Keep Austin Agile 2017

How can you be an effective Business Analyst (BA) in any organization no matter its Agile maturity? Come and find out how to be an adaptive BA!

In many organizations, Business Analyst effectiveness is often limited by the maturity of the organization in which they work. In this session, Leon Sabarsky will leverage his years of Agile and Business Analysis education and experience to give attendees practical guidance on how to maximize their Business Analysis effectiveness no matter the maturity of the organization.

For example, a very experienced Business Analyst may not be able to implement all of their best practices that they have acquired in their tool box over the years in their organization, especially if they join a new organization. Similarly, a less experienced Business Analyst may find that, as they grow in education and experience in their craft,  their organization is not keeping "up with the times".

Your business is moving fast and your team and your software need to keep up. As one of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto, Continuous Delivery has changed how teams develop, deploy and run software. Continuous Delivery is a critical automation practice under the DevOps umbrella. It allows a constant flow of code change through test and validation environments so that what is released to production meets the business needs without disruption. Find out how your team can be working toward a consistent and cohesive goal.

In this lecture, you will learn the principles of how to set up your own continuous delivery pipeline, very similar to how Microsoft's NuGet team manages NuGet.org. We will use the same chain of tools, and the same techniques. These principles apply beyond .NET.

Through interactive exercises, participants will gain a deeper understanding of the Scrum values. Participants will walk away with increased awareness of their team's current aptitude for the Scrum values and techniques for coaching them.

Scrum is a framework to enable agility, not a set of steps that will guarantee success. People have to do the hard work of solving complex problems, of coming up with innovative solutions, of experimenting and adjusting to deliver amazing products. There is no silver bullet, but there is a secret to Scrum success -- Scrum values.

The Scrum values are the lifeblood of the Scrum framework. The creators of Scrum believe values are so important and so often misunderstood or neglected that they updated the Scrum Guide in July of 2016 to include values. The Scrum values are focus, openness, commitment, courage, and respect. The words are easy to remember, but it can be difficult to understand what they mean, how to apply them, and how to recognize them. Without the Scrum values, we are just going through the motions. Applying the Scrum values maximizes our efforts with Scrum.

Agile is a mindset, not a methodology.

In the last few years, we have made a number of advancements in the way we treat applications, their deployments and the corresponding infrastructure. With the rise of microservices, containers, unikernels and now, serverless applications, we have new ways of deploying applications to production, and more importantly, quicker and simpler ways to make our infrastructure more Agile.

This talk will cover the advancements in containers, unikernels and serverless computing and discuss their common use cases. We'll also cover how newer architectures and methodologies using containers and serverless can make application delivery more Agile than in the past, and drive business value at a faster rate.

Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond some of the members' personal biases and quirks.

In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand ― and sometimes expose ― your own blind spots and limitations. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation.

Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.

Operations teams typically struggle to make and keep commitments larger than a few days due to the myriad of break fix, operational change, and tuning work that happens on a daily basis. Larger projects, such as critical hardware replacement, core software upgrades, and other tasks that are often important for security reasons, performance reasons, etc. go undone or end up partially done with the difficult items lanquishing.

At Kasasa, the speakers have worked out a way to handle projects large and small while continuing to maintain the flow style work necessary to "run the business."  They combined the types of work and work center notions from Gene Kim's seminole DevOps book The Phoenix Project with the Scrum and Kanban Agile models in order to organize their teams to address technical debt and business projects.

This talk will not only explore what their company is doing today, but begin by taking a look at the larger situation along with failed attempts at team organization and the application of DevOps and Agile thinking. Attendees will walk away with more than a, "Wow, that is a neat way to organize," but also have a model to think about the application of Agile in a less traditional - and more volatile - situation.

Many organizations are unaware of the benefits of Kanban. DrillingInfo was one of these companies. Using Lean Kanban University's techniques and approach to evolutionary change has created a revolution in the organization. Starting with one Kanban team, lead times, graphs, and slide decks has led to a viral adoption of Kanban that has reached the desk of the CTO, President, and COO. This session will share the case study of a Kanban transformation of a $100 million private technology energy company and what techniques were used to drive influence to change.

In December 2008, a team adopted Agile development practices. They used Scrum as the basis for their process, did two-week iterations, and tried to get a little better with each one. In the process, the team created two product lines and learned a lot about how to best work together to get things done. The team just completed their 200th iteration. Team members came and went over the course of the 200 iterations. The state of the business changed dramatically over the time period. The biggest differentiator was the sheer number of iterations and around eight years of retrospectives and trying to get better. 

Walter will talk about the things they tried in several areas -- such as Backlog Management, Grooming/Planning, Quality, Communication and Politics ---  what worked and what didn't.  Some things worked well at a point in time because of the composition of the team then.  But as the team composition changed and the business changed, the way they needed to work together changed as well. Each iteration is an opportunity to become better, to evolve as a team in order to be able to better deal with the problems at hand. Come see what they learned along the way.

Sabermetrics turned the baseball world upside down by challenging the decades-old measures of individual performance and their perceived linkage to team success. After 108 years cementing their legacy as the Lovable Losers, even the Chicago Cubs were able to leverage a data-driven approach to finally win a World Series in 2016. A high school football coach in Arkansas, with a devotion to statistical analysis, has won three state championships, by going against conventional wisdom and never punting. Formula 1 racing teams collect staggering amounts of telemetry data from their race cars, with each Constructor managing what amounts to a 'Data Center in a garage', for the purpose of eking out seconds of performance during the course of a two hour race.  

Geoff uses these concepts, along with others from the world of professional sports, to provide insights from the operations of the Dell EMC Server division as they adopt a data-driven, predictive analytics approach to its global test practices. Geoff shares how Dell leverages its structured and unstructured data from sources as varied as Engineering, Sales, Factory and Customer data to optimize test operations. From the identification of high-value test cases and test configurations to which automation test scripts should be retired and not re-factored, he demonstrates how these types of insights can be used to plan, forecast, and allocate resources to advance your organizational capabilities and maturity.

How do you take Agile to the next level, where your organization moves beyond basic Agile delivery to fully acting with Agility in everything you do? How do you move past predictable and productive delivery to fast response to market needs?

Many organizations are barred from this level of success by a project-centric mindset, which impedes your ability to maximize value delivery. David Hawks pushes for an evolution of the Agile Manifesto into a set of values and principles for outcome-driven development.

This session is targeted at novices and provides a first-hand account of how to successfully implement Agile in a small to medium-sized team. Attendees will learn how to ease colleagues and management into Agile, by incrementally introducing low-tech tools like sticky-note-Kanban and paper-sharpie burndown charts. We’ll also cover how to establish rules for new processes like standups and retrospectives, and to maintain buy-in by keeping things simple early on.