Business of Software Delivery Track

Thomas Murphy
Track Chair

The business of delivering software is increasingly adapting agile techniques driven by a need to deliver compelling user experiences in a world of digital business. This is driving leading IT shops to reconfigure around product teams rather than project teams and is driving tools to support increased collaboration and automation. However, the ability to adopt new practices and tools is a challenge of incorrect expectations and cultural change. This year we will explore how successful teams are connecting business to development and operations to transform from a “what will it cost”, to a “what will it enable” mentality.

We will explore how good AD life-cycle management practices and tools can aid in overcoming challenges such as: global Agile development, driving successful product delivery in regulated environments, and balancing the expectations of management with the reality of application delivery. How can you transition your organization not just to be agile or lean but to be effective, continuously delivering applications that delight customers and adapt to multiple modes of interaction.

Some of the focus areas of this track include:

Requirements Management
Organizational Change Management
Guiding Innovation
Driving Automation
Managing Adoption
Product Life Cycle Management
Portfolio Management
Global Integration
Information Analytics

Breakout Sessions

Eray Tuzun
Sr. Software Architect
Havelsan

Experiences Adopting ALM in a Hybrid Organization
Tuesday: 9:45 - 10:30am

In 2012, an ALM initiative was started in Havelsan to increase software development productivity and decrease infrastructure costs. The ultimate aim was delivering ALM as a service to the projects using a private cloud approach. This talk will reveal how Havelsan, the largest systems and software company in Turkey, adopt ALM practices from the idea phase, to the selection of the underlying toolset, and finally migrating the company to ALM practices.

It is a unique challenge to transform to a single ALM platform in a hybrid organization where there is a lot of diversity in platforms (Windows, Linux, MacOsX), programming languages (Java, C, C#, C++ etc.), and development methodologies (various forms of Agile to pure waterfall). In order to support the diverse needs of different projects in the organization, we have heavily customized and extended Microsoft Team Foundation Server especially in requirements management and change management especially for more formal projects in defense and government.

By 2015, the majority of the organization is now using the unified ALM toolset and processes. I will discuss the success & failure factors, total economic impact of ALM deployment in the organization, tactics to deploy ALM in a diverse environment, obstacles of ALM adoption in a large scale hybrid organization, and provide the lessons learned.

Mik Kersten
CEO
Tasktop

ALM Integration Patterns: From Build Automation to Continuous Collaboration
Tuesday: 10:45 - 11:30am

ALM at a fifty-person startup is (relatively) easy, at a 5000 person ISV it’s impressive, and in a Fortune 500 company it’s often a nightmare. At large scale, the sheer number of legacy systems, stakeholder specific tools, and governance processes can turn even a simple Agile deployment into Water-Scrum-Fall abomination. Yet ALM is critical for organizations of all sizes if they want to remain competitive in a software-driven economy.

In this talk, I will review my experiences and lessons learned working with ALM on a very large scale, using examples from the top 10 banks, the largest retailers, and major car manufacturers. Each of these organizations aspired to our collective goal of DevOps transformation, but was challenged by integrating the process of rapid iterations and continuous delivery with existing systems and stakeholders. This led me and my colleagues at these organizations to compile a set of tool-agnostic ALM Integration Patterns, with each pattern--Defect Unification, Agile Orchestration and Supply Chain Integration--building on the core ideas of continuous delivery and release automation. During the session, I will review a case study for each of these patterns and discuss how each implementation lead to ALM success. I will also present a compelling view of a DevOps future that comes directly from my experiences creating the open source Eclipse Mylyn project. On Mylyn we built a fully closed and connected collaboration loop that spanned coding by a handful of developers, to contributions and reviews by hundreds of community members, to continuous deployment and feedback from millions of users. And, we did it in a way that scales to the enterprise.

The talk will conclude with an outline of how, using these patterns, you can deploy a real-time build-measure-learn loop that spans your entire software delivery lifecycle.

