Agile Alliance website.

About Agile Alliance

Agile Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to promoting the concepts of Agile software development as outlined in the Agile Manifesto. With nearly 35,000 members and subscribers around the globe, Agile Alliance is driven by the principles of Agile methodologies and the value delivered to developers, organizations and end users. Agile Alliance organizes and supports events to bring the Agile community together on a global scale.

Media Contact

Pam Hughes
Marketing Chief, Agile Alliance
+1 971.204-8989

SOURCE Agile Alliance

Related Links

http://www.agilealliance.org

Episode 125: 10 Minutes with Dan North

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The Agile Revolution's avatarThe Agile Revolution Podcast

dannorthAfter many failed attempts to get him on the podcast, Craig finally catches up with Dan North at YOW! Conference on his way out the door to the airport and in a quick chat they cover:

  • BDD – developing an application by looking at its behaviour from the perspective of its stakeholders (people who’s live you touch)
  • Given When Then – “given” is setting up the world in a well known way, “when” is me interacting with the application as a stakeholder and “then” is what I expect to happen
  • BDD is not the same as writing automated tests, they are orthogonal – “Test-Driven Development Is Not About Testing“
  • Software, Faster – collection of patterns for people who have been around Agile and are asking “now what” – “Software, Faster” book in progress
  • YOW! 2015 talk “Delivery Mapping: Turning the Lights On“

TheAgileRevolution-125 (12 minutes)

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Episode 124: Talking Testing with Anne-Marie Charrett

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16069825102_aa54010a22_zCraig is at YOW! Conference and catches up with Anne-Marie Charrett who is well known in the testing community as a trainer, coach and consultant but also for her support of the community:

  • Don Reinertsen talk “Thriving in a Stochastic World“
  • Context-Driven Testing
  • Testing is a verb – it’s a doing thing and not an output, but the challenge is you cannot see doing
  • Anne-Marie’s class in Exploratory Testing
  • Where there is risk and failure, there is a job for testing
  • Exploratory testing – the key is feedback and using the learning to feedback into the next test
  • Agile testing – don’t try and test everything and don’t try and automate everything either, rather adopt a risk based approach
  • Unit testing – the usefulness depends on the programmer and the context and figuring out what you are trying to achieve
  • Sydney Testers Meetup
  • Speak Easy – Speak Easy…

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Opinion: What 2017 Has in Store for Culture & Methods

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InfoQWe polled the InfoQ Culture & Methods editors for their takes on what 2017 has in store for the technology industry, what are the trends which we see coming to the fore and what the implications will be for organizations around the globe.

Source: Opinion: What 2017 Has in Store for Culture & Methods

Episode 123: Some Principles of Lean and Product Development Flow with Don Reinertsen

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8265695783_995186c1ce_hCraig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and are privileged to spend some time with Don Reinertsen, who is considered one of the leading thinkers in the field of lean product development and author of numerous books including “Principles of Product Development Flow”

  • “Principles of Product Development Flow” book and why there is a waterfall on the front
  • Japanese Manufacturing Techniques was the name before it was rebranded as Lean Manufacturing
  • Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, hated math and thus preferred to sit on the factory floor and tweak processes, hence it was not a theory driven approach but rather empirically driven
  • Need to understand why things work so you can transfer it to other domains, a big shortcoming in lean manufacturing is that they don’t have much of a mathematical view on what they are doing
  • You can use magic in manufacturing…

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Episode 121: Diversity & Frugal Innovation in Africa with Betty Enyonam Kumahor

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enyoCraig and Tony sit down for a conversation at YOW! Conference with Betty Enyonam Kumahor (stands for good for me, on the way there) who is a technology leader in Africa:

  • Tony and Enyo are mutual members of the Alistair Cockburn fan club
  • YOW! Conference talk “Frugal Innovation and Scaffolding Software“
  • Software engineering uptake in Africa is very low, need more technologists because it is is not an industry it is an enabler
  • Lots of diversity challenges in Africa – lees than 1% of the South African IT industry is women, but also diversity in languages, education and belief systems
  • Diversity is a multi-pronged issue, need to be patient but not complacent to move the needle forward, give girls the confidence to be competent and to push the boundaries
  • Frugal innovation in Africa – building technology in a space of constraints such as inadequate power, everything happens by mobile…

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Episode 120: Microservices & The Lean Enterprise with James Lewis

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jlewisCraig is at YOW! Conference and has a conversation with James Lewis, best known for his work around microservices at ThoughtWorks. They discuss:

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Breaking the Cylinders of Excellence (in the Australian Government)

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YOW-Nights_Logo_stackedAt the recent YOW! Night in Brisbane (as well and Sydney and Melbourne), Lindsay Holmwood (the Head of Technology at the DTA) presented “Breaking the Cylinders of Excellence”. It was a rare experience to hear the story of how the DTA is using cutting edge development practices to help the government catch up with, and even exceed, the public sector. 

