Max Saperstone tells the story of how a healthcare company striving to get to continuous releases built up their automation to secure confidence in regular releases.

When moving toward automation, establishing trust in the automation test suite is important to unite the team as a whole. Once trust is established in the process and the tests, it becomes crucial to the overall software development lifecycle.

A best practice of software architecture is to design your applications into independent modules or components, with a published contract for interaction between components. This is a principle of the microservices style of architecture, but it also applies to components created in a large monolith. If we can test the functionality of the component independently, and apply a level of trust that those components work, this opens the door to rethinking our continuous integration and continuous delivery strategy, potentially reducing the need for long test suites and many environments. It will also cause us to rethink our unit testing strategy and the test pyramid. Tim Cochran will talk through the different kinds of component testing, show working examples, and give advice about when to apply them. He will also cover what this might mean for your organization's broader testing strategy.

A large company moves to agile, but when the going gets tough, they abandon all their agile processes and revert to old ways—which are now a combination of Scrum and waterfall—and delivery is worse than before they started.