For decades-with the exception of agile-dev followers-the IT community has continued to build and protect its departmental silos. Project management, business analysis, development, testing, DB administration, and operations are just a few of the specializations that are carved out and institutionalized. Agile practices seek to eliminate the walls and empower people to deliver the highest value to the business. DevOps is the latest effort in this direction-bringing developers, testers, and operations together to replace their silos with a continuous collaboration pipeline. Paul Peissner introduces DevOps and explains how it is a key to transitioning from continuous integration (creating the finished software product immediately) to continuous delivery (making the product immediately available to users) and adding tremendous new business value. Paul describes the effects DevOps will have on classic organizational roles-development, test, and operations-and the new opportunities arising for those who are up to the challenge. Find out what you need to do now to be ready for this paradigm shift.
Creating a Collaborative Workplace Culture Webinar SeriesCisco Canada
To increase innovation and productivity, organizations recognize that they have to get better at creating more “collaborative cultures” to leverage the collective knowledge, expertise and experience from within. View the slides from Part 1 of the series: Is it time for a Chief Collaboration Officer? Listen to the recording today: http://bit.ly/1L1SFow
Test-Driven Development for Developers: Plain and SimpleTechWell
Test-driven development (TDD) is not an easy discipline to establish. However, it provides considerable return on investment for the effort. Rob Myers describes the costs of TDD (the introduction of test-maintenance overhead) and its benefits (greatly improved quality, productivity, and throughput of real value)—but only when the TDD practices are given time to ripen. Rob shares a simple three-step process for establishing the personal and professional discipline required to successfully implement TDD and takes you through a simple yet realistic demo to reveal three core TDD techniques—Triangulation, Fake It, and Obvious Implementation. Rob uses this demo to show how new objects can reveal themselves to developers via "obvious necessity" thus destroying the myth that all TDD design must arise from either specification or refactoring. In this demo, Rob uses Java and JUnit but the principles and techniques described apply to any object-oriented programming efforts in any programming language.
Production Performance Testing in the CloudTechWell
Testing in production for online applications has evolved into a critical component of successful performance testing strategies. Dan Bartow explains the fundamentals of cloud computing, its application to full-scale performance validation, and the practices and techniques needed to design and execute a successful testing-in-production strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Dan describes the methodology he has used for testing numerous online applications in a production environment with minimal disruption. He explains how to create a performance testing strategy to give your team critical data about how your online application performs and scales. Learn how to create a robust lab-to-production ecosystem that delivers the answers about what will happen when peak traffic hits your site. Take back practical approaches to mitigate the three most common problems—security, test data, and potential live customer impact—that arise when embarking on testing in production.
When a team is ready to embark on an agile adventure, it is vital to consider the behavioral and practical aspects of agile prior to jumping in. Mario shares the important readiness factors within his “Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone” deployment framework. This includes preparing for an agile mindset of culture change and providing insight and knowledge into the challenging decisions that should be made prior to embarking on the adventure. Readiness includes establishing an organizational vision with objectives, embracing agile principles, evaluating buy-in and willingness, considering measures of success, adapting roles and responsibilities, evaluating existing practices, building a scalable agile framework, initiating agile education, and creating a customer validation vision. Outcomes include a better understanding of what can increase your chances for true agile transformation and an Agile Transformation Roadmap to begin or enhance your journey. For those who have already embarked on agile, enhance your current agile direction by understanding readiness factors.
The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and develop renewed energy for taking your organization’s test management to the next level.
Collaboration Techniques: Combining New Approaches with Ancient WisdomTechWell
In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly, effectively, efficiently, and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Many points of collaboration exist: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking. Rob Sabourin and Dot Graham examine what collaboration is, why it is challenging, and how you can do it better. Join Rob and Dot to learn about forgotten but proven techniques, such as risk-based objectives, checklists, entry and exit criteria, diverse roles, cross-checking, and root cause analysis. These techniques can help you work more efficiently, improve your professional relationships, and deliver quality products. Bring your own stories of collaboration—good and bad—and see how forgotten wisdom can help improve today’s practices.
Have you ever wondered what makes a good Product Owner? It’s a broad and deep role that is often filled with a hodgepodge of differently skilled individuals. Many organizations struggle to understand its importance as they scale their agile transformations. What about exceptional Product Ownership? What does that entail? In this highly collaborative session, Bob Galen explores the Four Quadrants of Effective Product Ownership—Product Management, Project Management, Leadership, and Business Analysis. Each of these critical aspects of the Product Owner role supports the agile team. Together, they lead to well-constructed product backlogs with an emphasis on creating high quality and high value products. Leave this session with a better understanding of the breadth and depth associated with outstanding Product Owners, a newfound respect for how challenging the role is, and with immediate insights and actions for improving your organization’s Product Ownership.
Creating a Collaborative Workplace Culture Webinar SeriesCisco Canada
To increase innovation and productivity, organizations recognize that they have to get better at creating more “collaborative cultures” to leverage the collective knowledge, expertise and experience from within. View the slides from Part 1 of the series: Is it time for a Chief Collaboration Officer? Listen to the recording today: http://bit.ly/1L1SFow
Test-Driven Development for Developers: Plain and SimpleTechWell
Test-driven development (TDD) is not an easy discipline to establish. However, it provides considerable return on investment for the effort. Rob Myers describes the costs of TDD (the introduction of test-maintenance overhead) and its benefits (greatly improved quality, productivity, and throughput of real value)—but only when the TDD practices are given time to ripen. Rob shares a simple three-step process for establishing the personal and professional discipline required to successfully implement TDD and takes you through a simple yet realistic demo to reveal three core TDD techniques—Triangulation, Fake It, and Obvious Implementation. Rob uses this demo to show how new objects can reveal themselves to developers via "obvious necessity" thus destroying the myth that all TDD design must arise from either specification or refactoring. In this demo, Rob uses Java and JUnit but the principles and techniques described apply to any object-oriented programming efforts in any programming language.
Production Performance Testing in the CloudTechWell
Testing in production for online applications has evolved into a critical component of successful performance testing strategies. Dan Bartow explains the fundamentals of cloud computing, its application to full-scale performance validation, and the practices and techniques needed to design and execute a successful testing-in-production strategy. Drawing on his experiences, Dan describes the methodology he has used for testing numerous online applications in a production environment with minimal disruption. He explains how to create a performance testing strategy to give your team critical data about how your online application performs and scales. Learn how to create a robust lab-to-production ecosystem that delivers the answers about what will happen when peak traffic hits your site. Take back practical approaches to mitigate the three most common problems—security, test data, and potential live customer impact—that arise when embarking on testing in production.
When a team is ready to embark on an agile adventure, it is vital to consider the behavioral and practical aspects of agile prior to jumping in. Mario shares the important readiness factors within his “Ready, Implement, Coach, and Hone” deployment framework. This includes preparing for an agile mindset of culture change and providing insight and knowledge into the challenging decisions that should be made prior to embarking on the adventure. Readiness includes establishing an organizational vision with objectives, embracing agile principles, evaluating buy-in and willingness, considering measures of success, adapting roles and responsibilities, evaluating existing practices, building a scalable agile framework, initiating agile education, and creating a customer validation vision. Outcomes include a better understanding of what can increase your chances for true agile transformation and an Agile Transformation Roadmap to begin or enhance your journey. For those who have already embarked on agile, enhance your current agile direction by understanding readiness factors.
