Soft Skills Matter Too: Agile + DevOps Day 5 AAR

Thursday morning dawned as the second official day of the conference. I’d cut my post-conference networking down significantly after Tuesday’s little adventure, and was ready for the first Thursday event of the day: a 6:45am group run.

The scenary for running was a nice change from my usual South Dakota views. One of the years I'll be back with time and
budget to ride this monster!

As it turned out, it wasn’t so much a group run as people just heading out and running. At least I got to see a few people I recognized from the conference heading in opposite directions. The area we were staying in is almost exclusively hotels and resort housing, so it was neat to see other members of my extended #FitFam who made the decision to pack our workout gear and not let fitness take a vacation.

On to the meat of the day, starting with a keynote presentation from Andrea Goulet of Corgibytes. Her presentation about the role of empathy in software development proved to be one of my conference highlights, and deserves an entire post unto itself unpacking the concepts there. I don’t agree with everything she said, but her focus on the concept of Rational Empathy was both refreshing and realistic. As an industry pro, she recognizes that most software developers view empathy as being one of those soft, fluffy skills that’s about as useful in software development as a broken keyboard. Andrea’s talk made a compelling argument for why that isn’t the case.

Another soft, fluffy, usually neglected skill among us introverted developer types is making friends. It's amazing how
much we have in common once we get to talking and find that despite being from different areas and radically different
industries, we're all facing a lot of the same problems!

Other interesting presentations of the day included a case study in running without a QA department by Nate Custer at The Testing Consultancy, a presentation of commonalities of Agile and DevOps Transformations for Large Organizations by Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson of Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, and What Aircrews Can Teach DevOps by Gerie Owen and Peter Varhol.

The conference closed with a final keynote called All You Need is Product Love by Todd Olson (Pendo CEO) who challenged us to believe in and love the products we’re creating. And if we’re not feeling that way now, to take a hard look at our organization and figure out if the problem is with our products, or if it’s that we’re feeling disengaged from the cool stuff that our products actually do. This was another really challenging talk that I’m still mentally unpacking ramifications from. More on that in another future blog post, I suppose.

The day ended with a networking and discussion event for the Leadership Summit that would consume Day 6. More on that tomorrow!

Let's Play Star Wars: X-Wing Alliance - B7M3 - Clearing the Way!

Now that the Executor has been destroyed and the shield is finally down, it's time to commence the attack on the Death Star properly. First, there's another fighter screen and a Star Destroyer to clear out of the way.



This is basically Mission 1 redux, only with a Star Destroyer to beat, and the need to get to the initial entry position within a time limit.

It's not terribly difficult. Focus on the fighters, then go after the shields on the Star Destroyer. With the Falcon's turrets, dealing with the fighters isn't too difficult, and you should be able to make it to the nav point with a minute or two to spare.

The Phoenix Project Isn't a MacGyver Reference - Agile + DevOps Day Four!

In the interest of full disclosure, I may possibly have networked just a little too hard after Day Three of the conference. At the very least, I got a “delightful” reminder that at the start of Day Four that I’m no longer twenty-two, and recovering from a late night sometimes takes a little more than chasing a handful of Vitamin I with a liter of water, a quad-Venti mocha, and horking down a breakfast burrito or a couple of Egg McMuffins.

Onward and upward though, because Day Four was the first official conference day of Agile + DevOps East! No half-day class sessions today, just traditional hour-long sessions, with breaks to visit the Expo hall, chat with vendors, and schmooze with colleagues.

Did I mention swag? Because the eighteen vendors at this conference gave out more and better items than I collected
from the hundreds of booths at PAX East combined. Best of all, everyone here understands how to use a shower, and
people weren't standing in a sweaty mob 200 deep for a foam sword.

The opening Keynote session, called Beyond the Phoenix Project by John Willis, added a solid stack of books to my reading list, plus a new entry in my “Favorite Quotes” list. The Phoenix Project: A Novel About IT, DevOps, and Helping Your Business Win vaulted way up my list. I’m going to try and get this read before the year is over.

Of the other sessions that I attended, Continuous Integration is Not Test Automation by Adam Auerbach was my particular favorite. Continuous Integration (or CI for short) is another one of those tech buzzwords that I’ve been hearing more and more of in the past couple of years. We mentioned it a few times in the Test Automation course as something that requires a rock-solid automation strategy for success, but didn’t necessarily get too much deeper than that.

This talk got a lot farther into the weeds of what CI is and is not, and more especially why CI isn’t test automation all by itself, and why neither CI nor a functional test automation strategy means the demise of QA in an organization.

One of the overall things I’ve gotten from this conference is a renewed excitement for where QA is going in the future, not to mention the need for effective test engineers. Something that stuck with me from getting laid off from Monolith was when the professional outplacer looked over my résumé and told me that my career experience was a mile wide and an inch deep. In 2011 and 2012, that made me a very tough sell. In 2018 that makes me someone with “T-Shaped Skills”, who can play a utility role in an Agile team and take some of the pressure of more specialized team members.

In 2013, I was told that the SDET (Software Developer in Test, a Microsoft term for Software Test Engineers) was all but extinct within MS, and that traditional QA would be done within five years. With CI, the explosion of mobile device environments, and more and more companies accepting the Gospel of Agile, SDETs and QA are more in demand than we’ve been in a decade, and that doesn’t look to be changing anytime soon.