Rebecca Parsons
CTO
ThoughtWorks

Evolutionary Architecture and Micro-Services
Tuesday: 1:45 - 2:30pm

Micro-services are at risk of being seen as the latest silver bullet. There are real advantages to micro-services, but the supporting approaches of evolutionary architecture, DevOps and continuous delivery are crucial to success. This talk will describe how to make all these approaches work together.

Kartik Raghavan
Sr. VP WW Engineering
CollabNet

From an ALM Perspective: 3 Prerequisites Before Jumping on the DevOps Bandwagon
Tuesday: 3:45 - 4:30pm

The DevOps frenzy is truly upon us and organizations are under increasing pressure to jump on the bandwagon in order to deliver software faster and faster. However, melding Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Agile delivery and DevOps is not a plug-and-play proposition – it requires time, effort and persistence. Also most enterprises, unlike Silicon Valley startups often held out as shining examples, don’t always have the luxury of dealing with newly designed software and freshly minted teams.

In this session, attendees will be presented the top prerequisites that must be in place to achieve the benefits of ALM, Agile delivery and DevOps on an enterprise scale:

Organizational Commitment
Automation with discipline
Tools and infrastructure

Implementing DevOps practices is a significant change and often an uncomfortable process for many enterprises. Attendees will leave the session confidently with a plan to establish clear alignment and goals for all stakeholders, a common sense of purpose and a roadmap to achieve DevOps success.

Dave West
Chief Product Office
Tasktop

ALM Industry Panel - chaired by Dave West
Tuesday: 4:45 - 5:30pm

Join industry veteran Dave West as he moderates a panel of his past colleagues and industry executives and find out what they believe are the current and emerging trends in ALM tooling and how the major vendors in the ALM industry will innovate to meet those trends.

Aaron Bjork is a Program Manager Lead working on Team Foundation Server (TFS).

Aaron Bjork
Principal Group Program Manager
Microsoft

Andrew is director of product management for HP-Software Lifecycle Management Suite in the Application Delivery Management Pillar (ADM).

Andrew Flick
Director
Product Management
HP

John is an IBM Distinguished Engineer, and is responsible for the open tooling architecture of the Jazz platform.

John Wiegand
Distinguished Engineer
IBM

Melinda-Carol Ballou serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research.

Melinda-Carol Ballou
Program Director
IDC

Thomas Murphy is a research director with Gartner, where he is part of the Application Strategies and Governance group.

Thomas Murphy
Research Director
Gartner

Related Resources:

Video: ALM Forum 2014 Analyst Panel

DZone Interview: Dave West on ALM and Real Software Engineering

Cheryl Hammond
ALM Consultant
Northwest Cadence

Effectively Measure Your Teams without Subjugating Them
Wednesday: 9:45 - 10:30am

“Managers who don’t know how to measure what they want, settle for wanting what they can measure.” In this session, learn how the right data can tell your team's authentic story - to management, your customers, and beyond. Step away from dangerous metrics that punish unfairly. Quit wasting time with metrics that are easily gamed. Instead, use true metrics to get everyone on the same page about what's important. Use metrics to reduce technical debt and improve quality? You bet you can. Dramatically increase productivity by reducing efficiency? We'll show you how, with real math, and you'll never look at a metric the same way again!

John Wetherill
Technology Evangelist
ActiveState

Microservices and PaaS
Wednesday: 10:45 - 11:30am

The old monolithic style of building enterprise applications just isn't cutting it anymore. It results in applications and teams that are complex, inefficient, and inflexible, with considerable communication overhead and long change cycles.

While microservice architectures have been around for a while, they are now gaining serious traction with software organizations, and for good reasons: they enable small targeted teams, rapid continuous deployment, independent updates, true polyglot languages and persistence layers, and a host of other benefits.

But truly adopting a microservice architecture requires dramatic changes across the entire organization, and a DevOps culture is absolutely essential.

This talk will dive into considerations for implementing microservices architecture, with a focus on the relationships between DevOps, microservices, and PaaS.

This session will cover:

microservices overview, and comparison with traditional monolithic applications
benefits and pitfalls of adopting microservices
revamping the organization to support microservices
how the DevOps culture enables success in a microservices-based organization
architecture practices and techniques essential for microservices adoption
lessons learned by corporations who have adopted micro services
essential tools for microservices
using PaaS to streamline microservices development

This technical session is intended for developers, DevOps, system administrators, and IT decision-makers responsible for building modern cloud applications.