 

  • DTA – aid transformation in government, small agency
  • Delivery hubs in Sydney and Canberra – help identify and plug capability gaps in teams
  • Prototype of how government services could work  gov.au/alpha
  • Digital Service Standard – 13 characteristics on what good looks like in government, useful in organisations as well
  • Cloud.gov.au  – government cloud service, usage growing, continuous delivery pipeline (which is a major change for government who are used to 2 changes per year)
  • The unit of delivery is the team – not about individuals, but the team – borrowed from GDS
  • Government is slow, but government is designed to be stable, they cannot fail, they have characteristics that are resistant to change
  • Myth that organisations must choose between speed and reliability, high performing organisations deploy more frequently, have shorter lead times, fewer failures and recover faster, but they also have a greater profit
  • Want to deliver like a startup but be stable like a government
  • Not a lot of cross pollination between departments currently
  • Read the policy! – quite often the process is not mandated
  • Document what works and doesn’t so it becomes a repeatable pattern – ie. running a meetup inhouse, don’t tell me I can’t do it, tell me how I can run it without being thrown in jail!
  • Stick with technologies the government is comfortable with if you are changing the delivery engine
  • Security matters – prevention is a battle you will always lose, detection is your best defence – aggregate and log in one place, identify threat signatures, etc
  • Embed security people on big services so it is part of the architecture
  • Proactive testing between different governments around the world on similar platforms
  • Simplest security breaches make the most mess – infected excel macros, leaving free USB keys in the foyer that are malware infected
  • Need to put user needs first – alpha mockup using tools like Jeckyll, then beta then live
  • Lots of people strictly interpret the design and delivery guides – they are guides not rules!
  • Create a longer runway by pulling tech forward – turn down the volume of design, turn up the volume of tech
  • If it hurts, do it more often!
  • Fixed cost delivery with agile is a thing, agile is a way to de-risk in the government
  • Don’t put manual testing on the critical deployment path – have special skills on hand for accessibility, performance and security

Episode 119: Agile (Raccoon) is Dead with “Pragmatic” Dave Thomas

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davethomasCraig and Tony are at YOW! Conference and get the opportunity to sit down with Dave Thomas, signatory to the Manifesto for Agile Software Development and have a great discussion about:

  • Dave’s talk “Agile is Dead (Long Live Agility)“
  • Agile as a word has become meaningless, don’t follow the off-the-shelf processes, apply small corrections to move forward
  • Story of Stone Soup is like Agile consultancies, the hard work is done by the companies
  • Scrum is a good starting point due to its simplicity
  • Raccoon is a noun, so not a good replacement name for Agile, because you can buy a pound of it
  • 1,000 working on one thing can never be Agile, you have to make enterprises agile before you can run an agile project
  • The values in the Agile Manifesto hold up well, would have been nice to have had more diversity, had no expectation they were…

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Episode 117: The Changing Role of a Tester with Mark Pedersen

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mpCraig is at the YOW! Connected conference and talks to Mark Pedersen, the CTO at KJR, and they talk all things quality and testing:

  • the changing role of a tester in an Agile environment, it clarifies the role rather than making it blurrier
  • in an Agile environment it does not make sense to have a Test Manager role anymore
  • the number of dedicated testing roles are decreasing, but becoming more important and valuable
  • most organisations say that they use both waterfall and agile frequently
  • build your skills in either a quasi analysis / product owner / acceptance criteria role or get up to speed with sensible technical automation tools for your tech stack
  • TDD – good idea but not many organsations practicing it in a dedicated way, unit testing in most industries is a luxury
  • BDD – does not make TDD obsolete, defining acceptance criteria upfront helps understand…

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