The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and develop renewed energy for taking your organization’s test management to the next level.
Collaboration Techniques: Combining New Approaches with Ancient WisdomTechWell
In our increasingly agile world, the new buzzword is collaboration—so easy to preach but difficult to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly, effectively, efficiently, and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers, and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. Many points of collaboration exist: grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with customers, troubleshooting bugs with developers, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking. Rob Sabourin and Dot Graham examine what collaboration is, why it is challenging, and how you can do it better. Join Rob and Dot to learn about forgotten but proven techniques, such as risk-based objectives, checklists, entry and exit criteria, diverse roles, cross-checking, and root cause analysis. These techniques can help you work more efficiently, improve your professional relationships, and deliver quality products. Bring your own stories of collaboration—good and bad—and see how forgotten wisdom can help improve today’s practices.
Have you ever wondered what makes a good Product Owner? It’s a broad and deep role that is often filled with a hodgepodge of differently skilled individuals. Many organizations struggle to understand its importance as they scale their agile transformations. What about exceptional Product Ownership? What does that entail? In this highly collaborative session, Bob Galen explores the Four Quadrants of Effective Product Ownership—Product Management, Project Management, Leadership, and Business Analysis. Each of these critical aspects of the Product Owner role supports the agile team. Together, they lead to well-constructed product backlogs with an emphasis on creating high quality and high value products. Leave this session with a better understanding of the breadth and depth associated with outstanding Product Owners, a newfound respect for how challenging the role is, and with immediate insights and actions for improving your organization’s Product Ownership.
Testers are taught they are responsible for all testing. Some even say “It’s not tested until I run the product myself.” Eric Jacobson believes this old school way of thinking can hurt a tester’s reputation and—even worse—may threaten the team’s success. Learning to recognize opportunities where you may not have to test can eliminate bottlenecks and make you everyone’s favorite tester. Eric shares eight patterns from his personal experiences where not testing was the best approach. Examples include patches for critical production problems that can’t get worse, features that are too technical for the tester, cosmetic bug fixes with substantial test setup, and more. Challenge your natural testing assumptions. Become more comfortable with approaches that don’t require testing. Eliminate waste in your testing process by asking, “Does this need to be tested? By me?” Take back ideas to manage not testing including using lightweight documentation for justification. You may find that not testing may actually be a means to better testing.
Keynote: The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Talk on Measurement You’ll Ever...TechWell
Lee Copeland maintains that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal metrics program failures. The first major mistake people make is forgetting that the model we are using for measurement is not necessarily reality. The second major blunder is treating ideas as if they were real things and then counting them. Lee describes the “Three Don'ts of Metrics”—Don’t measure it unless you know what it means; Don’t measure it if you’re not going to do something with the measurement; and no matter what else you do, Don’t turn your measurement into a goal. Through the years, Lee has discovered his favorite project indicator is not a measurement at all—and you’ll be surprised to learn what it is. Join Lee as he shares his Zeroth Law of Metrics to guide your program to success.
All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The major problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities available. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Explore white-box techniques with their associated coverage metrics. Evaluate more informal approaches, such as random and hunch-based testing, and learn the importance of using exploratory testing to enhance your testing ability. Choose the right test case design approaches for your projects. Use the test results to evaluate the quality of both your products and your test designs.
Testing with an Accent: Internationalization TestingTechWell
Finding time to test the basic functionality, performance, and security of a system is difficult enough, so how do you find time to add internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) testing? Today’s world is very small, and you may already have international users in your target market. Can you really afford to ignore those who can’t enter their name correctly with the default US-ASCII character set? Will it still be a quality product to them? Paul Carvalho shares how you can—with a little creative thinking and design—incorporate i18n and l10n testing into your regular routine. Great testing requires the right mindset, applied insight, preparation, and dedication. Learn how to identify the system elements that pose juicy risks; go beyond looking at the UI, using simple tools and tricks you can try right away; and discuss ways to integrate i18n into your functional testing in a fun way with little overhead. Impress your co-workers and delight your customers!
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all of the features were covered and all of the tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. By expanding basic tests and incorporating specific robustness attacks, Dawn shows you how to catch defects that commonly show up first in production. She offers strategies for making robustness testing a project-level concern so those defects get the priority they deserve and are fixed before release. Join Dawn to learn about robustness tests you can add to your suite and execute in just a few minutes—even if your test team is over-tasked and under-resourced.
Deadlines Approaching? Budgets Cut? How to Keep Your SanityTechWell
Testing projects have a habit of dissolving into chaos—and even strife—as deadlines approach and budgets are cut. When asked to do the impossible, risk management and mitigation tools can be the only way for testers to survive. Geoff Horne presents a proven method he uses for identifying and assessing risks and the effects—both positive and negative—of various mitigation approaches. Through the school of hard knocks, Geoff has learned that the most plausible risk mitigation strategy is not always the best and may actually harm the project. Successfully used on different projects across different types of businesses, Geoff’s approach is based on evaluating risks and assessing the impacts across key criteria: resources, productivity, cost, quality, and confidence. Geoff presents risk assessments in a color-coded graphical format that enables an easy, straightforward comparison and prioritization of the mitigation strategies under consideration. Learn to maintain your sanity when you are next asked to do the impossible—one more time.
Baking In Quality: The Evolving Role of the Agile TesterTechWell
While more and more organizations are practicing agile development methodologies, many have not learned how to “bake in quality” throughout the process. As an agile tester, you are an integral part of the development team—working on requirements, design, implementation, writing automated tests, and testing However, are all team members working together as they should to ensure quality from day one through final delivery? Dena Laterza offers proven tips to help you and your team make the cultural shift to adopt and foster a “quality first” team standard. Gain an understanding of a tester's involvement in test-driven development and behavior-driven development. Take back new ideas on automating tests, working with stakeholders, and becoming a fully informed tester. Learn how to push testing back into development and maximize the value of testers on the team. Take back a plan to get your agile team working together—as a team.
Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in ChargeTechWell
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your ideas to your target audience, a set of questions you can ask to better understand your executives’ goals, and methods for overcoming resistance to change from teams you don’t lead. These tools—together with an awareness of your organization’s core culture—will help you identify which changes you can successfully implement and which you should leave until another day.
If you’ve ever been involved in promoting cultural change within an organization, you may have experienced something even more disheartening than flat-out rejection—a full rollback of hard-won cultural change followed by a decade-long resentment of anyone remotely associated with the implementation. This has happened at countless organizations with agile, with SOA, with virtualization—and it’s starting to happen with DevOps. How can such a simple idea that’s been so successful at so many organizations become such a resounding failure at others? It’s not the organization, and it’s certainly not DevOps. The problem lies in the implementation, and ultimately, with its promoters and champions. Alex Papadimoulis discusses what this "DevOps thing" is all about, goes over the technical and organizational strategies for a successful long-term DevOps implementation, shares a few big failures at big companies, and covers the common and not-so-common pitfalls when promoting this type of cultural change.
