AGILE | DEVOPS | TESTING 2016:

The attendees choose one of the three parallel Tutorial Streams.

Each topic (DevOps, Testing, Agile) is covered by a day of intensive tutorial sessions. These are short hands-on training sessions between 45 and 90 minutes long. At the end of the day attendees have the opportunity to join in panel sessions of question and answers with the presenters to clarify their queries. Delegates are also free to change tutorial streams during the day.

John Clapham, Principal, Cotelic

Agile methods encourage creativity through collaboration - but those ideas, and our responses to others, are filtered through our own perceptions. Most worrisome are the kind of perceptions that we've built up and curated over many years, until we are barely aware of them.

Working in groups can improve things, and we've learnt to value the wisdom of crowds. But groupthink creeps in with alarming ease, depriving the team of diversity and breadth of experience.

In this session we’ll look at some of the most harmful biases, and introduce a technique that’s delivered effective decision making to many organisations: The Six Thinking Hats.

Speakers:

John Clapham

Gurpreet Singh, Scrum Master/ Culture Hacker, Johnson & Johnson

The retrospective is often undervalued but it is an important Scrum ceremony. Organizations fall into the trap of skipping the retrospectives in order to 'quicken' the process, thus diminishing / minimizing the outcome of the retrospectives.

Why and when should we perform the retrospectives?

During this workshop we will perform together a few activities to answer the questions mentioned above and remove a few myths around the retrospectives.

Speakers:

Gurpreet Singh

Chris Foley and Amit Kumar Singh, Agile Nirvana

Let’s get together for a collective learning experience. You are invited to suggest a high-level topic or a specific need. You create your own agenda to have the talks that are most important to you.

Agile Human/people management : Servant Leadership, Motivation, Performance Appraisals, Conflicts Resolution, Effective Teamwork, Team Empowerment, The Role of Middle Management, How to Organise into Teams …

Agile Organisation change : Challenges in Agile Adoption and Transformation, Technique for Scaling Agile, Cultural and Mindset Change, Agile Testing and Automation, DevOps, Spotify, Tribal leadership, Lean Startup, Agile Anti Patterns, Wastes of Agile Software Development …

Agile Practises : Release Planning, User Story Mapping, Product Backlog Refinement, Story Estimation - Hours or Story Points or Ideal Developer Days

Agile in a Regulated Environment : How to be Compliant, but still Agile

Speakers:

Amit Kumar Singh

Chris Foley

Augusto Evangelisti, Principal Consultant, Evangelisti Consulting Ltd and Darryn Downey, test engineer, Paddy Power Bet fair

Having worked with agile teams for years, and having used one flavour or another of BDD almost since it was first introduced in 2006, like many others, I totally misunderstood it, used it badly and made a mess of it for a good while. Mistake after mistake, I learned a lot of things and today I believe I have developed a decent approach that I continuously try to improve. Through these years of many failures and some success, one thing clearly emerged: it is that I believe in the true value of BDD.

BDD is about communication, collaboration and delivering business value. It’s based on this principle that we built our tutorial. Improved communication and close collaboration help defects prevention; systems built with BDD are built right the first time. One of the nice side effects of BDD is the creation of an automated regression suite that covers all areas of the deliverable, allowing testers not to waste time on manual regression testing and to focus on a more in-depth exploration of the systems.

If you want to know how your team can deliver business value by producing clear and maintainable code, come to our tutorial!

This tutorial is for testers, developers, business analysts, managers and product owners

Speakers:

Augusto Evangelisti

Darryn Downey

Marco Bonezzi, Technical Service Engineer, MongoDB

Docker is becoming the default container technology and more and more organizations are already using it. If you have heard of Docker but not yet played with it, you may want to know why companies are implementing their solution with Docker? Why are containers popular? What is the benefit and how can they help in my organization? What is the difference between containers and virtual machines?

Docker and containers are key in micro services architectures and it can help us to speed up processes of testing and deployment in multiple environments like testing to production. Containers are not only a way to package our application, but also the foundation to orchestrate and deploy multiple solutions on distributed systems, multiple cloud environments or even our own laptop.

This tutorial covers what is Docker, what are the benefits of using Docker, how it can be used within an organization and how to successfully build and orchestrate our solution based on Docker containers.

Deploying MongoDB on Docker seems hard. Running multiple MongoDB instances on the same server is not easier. If you ever thought about it, you may have some key questions specific to deploying MongoDB on Docker containers. Where do I put my data? How do I configure a replica set using containers? If you ever wanted to deploy MongoDB on Docker but did not know how (or maybe you already do but you want to improve), then this talk is for you! Successfully implementing a MongoDB replica set or sharded cluster on Docker at production level requires planning and taking both MongoDB and Docker configurations to a higher level. When running MongoDB deployments using Docker, building highly available repeatable patterns, orchestrate containers to build them and defining resource limits are key for a successful cluster. This use case covers what is a recommended MongoDB pattern, how to build it with Docker containers by using docker swarm for container orchestration, docker compose and docker-machine to deploy multiple containers into AWS and finally how to define resource limits for each running container using Docker cgroups option.

Speakers:

Marco Bonezzi

Adrian Skehill, Independent Consultant

Continuous Delivery involves more than being able to build / test & ship your code frequently. You also need to consider the infrastructure that is used to host the application and how it's managed. Can it be recreated in the event of a disaster? How are changes to the OS, network and security managed? What's the process for adding new components to support new features in your application?

This session will look at how you can integrate the infrastructure that is used to power your website into your continuous delivery pipeline. We will look at a couple of examples using AWS but building our solution in a vendor neutral way. Leveraging some of Hashicorp Suite of software such as Packer and Terraform we will go through some concrete examples of how to spin up and maintain the infrastructure. All the scripts will be made available in the tutorial so if you have an AWS account you can test the concepts yourself.

Speakers:

Adrian Skehill

Dave Anderson, Head of Consulting, Ammeon

DevOps is a movement that propels organizations to achieve Business Agility through the transformation of people, process and tools. There are plenty of resources that explain ‘why’ your organization needs DevOps, but few help you start out on the road to success. Over the course of 60 minutes, this workshop will prepare you for leading your organization to reach high-performing status.

You will learn:
● The importance of taking immediate action to maximise the business value from DevOps adoption
● The power of incremental change to achieving your end goal
● The Dos and Don’ts of implementing DevOps principles

You will then be taken through a series of practical exercises to determine your organization’s readiness for a transformation journey.

This workshop is ideal for IT Leaders who understand DevOps concepts, but are unsure how to get started, and DevOps advocates looking to influence IT-Agility change within their organization.

Speakers:

Dave Anderson

Eamonn Hegarty, Prudential; Alan Wright, Pramerica Systems

A fun interactive educational session on implementing DevOps with a focus on Continuous Integration. This session will teach you how to get the most out of implementing Continuous Integration as well as showing you how to do it. It has audience participation as well as a recent enterprise level example showing the benefits that adopting DevOps has had in part of a large US Financial Instruction.

Speakers:

Alan Wright

Eamonn Hegarty

John Clapham, Principal, Cotelic

This session is a fun way to learn agile and DevOps principles and understand how to assist the flow of valuable work between teams. It covers basic principles such as iteration and retrospection before moving onto more advanced topics such as coaching, flow, and the impact of organisational structure.

Speakers:

John Clapham