agile

Performance issues substantially impact quality, cost, and customer confidence. Agile teams are challenged to build in performance processes throughout the lifecycle, but it is critical to incorporate performance into your CI/CD pipeline. Join Amit Patel as he shares his recent project experiences and the steps his team took to change processes, leverage different technologies, and align internal stakeholders. He explains how they use production-monitoring solutions to create a real-world production feedback loop in order to ensure they can analyze data and turn the information into actionable defects. As part of this, his team created process and procedures to execute performance tests on a regular basis and pass/fail builds based on thresholds. Join Amit to learn how to build a successful production feedback loop, align internal stakeholders, and implement holistic performance engineering.

Delivering a compliant product is a resource intensive and challenging activity for most teams. Whether a team is trying to adhere to company, industry, or international standards, it needs to produce deliverables under tight deadlines with the right level of quality. When you work with Forensic teams the stakes are high! Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) is a new forensic DNA sequencing technology which can result in increased detection ability for degraded and complex mixture samples. It can also provide ancestry and physical trait information which help's narrow down suspects. Join Aprajita Mathur as she shares how her team successfully built the first Forensics, NGS “sample-to-answer” platform at illumina, working in a cross-functional team, using a scrum-based methodology, yet in a compliant environment.

Ashwin Desai has faced the daunting challenge of using measurements and metrics to assess and improve product quality through process change. Join him as he shares what he learned on the journey to move the sports technology firm Hudl from a reactive approach to quality to quantitative, data driven, proactive means to improve product quality. Just as Hudl itself provides the ability for coaches and teams to analyze and improve their performance based on data, they wanted to move the teams building Hudl to use the same approach to improve quality. Ashwin shares how they selected measurements, the work agile teams completed to get buy-in for the measurements, and how the data was normalized to provide understanding of the quality of each initiative and the variance between them.

Agile and Scrum Teams are self-organizing and self-managing. As a line manager, what's left to do? Traditionally, managers are responsible for the output of their teams. Sometimes they're even responsible for the for a team's delivery that they do not have direct oversight. This model is flawed. People are complex, a team of people is a complex system. May as well try to manage the weather. To get a handle on the complexity of teams, managers need to act differently in how they lead others. In other words, managers of agile teams will fail if they do not shift their thinking from management to leadership. We can't manage the complexity but we can help people navigate it. Just as we can't stop it from raining, we help teams find umbrellas and take supportive actions when things begin to flood.