Removing the Silos: When Agile, Lean, and DevOps Aren’t EnoughTechWell
Your organization has adopted some combination of agile, lean, and DevOps practices, yet you have a sinking feeling that it’s not working the way everyone hoped it would. You’re wondering if it’s because you work for a very large organization and all this talk about small, cross-functional teams seems to conflict with your organizational charts. Your IT department is organized around functional disciplines such as the PMO, business analysis, Test Center of Excellence, and DevOps engineering. Do we need to blow up these structures in order to have successful agile/lean/DevOps transformations? Betty Zakheim says no. The trick is to remove the barriers to effective teamwork that these functional silos create. To understand where the barriers exist, Betty uses a combination of value stream mapping and an examination of the tools and techniques the functional disciplines employ. Using these techniques, she locates the inefficiencies in the handoffs among disciplines and introduces cross-lifecycle metrics that provide a better understanding of how effective your SDLC really is.
Most manifestations of DevOps contribute to faster, more reliable and cheaper development and delivery of IT-related services and products.
Significant additional benefits are to be gained by improvements outside the scope of current mainline DevOps thinking, in the identification and justification of investments and functionality. The key knowledge area that helps organizations achieve these additional benefits, is Business Value Optimization.
Join our 30-minute webinar with the author of the whitepaper our own DASA Ambassador Mark Smalley.
In this webinar, Mark will talk about the final chapters of his white paper;
- Fast flow from business to business
- From IT services to business goals
- DevOps’ contribution to improved IT services and business goals
DevOps and Regulatory Compliance—Like Oil and Water or Peanut Butter and Jelly?TechWell
DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organizations. DevOps enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. Regulatory compliance ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws that appear to require adding burdensome processes and controls to your software development lifecycle. Brandon Carlson acknowledges that at first glance these two ideas seem incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut butter and jelly. While maintaining, analyzing, confirming, and reporting on the status of required information security, compliance, and privacy controls can be difficult, integrating these tasks within your DevOps/continuous delivery pipeline is easier than you think. Using examples from real-world projects in organizations just like yours, Brandon explains how to integrate compliance and reporting into your projects using tools you already know such as pair programming, Jenkins, Chef, Metasploit, and others. When it comes to compliance, it’s not oil and water. It’s peanut butter and jelly time.
Many IT managers find themselves banging their heads against a wall trying to get upper management to invest in DevOps. Managers see clear opportunities to implement it into their organizations but get a No from senior executives. Many managers are frustrated that, despite all the blustering in their companies about corporate initiatives for transformation, any attempt to implement improvements peters out quickly. T.j. Randall discusses the various stages of the software release pipeline. He offers a detailed demonstration of how to calculate the cost of each stage and suggests financial language IT managers can use to convey these costs to upper management and win support. He uses examples of large enterprise organizations to show the ROI of a DevOps implementation. Learn about real-world skills for getting buy-in from management and financial teams, tools for calculating the cost of delivering applications in their environment, and developing a working model that helps make a case for investing in DevOps.
DevOps is an exciting new management framework that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is rapidly popularity across the IT industry due to the ease with which it can be used in combination with Agile software development.
Original Source: https://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/it/devops/what-is-devops
Integrating Project Management with Service Management Best Practices Event B...Google
SureSkills Belfast Breakfast Briefing on 'Integrating Project Management with Service Management Best Practices Event, April 3rd 2014'.
The event aimed to show that the points of integration between Project Management and Service Management. Given the minimal industry discourse on integrating Project Management and Service Management, we used the event as an open discussion with industry professionals and local industry case studies combined with a very interactive Q&A session.
Guest Speakers on the day included:
- Bill Heffernan, Principal Service Management Consultant at SureSkills / CEO SP3 Services
- Domingos Ferreira, Director at Quantum Outsource
- Ruaidhri McSharry, Chief Operating Officer & Director Service of Service Management at SureSkills
Date of event: Thursday, 3rd of April 2014
Venue: Europa Hotel Belfast
If you require any additional details about this event email Marketing@SureSkills.Com or contact your SureSkills Belfast account manager on 028 9093 55 55.
Business in the Driver’s Seat – An Improved Model for IntegrationInside Analysis
The Briefing Room with Dr. Robin Bloor and WhereScape
Live Webcast on September 30, 2014
Watch the archive:
https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/lsr.php?RCID=bfff40f7c9645fc398770ea11152b148
The fueling of information systems will always require some effort, but a confluence of innovations is fundamentally changing how quickly and accurately it can be done. Gone are long cycle times for development. Today, organizations can embrace a more rapid and collaborative approach for building analytical applications and data warehouses. The key is to have business experts working hand-in-hand with data professionals as the solutions take shape, thus expediting the speed to valuable insights.
Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to hear veteran Analyst Dr. Robin Bloor as he explains the changing nature of information design. He’ll be briefed by WhereScape President Mark Budzinski, who will discuss his company’s data warehouse automation solutions and how they enable collaborative development. He will share use cases that illustrate show aligning business and IT, organizations can enable faster and more agile data warehouse development.
Visit InsideAnlaysis.com for more information.
Keynote: Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile DevelopmentTechWell
Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more. A publicly available set of practices for agile teams, projects, architectures, programs, and portfolios, this framework helps organizations scale lean and agile development from several small teams to hundreds—and even thousands—of practitioners. Working at companies including BMC Corporation and John Deere, Dean has discovered what works and what doesn’t work. He focuses on the critical role software development managers, leaders, and executives play in implementing and supporting the framework to achieve the full business benefits of enterprise agility.
DevOps Is More than Dev and Ops: It’s about Tearing Down WallsTechWell
The word DevOps is quickly becoming the new Agile—an overused word that has lost its meaning. Cutting through the jargon, Lee Eason gets to the heart of what DevOps means, where it came from, and why it is crucial for your company to embrace it. If you want to deliver on the promise of agile—to improve quality and reduce time to market—you must understand and implement DevOps. Lee shares three mechanisms of change—enablement, mentoring, and coaching—you can use to drive the transformation, as well as key performance indicators to measure your progress along the way. Learn where the big technical roadblocks lie, why they exist in your company, and how to navigate them successfully. Finally, Lee shares key benefits you can expect with your shift to DevOps—the effect on consumers’ loyalty, developer satisfaction, systems uptime, and software quality.
Testers are taught they are responsible for all testing. Some even say “It’s not tested until I run the product myself.” Eric Jacobson believes this old school way of thinking can hurt a tester’s reputation and—even worse—may threaten the team’s success. Learning to recognize opportunities where you may not have to test can eliminate bottlenecks and make you everyone’s favorite tester. Eric shares eight patterns from his personal experiences where not testing was the best approach. Examples include patches for critical production problems that can’t get worse, features that are too technical for the tester, cosmetic bug fixes with substantial test setup, and more. Challenge your natural testing assumptions. Become more comfortable with approaches that don’t require testing. Eliminate waste in your testing process by asking, “Does this need to be tested? By me?” Take back ideas to manage not testing including using lightweight documentation for justification. You may find that not testing may actually be a means to better testing.