Chocolate and Legos Teach DevOps? How??? Agile + DevOps East 2018 AAR, Day 3

Day Three of Agile + DevOps East was my chance to branch out a little bit and check out a couple of half-day topics. My first stop would be Introduction to DevOps with Chocolate and Legos, taught by Dana Pylayeva.

Prior to this class, everything I knew about DevOps, other than it being a buzzword I’ve seen more and more, could be summarized by this cartoon:

In short, my understanding of DevOps was that it ended up putting some new names to the same old behaviors.

But Dana’s class changed all that. The brilliance of the class is that it’s totally hands on. The class was split into three groups: Devs, Ops, and Business. Then each table selected roles from a deck of cards. As developers, our tasks were to deliver packages containing a Lego animal and a piece of chocolate which would be built into packages by the Ops team and delivered to the Business so that we could get paid.

Simple, right? Everyone has a nicely defined role, we just do our thing and get paid. Why did I take this class again?

Then we didn’t deliver anything on the first Sprint. It didn’t feel like we were set up to fail either, we just followed our roles like good students and the failure just sort of happened. Requirements from the business were unclear, our big packages broke and got rejected, and the single Ops table got too backed up trying to deal with three Dev tables.

For the second Sprint, we tried some crosstraining. People got out of their rigid comfort zones, and things got a bit better. Everyone was more involved, and we were able to deliver a few things. But it wasn’t great.

For the third Sprint we got to simulate a Continuous Delivery model. Productivity went through the roof! We were slamming Lego creations and chocolate pieces into bags so quickly that we overwhelmed the business team, ran ourselves out of chocolates, and ran out of bags!

We were also all standing up, actively engaged, and talking to each other! Dev, QA, and Ops were huddled around tables, chairs pushed away, trying to get as much done as we possibly could.

This was our Sprint Two ending table. Total chaos, but happy learning.

When the exercise ended, I got it. Explain to me enough times how DevOps is supposed to work, and I’m sure I’d get it eventually. But by having everyone in the class actively participate in the exercise, an entire class got the major concepts in just a couple of hours.

My afternoon class was Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions with Jeffery Payne. This was another good class, if not nearly as exciting as playing with Legos and chocolate. 

Jeff walked us through a couple of real world cases of major project failures featuring “Agile” development, and had the class discuss the causes and how to avoid or fix them.

Most interesting to me was that some of the issues that he covered were also covered in the Agile Automation course I had attended. The class was a great summary of many of the pitfalls that companies can run into when trying to implement an Agile transformation.

The day capped off with a networking event. Every night of the conference has featured some kind of networking event, and the opportunity to connect more with fellow classmates and meet new people has been one of the major highlights for me. I’m not an extrovert by nature, but making myself meet new people has definitely been rewarding.

Let's Play Ash of Gods: Redemption - Epic Finale!

It's the final countdown! Both Thorn Brennin and Lo Pheng race to stop the Reapers' nefarious plan, but will they be in time? Even if they are in time, will it matter? Who can contain the birthing of a god into the mortal realm?

Agile + DevOps East AAR: Days 1 & 2

Day One and Two of my time at Agile + DevOps East 2018 were spent taking the Agile Test Automation course from ICAgile. This course leads to the ICAGile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA) certification. Given my current roles and responsibilities as a Test Engineer split across a pair of Agile Scrum teams, I felt that the ICP-ATA would be a valuable addition to both my toolbox and my résumé.

The two-day course, as led by Robert Sabourin (RobSab), provided a solid overview of good test automation practices within an Agile team framework. One important thing to consider is that this not an introduction to Agile level class. Students unfamiliar with core Agile concepts should definitely take one of the foundational Agile classes before considering this certification.

The primary value in the course comes from the examples and class work. The basic testing principles that underly good tests, are also the same ones which most often need automation: Story testing, Non-Functional testing, Experience & Exploratory testing, Static & Dynamic Analysis, and 

Structural testing. These should be familiar concepts to people who’ve gone through other testing courses, and/or been in the software testing field for five years or more. The emphasis in this class was on how those testing components could be automated, and how that automation would fit into the framework of an Agile team.

Another highlight on the social side has been talking to some of my fellow Agile Test Automation classmates. We were a remarkably diverse group, including project managers from General Dynamics, an engineer from ExxonMobil, and a Test Engineer from Kaspersky, who was part of a group that flew here all the way from Moscow!

I know the F-16 is officially a LockMart product now, but when I think General Dynamics, I think F-16s. Which just makes
this a flimsy excuse to post a cool picture of the Thunderbirds.

A speed-networking course at the end of Day 2 (Monday), made for a bit of fun. In the span of an hour, this introvert managed to have solid conversations with three people (Tina, Christina, and Eric), find a few things in common with each of them, and swap business cards. So far, that’s been one of the highlights of the conference: I’ve been forcing myself to get out of my quiet, introverted comfort zone and talk to some different people each day.

Vlog 2018-45: On the Road Again in Orlando

Orlando seems like an interesting town. Seemingly built up largely to service the various amusement park walled gardens that call the area home, it's not exactly a walkable city.



Good thing my hotel has pretty much everything I need!

I'm very excited to be here for Agile + DevOps East. I'll be working on my Agile Test Engineering certification, then attending a bunch more cool agile classes and training over the course of the week.

More to come!