Keynote: The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Talk on Measurement You’ll Ever...TechWell
Lee Copeland maintains that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal metrics program failures. The first major mistake people make is forgetting that the model we are using for measurement is not necessarily reality. The second major blunder is treating ideas as if they were real things and then counting them. Lee describes the “Three Don'ts of Metrics”—Don’t measure it unless you know what it means; Don’t measure it if you’re not going to do something with the measurement; and no matter what else you do, Don’t turn your measurement into a goal. Through the years, Lee has discovered his favorite project indicator is not a measurement at all—and you’ll be surprised to learn what it is. Join Lee as he shares his Zeroth Law of Metrics to guide your program to success.
All testers know that we can identify many more test cases than we will ever have time to design and execute. The major problem in testing is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities available. Join Lee Copeland to discover how to design test cases using formal black-box techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Explore white-box techniques with their associated coverage metrics. Evaluate more informal approaches, such as random and hunch-based testing, and learn the importance of using exploratory testing to enhance your testing ability. Choose the right test case design approaches for your projects. Use the test results to evaluate the quality of both your products and your test designs.
Testing with an Accent: Internationalization TestingTechWell
Finding time to test the basic functionality, performance, and security of a system is difficult enough, so how do you find time to add internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) testing? Today’s world is very small, and you may already have international users in your target market. Can you really afford to ignore those who can’t enter their name correctly with the default US-ASCII character set? Will it still be a quality product to them? Paul Carvalho shares how you can—with a little creative thinking and design—incorporate i18n and l10n testing into your regular routine. Great testing requires the right mindset, applied insight, preparation, and dedication. Learn how to identify the system elements that pose juicy risks; go beyond looking at the UI, using simple tools and tricks you can try right away; and discuss ways to integrate i18n into your functional testing in a fun way with little overhead. Impress your co-workers and delight your customers!
Have you ever worked on a project where you felt testing was thorough and complete—all of the features were covered and all of the tests passed—yet in the first week in production the software had serious issues and problems? Join Dawn Haynes to learn how to inject robustness testing into your projects to uncover those issues before release. Robustness—an important and often overlooked area of testing—is the degree to which a system operates correctly in the presence of exceptional inputs or stressful environmental conditions. By expanding basic tests and incorporating specific robustness attacks, Dawn shows you how to catch defects that commonly show up first in production. She offers strategies for making robustness testing a project-level concern so those defects get the priority they deserve and are fixed before release. Join Dawn to learn about robustness tests you can add to your suite and execute in just a few minutes—even if your test team is over-tasked and under-resourced.
Deadlines Approaching? Budgets Cut? How to Keep Your SanityTechWell
Testing projects have a habit of dissolving into chaos—and even strife—as deadlines approach and budgets are cut. When asked to do the impossible, risk management and mitigation tools can be the only way for testers to survive. Geoff Horne presents a proven method he uses for identifying and assessing risks and the effects—both positive and negative—of various mitigation approaches. Through the school of hard knocks, Geoff has learned that the most plausible risk mitigation strategy is not always the best and may actually harm the project. Successfully used on different projects across different types of businesses, Geoff’s approach is based on evaluating risks and assessing the impacts across key criteria: resources, productivity, cost, quality, and confidence. Geoff presents risk assessments in a color-coded graphical format that enables an easy, straightforward comparison and prioritization of the mitigation strategies under consideration. Learn to maintain your sanity when you are next asked to do the impossible—one more time.
Baking In Quality: The Evolving Role of the Agile TesterTechWell
While more and more organizations are practicing agile development methodologies, many have not learned how to “bake in quality” throughout the process. As an agile tester, you are an integral part of the development team—working on requirements, design, implementation, writing automated tests, and testing However, are all team members working together as they should to ensure quality from day one through final delivery? Dena Laterza offers proven tips to help you and your team make the cultural shift to adopt and foster a “quality first” team standard. Gain an understanding of a tester's involvement in test-driven development and behavior-driven development. Take back new ideas on automating tests, working with stakeholders, and becoming a fully informed tester. Learn how to push testing back into development and maximize the value of testers on the team. Take back a plan to get your agile team working together—as a team.
Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in ChargeTechWell
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your ideas to your target audience, a set of questions you can ask to better understand your executives’ goals, and methods for overcoming resistance to change from teams you don’t lead. These tools—together with an awareness of your organization’s core culture—will help you identify which changes you can successfully implement and which you should leave until another day.
If you’ve ever been involved in promoting cultural change within an organization, you may have experienced something even more disheartening than flat-out rejection—a full rollback of hard-won cultural change followed by a decade-long resentment of anyone remotely associated with the implementation. This has happened at countless organizations with agile, with SOA, with virtualization—and it’s starting to happen with DevOps. How can such a simple idea that’s been so successful at so many organizations become such a resounding failure at others? It’s not the organization, and it’s certainly not DevOps. The problem lies in the implementation, and ultimately, with its promoters and champions. Alex Papadimoulis discusses what this "DevOps thing" is all about, goes over the technical and organizational strategies for a successful long-term DevOps implementation, shares a few big failures at big companies, and covers the common and not-so-common pitfalls when promoting this type of cultural change.
Removing the Silos: When Agile, Lean, and DevOps Aren’t EnoughTechWell
Your organization has adopted some combination of agile, lean, and DevOps practices, yet you have a sinking feeling that it’s not working the way everyone hoped it would. You’re wondering if it’s because you work for a very large organization and all this talk about small, cross-functional teams seems to conflict with your organizational charts. Your IT department is organized around functional disciplines such as the PMO, business analysis, Test Center of Excellence, and DevOps engineering. Do we need to blow up these structures in order to have successful agile/lean/DevOps transformations? Betty Zakheim says no. The trick is to remove the barriers to effective teamwork that these functional silos create. To understand where the barriers exist, Betty uses a combination of value stream mapping and an examination of the tools and techniques the functional disciplines employ. Using these techniques, she locates the inefficiencies in the handoffs among disciplines and introduces cross-lifecycle metrics that provide a better understanding of how effective your SDLC really is.
Most manifestations of DevOps contribute to faster, more reliable and cheaper development and delivery of IT-related services and products.
Significant additional benefits are to be gained by improvements outside the scope of current mainline DevOps thinking, in the identification and justification of investments and functionality. The key knowledge area that helps organizations achieve these additional benefits, is Business Value Optimization.
Join our 30-minute webinar with the author of the whitepaper our own DASA Ambassador Mark Smalley.
In this webinar, Mark will talk about the final chapters of his white paper;
- Fast flow from business to business
- From IT services to business goals
- DevOps’ contribution to improved IT services and business goals
DevOps and Regulatory Compliance—Like Oil and Water or Peanut Butter and Jelly?TechWell
DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organizations. DevOps enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. Regulatory compliance ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws that appear to require adding burdensome processes and controls to your software development lifecycle. Brandon Carlson acknowledges that at first glance these two ideas seem incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut butter and jelly. While maintaining, analyzing, confirming, and reporting on the status of required information security, compliance, and privacy controls can be difficult, integrating these tasks within your DevOps/continuous delivery pipeline is easier than you think. Using examples from real-world projects in organizations just like yours, Brandon explains how to integrate compliance and reporting into your projects using tools you already know such as pair programming, Jenkins, Chef, Metasploit, and others. When it comes to compliance, it’s not oil and water. It’s peanut butter and jelly time.
Many IT managers find themselves banging their heads against a wall trying to get upper management to invest in DevOps. Managers see clear opportunities to implement it into their organizations but get a No from senior executives. Many managers are frustrated that, despite all the blustering in their companies about corporate initiatives for transformation, any attempt to implement improvements peters out quickly. T.j. Randall discusses the various stages of the software release pipeline. He offers a detailed demonstration of how to calculate the cost of each stage and suggests financial language IT managers can use to convey these costs to upper management and win support. He uses examples of large enterprise organizations to show the ROI of a DevOps implementation. Learn about real-world skills for getting buy-in from management and financial teams, tools for calculating the cost of delivering applications in their environment, and developing a working model that helps make a case for investing in DevOps.
DevOps is an exciting new management framework that combines software development and IT operations. It aims to shorten the systems development life cycle and provide continuous delivery with high software quality. DevOps is rapidly popularity across the IT industry due to the ease with which it can be used in combination with Agile software development.
Original Source: https://www.knowledgetrain.co.uk/it/devops/what-is-devops
Integrating Project Management with Service Management Best Practices Event B...Google
SureSkills Belfast Breakfast Briefing on 'Integrating Project Management with Service Management Best Practices Event, April 3rd 2014'.
The event aimed to show that the points of integration between Project Management and Service Management. Given the minimal industry discourse on integrating Project Management and Service Management, we used the event as an open discussion with industry professionals and local industry case studies combined with a very interactive Q&A session.
Guest Speakers on the day included:
- Bill Heffernan, Principal Service Management Consultant at SureSkills / CEO SP3 Services
- Domingos Ferreira, Director at Quantum Outsource
- Ruaidhri McSharry, Chief Operating Officer & Director Service of Service Management at SureSkills
Date of event: Thursday, 3rd of April 2014
Venue: Europa Hotel Belfast
If you require any additional details about this event email Marketing@SureSkills.Com or contact your SureSkills Belfast account manager on 028 9093 55 55.
Business in the Driver’s Seat – An Improved Model for IntegrationInside Analysis
The Briefing Room with Dr. Robin Bloor and WhereScape
Live Webcast on September 30, 2014
Watch the archive:
https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/lsr.php?RCID=bfff40f7c9645fc398770ea11152b148
The fueling of information systems will always require some effort, but a confluence of innovations is fundamentally changing how quickly and accurately it can be done. Gone are long cycle times for development. Today, organizations can embrace a more rapid and collaborative approach for building analytical applications and data warehouses. The key is to have business experts working hand-in-hand with data professionals as the solutions take shape, thus expediting the speed to valuable insights.
Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to hear veteran Analyst Dr. Robin Bloor as he explains the changing nature of information design. He’ll be briefed by WhereScape President Mark Budzinski, who will discuss his company’s data warehouse automation solutions and how they enable collaborative development. He will share use cases that illustrate show aligning business and IT, organizations can enable faster and more agile data warehouse development.
Visit InsideAnlaysis.com for more information.
Keynote: Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile DevelopmentTechWell
Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more. A publicly available set of practices for agile teams, projects, architectures, programs, and portfolios, this framework helps organizations scale lean and agile development from several small teams to hundreds—and even thousands—of practitioners. Working at companies including BMC Corporation and John Deere, Dean has discovered what works and what doesn’t work. He focuses on the critical role software development managers, leaders, and executives play in implementing and supporting the framework to achieve the full business benefits of enterprise agility.
DevOps Is More than Dev and Ops: It’s about Tearing Down WallsTechWell
The word DevOps is quickly becoming the new Agile—an overused word that has lost its meaning. Cutting through the jargon, Lee Eason gets to the heart of what DevOps means, where it came from, and why it is crucial for your company to embrace it. If you want to deliver on the promise of agile—to improve quality and reduce time to market—you must understand and implement DevOps. Lee shares three mechanisms of change—enablement, mentoring, and coaching—you can use to drive the transformation, as well as key performance indicators to measure your progress along the way. Learn where the big technical roadblocks lie, why they exist in your company, and how to navigate them successfully. Finally, Lee shares key benefits you can expect with your shift to DevOps—the effect on consumers’ loyalty, developer satisfaction, systems uptime, and software quality.
Understanding the Relationship Between Agile, Lean and DevOps LeanKit
In this webinar, Troy DeMoulin discusses the relationships between Lean, Agile, and DevOps. Then, he offers an easy-to-understand blueprint for how these different pieces fit together within the larger puzzle.
Many organisations struggle to implement a successful ITSM program, with multiple attempts at the same issue being undertaken with almost clockwork like regularity every 3-4 years. But why is it so hard to implement an ITSM framework that delivers real business value? How does a Program Manager even approach this issue? Where is the checklist for implementation success?
Join Peter Hubbard, Pink Elephant EMEA, as he maps out a structured approach to successful implementation of an ITSM initiative. He will discuss the considerations of which processes should be attempted first, the importance of the toolset, and, the one underlying area that is almost always neglected but is responsible for the failure of over 60% of all ITSM implementation projects; The people who have to work in alignment with the new world. And yes…. There will even be a checklist for implementation success. Watch recording here https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/10001/153595
Building Customer Feedback Loops: Learn Quicker, Design SmarterTechWell
Listening to your customers is critical to developing better software. Their feedback enables you to stay in sync with customer expectations, to make changes before those changes become costly, and to pivot if necessary. Sharif shares five practical tips for building, capturing, and scaling feedback loops, providing real examples of what his team has learned. He explores how to create a feedback strategy, how to make feedback fun using gamification techniques, tips and tricks for reducing friction in the process, how to validate ideas before writing a single line of code, and how to manage the process when you get too much feedback. Each of these techniques provides a deeper understanding of your customers, making software development more effective and productive. Don’t finish your next software project thinking, “I wish I’d known that earlier.” Obtaining valuable feedback is easier and more fun than you might think.
Understanding What’s Possible: Getting Business Value from Big Data QuicklyInside Analysis
The Briefing Room with David Loshin and OpenText
Live Webcast April 14, 2015
https://bloorgroup.webex.com/bloorgroup/onstage/g.php?MTID=e079dc562543a394c5c5d0588e7cd9152
To be successful and practical in delivering meaningful insights, companies must embrace the three pillars of enterprise analytics: scalability, open standards, and speed to value. In doing so, organizations enable a range of options that can satisfy both data scientists and self-service business users alike. But getting there requires a thoughtful approach -- and some enterprise knowledge of statistical modeling. How can your company stay ahead of the game?
Register for this episode of The Briefing Room to learn from veteran Analyst David Loshin, as he explains why the fundamentals will always apply to the high-stakes game of analytics. He’ll be briefed by Allen Bonde of Actuate, now part of OpenText, who will showcase his company’s intelligence platform, which was designed from the ground up to embrace open standards and was purpose-built to serve large enterprises with a wide range of data needs. He'll demonstrate recent success stories using a number of Big Data sources, including device and machine data.
Visit InsideAnalysis.com for more information.
Similar to A Big Helping of DevOps with Career Advice on the Side (20)
Do you ever feel you have lost confidence in your own abilities? Why does this happen? Isabel Evans spends a lot of time painting. Someone once commented, “Why are you doing this, when you are not very good at it?” And gradually she stopped drawing and painting, after being intimidated by a conventional vision of what good art should look like. At the same time, she experienced a parallel loss of confidence in her professional abilities. Attempting creative pursuits like drawing and painting is essential to cognitive, emotional, creative abilities and she began to understand the correlation between her creative activities and her confidence. Making errors, being wrong, failing – that is a generous gift we receive when we practice outside our skill level. By staying in a comfort zone and repeating successes, we stagnate. As Isabel started to create again she thought “I don’t feel good at it, I do feel good doing it” The difference was that she was learning, having ideas and the act of re-engaging with failure, together with the comradeship of friends and colleagues, including at Women Who Test, Isabel has regained her confidence in her professional abilities, and been able to reboot her career and joy. Join Isabel to share a journey from self-perceived failure, to recovery and renewed learning.
Instill a DevOps Testing Culture in Your Team and Organization TechWell
The DevOps movement is here. Companies across many industries are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes. Traditionally, IT organizations have been staffed with mostly manual testers and a limited number of automation and performance engineers. To keep pace with development in the new “you build it, you own it” environment, testing teams and individuals must develop new technical skills and even embrace coding to stay relevant and add greater value to the business. DevOps really starts with testing. Join Adam Auerbach as he explains what DevOps is and how it relates to testing. He describes how testing must change from top to bottom and how to access your own environment to identify improvement opportunities. Adam dives into practices like service virtualization, test data management, and continuous testing so you can understand where you are now and identify steps needed to instill a DevOps testing culture in your team and organization.
Test Design for Fully Automated Build ArchitectureTechWell
Imagine this … As soon as any developed functionality is submitted into the code repository, it is automatically subjected to the appropriate battery of tests and then released straight into production. Setting up the pipeline capable of doing just that is becoming more and more common and something you need to know about. But most organizations hit the same stumbling block—just what IS the appropriate battery of tests? Automated build architectures don't always lend themselves well to the traditional stages of testing. In this hands-on tutorial, Melissa Benua introduces you to key test design principles—applicable to organizations both large and small—that allow you to take full advantage of the pipeline's capabilities without introducing unnecessary bottlenecks. Learn how to make highly reliable tests that run fast and preserve just enough information to let testers and developers determine exactly what went wrong and how to reproduce the error locally. Explore ways to reduce overlap while still maintaining adequate test coverage. Take back ideas about which test areas could benefit from being combined into a single suite and which areas could benefit most from being broken out altogether.
System-Level Test Automation: Ensuring a Good StartTechWell
Many organizations invest a lot of effort in test automation at the system level but then have serious problems later on. As a leader, how can you ensure that your new automation efforts will get off to a good start? What can you do to ensure that your automation work provides continuing value? This tutorial covers both “theory” and “practice”. Dot Graham explains the critical issues for getting a good start, and Chris Loder describes his experiences in getting good automation started at a number of companies. The tutorial covers the most important management issues you must address for test automation success, particularly when you are new to automation, and how to choose the best approaches for your organization—no matter which automation tools you use. Focusing on system level testing, Dot and Chris explain how automation affects staffing, who should be responsible for which automation tasks, how managers can best support automation efforts to promote success, what you can realistically expect in benefits and how to report them. They explain—for non-techies—the key technical issues that can make or break your automation effort. Come away with your own clarified automation objectives, and a draft test automation strategy to use to plan your own system-level test automation.
Build Your Mobile App Quality and Test StrategyTechWell
Let’s build a mobile app quality and testing strategy together. Whether you have a web, hybrid, or native app, building a quality and testing strategy means (1) knowing what data and tools you have available to make agile decisions, (2) understanding your customers and your competitors, and (3) testing your app under real-world conditions. Jason Arbon guides you through the latest techniques, data, and tools to ensure the awesomeness of your mobile app quality and testing strategy. Leave this interactive session with a strategy for your very own app—or one you pretend to own. The information Jason shares is based on data from Appdiff’s next-gen mobile app testing platform, lessons from Applause/uTest’s crowd, text mining hundreds of millions of app store reviews, and in-depth discussions with top mobile app development teams.
Testing Transformation: The Art and Science for SuccessTechWell
Technologies, testing processes, and the role of the tester have evolved significantly in the past few years with the advent of agile, DevOps, and other new technologies. It is critical that we testing professionals evaluate ourselves and continue to add tangible value to our organizations. In your work, are you focused on the trivial or on real game changers? Jennifer Bonine describes critical elements that help you artfully blend people, process, and technology to create a synergistic relationship that adds value. Jennifer shares ideas on mastering politics, maneuvering core vs. context, and innovating your technology strategies and processes. She explores how new processes can be introduced in an organization, what the role of organizational culture is in determining the success of a project, and how you can know what tools will add value vs. simply adding overhead and complexity. Jennifer reviews critically needed tester skills and discusses a continual learning model to evolve your skills and stay relevant. This discussion can lead you to technologies, processes, and skills you can stake your career on.
We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD), and Cucumber and SpecFlow, tools for running automated acceptance tests and facilitating BDD. Mary explores the nuances of Cucumber and SpecFlow, and shows you how to implement BDD and agile acceptance testing. By fostering collaboration for implementing active requirements via a common language and format, Cucumber and SpecFlow bridge the communication gap between business stakeholders and implementation teams. In this workshop, practice writing feature files with the best practices Mary has discovered over numerous implementations. If you experience developers not coding to requirements, testers not getting requirements updates, or customers who feel out of the loop and don’t get what they ask for, Mary has answers for you.
Develop WebDriver Automated Tests—and Keep Your SanityTechWell
Many teams go crazy because of brittle, high-maintenance automated test suites. Jim Holmes helps you understand how to create a flexible, maintainable, high-value suite of functional tests using Selenium WebDriver. Learn the basics of what to test, what not to test, and how to avoid overlapping with other types of testing. Jim includes both philosophical concepts and hands-on coding. Testers who haven't written code should not be intimidated! We'll pair you up to make sure you're successful. Learn to create practical tests dealing with advanced situations such as input validation, AJAX delays, and working with file downloads. Additionally, discover when you need to work together with developers to create a system that's more easily testable. This tutorial focuses primarily on automating web tests, but many of the same concepts can be applied to other UI environments. Demos and labs will be in C# and Java using WebDriver. Leave this tutorial having learned how to write high-value WebDriver tests—and stay sane while doing so.
DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created, operating in an informational vacuum and causing operational inefficiency and goal misalignment. Sharing his experiences working on both sides of the fence, Leon Fayer describes the importance of including business units in order to align technology decisions with business goals. Leon discusses inclusion of business units in existing agile processes, benefits of cross-departmental monitoring, and a business-first approach to technology decisions.
Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps StrategyTechWell
Chris Parlette maintains that renting infrastructure on demand is the most disruptive trend in IT in decades. In 2016, enterprises spent $23B on public cloud IaaS services. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach $65B. The public cloud is now used like a utility, and like any utility, there is waste. Who's responsible for optimizing the infrastructure and reducing wasted expenses? It’s DevOps. The excess expense, known as cloud waste, comprises several interrelated problems: services running when they don't need to be, improperly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT. There are a few core tenets of DevOps—holistic thinking, no silos, rapid useful feedback, and automation—that can be applied to reducing your cloud waste. Join Chris to learn why you should include continuous cost optimization in your DevOps processes. Automate cost control, reduce your cloud expenses, and make your life easier.
Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOpsTechWell
With the recent emergence of DevOps across the industry, testing organizations are being challenged to transform themselves significantly within a short period of time to stay meaningful within their organizations. It’s not easy to plan and approach these changes considering the way testing organizations have remained structured for ages. These challenges start from foundational organizational structures and can cut across leadership influence, competencies, tools strategy, infrastructure, and other dimensions. Sumit Kumar shares his experience assisting various organizations to overcome these challenges using an organized DevOps enablement framework. The framework includes radical restructuring, turning the tools strategy upside down, a multidimensional workforce enablement supported by infrastructure changes, redeveloped collaborations models, and more. From his real world experiences Sumit shares tips for approaching this journey and explains the roadmap for testing organizations to transform themselves to lead the quality in DevOps.
The Fourth Constraint in Project Delivery—LeadershipTechWell
All too often, the triple constraints—time, cost, and quality—are bandied about as if they are the be-all, end-all. While they are important, leadership—the fourth and larger underpinning constraint—influences the first three. Statistics on project success and failure abound, and these measurements are usually taken against the triple constraints. According to the Project Management Institute, only 53 percent of projects are completed within budget, and only 49 percent are completed on time. If so many projects overrun budget and are late, we can’t really say, “Good, fast, or cheap—pick two.” Rob Burkett talks about leadership at every level of a team. He shares his insights and stories gleaned from his years of IT and project management experience. Rob speaks to some of the glaring difficulties in the workplace in general and some specifically related to IT delivery and project management. Leave with a clearer understanding of how to communicate with teams and team members, and gain a better understanding of how you can be a leader—up and down your organization.
Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile TeamsTechWell
As teams grow, organizations often draw a distinction between feature teams, which deliver the visible business value to the user, and component teams, which manage shared work. Steve Berczuk says that this distinction can help organizations be more productive and scale effectively, but he recognizes that not all shared work fits into this model. Some work is best handled by “specialists,” that is people with unique skills. Although teams composed entirely of T-shaped people is ideal, certain skills are hard to come by and are used irregularly across an organization. Since these specialists often need to work closely with teams, rather than working from their own backlog, they don’t fit into the component team model. The use of shared resources presents challenges to the agile planning model. Steve Berczuk shares how teams such as those providing infrastructure services and specialists can fit into a feature+component team model, and how variations such as embedding specialists in a scrum team can both present process challenges and add significant value to both the team and the larger organization.
Pin the Tail on the Metric: A Field-Tested Agile GameTechWell
Metrics don’t have to be a necessary evil. If done right, metrics can help guide us to make better forward-looking decisions, rather than being used for simply managing or monitoring. They can help us identify trade-offs between options for what to do next versus punitive or worse, purely managerial measures. Steve Martin won’t be giving the Top Ten List of field-tested metrics you should use. Instead, in this interactive mini-workshop, he leads you through the critical thinking necessary for you to determine what is right for you to measure. First, Steve explores why you want to measure something—whether it’s for a team, a portfolio, or even an agile transformation. Next, he provides multiple real-life metrics examples to help drive home concepts behind characteristics of good and bad metrics. Finally, Steve shows how to run his field-tested agile game—Pin the Tail on the Metric. Take back this activity to help you guide metrics conversations at your organization.
Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile TeamsTechWell
A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton designed the APH by drawing from lessons learned observing and assessing hundreds of agile companies and teams. The APH helps implement a holarchy—a system composed of interacting organizational units called holons—centered on a series of performance circles that embody the behaviors of high performing agile organizations. Jeff describes how APH provides guidelines in the areas of leadership, values, teaming, visioning, governing, building, supporting, and engaging within an all-agile organization. Join Jeff to see what the APH is all about and how you can use it in your team and organization.
A Business-First Approach to DevOps ImplementationTechWell
DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created, operating in an informational vacuum and causing operational inefficiency and goal misalignment. Sharing his experiences working on both sides of the fence, Leon Fayer describes the importance of including business units in order to align technology decisions with business goals. Leon discusses inclusion of business units in existing agile processes, benefits of cross-departmental monitoring, and a business-first approach to technology decisions.
Databases in a Continuous Integration/Delivery ProcessTechWell
DevOps is transforming software development with many organizations adopting lean development practices, implementing continuous integration (CI), and performing regular continuous deployment (CD) to their production environments. However, the database is largely ignored and often seen as a bottleneck in the DevOps process. Steve Jones discusses the challenges of database development and why many developers find the database to be an impediment to the CD process. Steve shares the techniques you can use to fit a database into the DevOps process. Learn how to store database code in a version control system, and the differences between that and application code. Steve demonstrates a CI process with SQL code and uses automated testing frameworks to check the code. Steve then shows how automated releases with manual gates can reduce the stress and risk of database deployments while ensuring consistent, reliable, repeatable releases to QA, UAT, and production.
Mobile Testing: What—and What Not—to AutomateTechWell
Organizations are moving rapidly into mobile technology, which has significantly increased the demand for testing of mobile applications. David Dangs says testers naturally are turning to automation to help ease the workload, increase potential test coverage, and improve testing efficiency. But should you try to automate all things mobile? Unfortunately, the answer is not always clear. Mobile has its own set of complications, compounded by a wide variety of devices and OS platforms. Join David to learn what mobile testing activities are ripe for automation—and those items best left to manual efforts. He describes the various considerations for automating each type of mobile application: mobile web, native app, and hybrid applications. David also covers device-level testing, types of testing, available automation tools, and recommendations for automation effectiveness. Finally, based on his years of mobile testing experience, David provides some tips and tricks to approach mobile automation. Leave with a clear plan for automating your mobile applications.
Cultural Intelligence: A Key Skill for SuccessTechWell
Diversity is becoming the norm in everyday life. However, introducing global delivery models without a proper understanding of intercultural differences can lead to difficulty, frustration, and reduced productivity. Priyanka Sharma and Thena Barry say that in our diverse world, we need teams with people who can cross these boundaries, communicate effectively, and build the diverse networks necessary to avoid problems. We need to learn about cultural intelligence (CI) and cultural quotient (CQ). CI is the ability to relate and work effectively across cultures. CQ is the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral capacity to understand and respond to beliefs, values, attitudes, and behaviors of individuals and groups. Together, CI and CQ can help us build behavioral capacities that aid motivation, behavior, and productivity in teams as well as individuals. Priyanka and Thena show how to build a more culturally intelligent place with tools and techniques from Leading with Cultural Intelligence, as well as content from the Hofstede cultural model. In addition, they illustrate the model with real-life experiences and demonstrate how they adapted in similar circumstances.
Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile TransformationTechWell
Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create momentum and transform non-IT-focused industries to an agile model. If you are struggling with gaining traction in your pursuit of agile within your business, Glen gives you concrete, practical experiences to leverage in your pursuit. Finally, he communicates how to gain buy-in from business partners who have no idea or concern about agile or its methodologies. If your business partners look at you with amusement when you mention the need for a dedicated Product Owner, join Glen as he walks you through the approaches to overcoming agile skepticism.
Software Delivery At the Speed of AI: Inflectra Invests In AI-Powered QualityInflectra
In this insightful webinar, Inflectra explores how artificial intelligence (AI) is transforming software development and testing. Discover how AI-powered tools are revolutionizing every stage of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), from design and prototyping to testing, deployment, and monitoring.
Learn about:
• The Future of Testing: How AI is shifting testing towards verification, analysis, and higher-level skills, while reducing repetitive tasks.
• Test Automation: How AI-powered test case generation, optimization, and self-healing tests are making testing more efficient and effective.
• Visual Testing: Explore the emerging capabilities of AI in visual testing and how it's set to revolutionize UI verification.
• Inflectra's AI Solutions: See demonstrations of Inflectra's cutting-edge AI tools like the ChatGPT plugin and Azure Open AI platform, designed to streamline your testing process.
Whether you're a developer, tester, or QA professional, this webinar will give you valuable insights into how AI is shaping the future of software delivery.
LF Energy Webinar: Electrical Grid Modelling and Simulation Through PowSyBl -...DanBrown980551
Do you want to learn how to model and simulate an electrical network from scratch in under an hour?
Then welcome to this PowSyBl workshop, hosted by Rte, the French Transmission System Operator (TSO)!
During the webinar, you will discover the PowSyBl ecosystem as well as handle and study an electrical network through an interactive Python notebook.
PowSyBl is an open source project hosted by LF Energy, which offers a comprehensive set of features for electrical grid modelling and simulation. Among other advanced features, PowSyBl provides:
- A fully editable and extendable library for grid component modelling;
- Visualization tools to display your network;
- Grid simulation tools, such as power flows, security analyses (with or without remedial actions) and sensitivity analyses;
The framework is mostly written in Java, with a Python binding so that Python developers can access PowSyBl functionalities as well.
What you will learn during the webinar:
- For beginners: discover PowSyBl's functionalities through a quick general presentation and the notebook, without needing any expert coding skills;
- For advanced developers: master the skills to efficiently apply PowSyBl functionalities to your real-world scenarios.
Connector Corner: Automate dynamic content and events by pushing a buttonDianaGray10
Here is something new! In our next Connector Corner webinar, we will demonstrate how you can use a single workflow to:
Create a campaign using Mailchimp with merge tags/fields
Send an interactive Slack channel message (using buttons)
Have the message received by managers and peers along with a test email for review
But there’s more:
In a second workflow supporting the same use case, you’ll see:
Your campaign sent to target colleagues for approval
If the “Approve” button is clicked, a Jira/Zendesk ticket is created for the marketing design team
But—if the “Reject” button is pushed, colleagues will be alerted via Slack message
Join us to learn more about this new, human-in-the-loop capability, brought to you by Integration Service connectors.
And...
Speakers:
Akshay Agnihotri, Product Manager
Charlie Greenberg, Host
Accelerate your Kubernetes clusters with Varnish CachingThijs Feryn
A presentation about the usage and availability of Varnish on Kubernetes. This talk explores the capabilities of Varnish caching and shows how to use the Varnish Helm chart to deploy it to Kubernetes.
This presentation was delivered at K8SUG Singapore. See https://feryn.eu/presentations/accelerate-your-kubernetes-clusters-with-varnish-caching-k8sug-singapore-28-2024 for more details.
DevOps and Testing slides at DASA ConnectKari Kakkonen
My and Rik Marselis slides at 30.5.2024 DASA Connect conference. We discuss about what is testing, then what is agile testing and finally what is Testing in DevOps. Finally we had lovely workshop with the participants trying to find out different ways to think about quality and testing in different parts of the DevOps infinity loop.
Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey 2024 by 91mobiles.pdf91mobiles
91mobiles recently conducted a Smart TV Buyer Insights Survey in which we asked over 3,000 respondents about the TV they own, aspects they look at on a new TV, and their TV buying preferences.
Elevating Tactical DDD Patterns Through Object CalisthenicsDorra BARTAGUIZ
After immersing yourself in the blue book and its red counterpart, attending DDD-focused conferences, and applying tactical patterns, you're left with a crucial question: How do I ensure my design is effective? Tactical patterns within Domain-Driven Design (DDD) serve as guiding principles for creating clear and manageable domain models. However, achieving success with these patterns requires additional guidance. Interestingly, we've observed that a set of constraints initially designed for training purposes remarkably aligns with effective pattern implementation, offering a more ‘mechanical’ approach. Let's explore together how Object Calisthenics can elevate the design of your tactical DDD patterns, offering concrete help for those venturing into DDD for the first time!
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4DianaGray10
Welcome to UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series part 4. In this session, we will cover Test Manager overview along with SAP heatmap.
The UiPath Test Manager overview with SAP heatmap webinar offers a concise yet comprehensive exploration of the role of a Test Manager within SAP environments, coupled with the utilization of heatmaps for effective testing strategies.
Participants will gain insights into the responsibilities, challenges, and best practices associated with test management in SAP projects. Additionally, the webinar delves into the significance of heatmaps as a visual aid for identifying testing priorities, areas of risk, and resource allocation within SAP landscapes. Through this session, attendees can expect to enhance their understanding of test management principles while learning practical approaches to optimize testing processes in SAP environments using heatmap visualization techniques
What will you get from this session?
1. Insights into SAP testing best practices
2. Heatmap utilization for testing
3. Optimization of testing processes
4. Demo
Topics covered:
Execution from the test manager
Orchestrator execution result
Defect reporting
SAP heatmap example with demo
Speaker:
Deepak Rai, Automation Practice Lead, Boundaryless Group and UiPath MVP
UiPath Test Automation using UiPath Test Suite series, part 4
A Big Helping of DevOps with Career Advice on the Side
1.
AT7
Concurrent Session
11/8/2012 2:15 PM
"A Big Helping of DevOps with Career
Advice on the Side"
Presented by:
Paul Peissner
CollabNet
Brought to you by:
340 Corporate Way, Suite 300, Orange Park, FL 32073
888‐268‐8770 ∙ 904‐278‐0524 ∙ sqeinfo@sqe.com ∙ www.sqe.com
2. Paul Peissner
CollabNet
Paul Peissner is an IT best practice enthusiast in cross-discipline areas of agile, ALM, QA,
BSM, ITIL, ITSM, and DevOps at CollabNet. Paul is a strong advocate for partner-based “ecosystem innovation,” encouraging enterprise IT adoption of cloud, mobility, self-service, and
organizational standards of agile and DevOps. He understands the limits of an R&D platform
team, the growing and changing demands of customers, and the wealth of resources the right
partnerships can provide to end-users. You can follow him @PaulPeissner.