Jim Szubryt
Enterprise Workforce
Accenture

Who Does What in DevOps in Large Enterprises
Wednesday: 1:45 - 2:30pm

When it comes to large enterprises adopting DevOps, how it gets adopted and who does what presents complexity with large, function specific purpose teams. Organizations can struggle with how reporting structures need to change to adjust to the flexibility required with DevOps. Where the focus should be can be challenging: is it how they deploy apps, how security is managed, how apps are tested once released? Traditional separation of roles and priorities will need to change. This session will provide guidance you can use in understanding who does what.

Aaron Rudger
Director Product Marketing
Keynote

Top Tips to Overcome the Language Barrier between the Business and IT Teams
Wednesday: 3:45 - 4:30pm

In a competitive business world, enterprises need to meet the expectations of customers in the digital moments that matter. Applications have to function fast and flawlessly. To get there, IT and the business need to operate and respond in real time. But, when they speak different languages, how can they possibly deliver the right updates in shorter cycles?

Join this session to hear how to address the top challenges created by continuous delivery that often become barriers to elevating the conversation between IT and digital teams. Aaron Rudger, senior product marketing manager, Keynote will cover:

How do I keep the business in alignment with development and operations so we can improve and respond quickly, while working across globally distributed teams?
What metrics can IT operations teams and the business use to speak common language?
How do I drive high quality, high performing customer experiences in an increasingly complex hybrid environment that demands faster response time?

Steve Riley
Technical Director
Riverbed Technology

Devops and Security: Will they blend?
Wednesday: 4:45 - 5:30pm

SecDevOps is the natural next phase of software engineering's evolution - balancing devops workflows with cloud security practices. Popular devops tools enable developers to ship changes quickly, on infrastructure that itself is built from software. Engineering and operations push updates frequently. How can security cope without getting left behind? Security can learn to mitigate risk using devops techniques: cookbooks for establishing and enforcing security policies, tooling in the build process to monitor for threats and vulnerabilities. Allowing devops teams to have safe access to production allows them to see how systems behave in real time. Well-tested changes can be applied while the security team conducts continuous monitoring, using security tools integrated into the devops automation pipeline.

Chris Sterling
Sr. Lead Product Manager
CenturyLink Cloud

Reduce Time to Value: Focus on Configuration Management Debt First
Thursday: 9:45 - 10:30am

The value of software is only potential value until it is put into a user’s hands. There can be many roadblocks to software getting into user’s hands in an organization’s processes:

Proliferation of long-lived branches
Overburdened release engineering and operations teams
Poor integration processes across architecture components and scaled team delivery
High coupling with centrally managed architecture element/component
Too many variations/versions of the software supported in production
Code changes feel too risky and take too long to validate before releasing into production
Poor documentation practices
Too many hand-offs between teams in order to release software to users

In organizations that have effective configuration management practices it is common to see deployment pipelines that have a smaller number of hand-offs between teams, architectures that tend to be more malleable, and efficient validation processes. By focusing on reducing Configuration Management Debt it is simpler to identify aspects of the integration and release management process that need to be tackled in order to get working software in the hands of users sooner while reducing the bottlenecks in the organizational processes and practices therefore leading to further optimizations in the future.

In this session we will discuss specific approaches and examples on how reducing Configuration Management Debt leads to reducing other forms of software debt including:

Smaller number of hand-offs: Platform Experience Debt
Malleable architectures: Design Debt
Efficient validation processes: Quality Debt
More testable software: Technical Debt

Bernard Golden
VP, Strategy
ActiveState

Jumpstarting Your Microservices Future
Thursday: 10:45 - 11:30am

The approved stack is dead. Monolithic applications are too difficult to manage, take too long to update, and don’t support the reality of a polyglot IT world. The next-generation approach is called microservices — independently operating, fine-grained services bound by an API contract and aggregated to deliver a complete solution. Microservices enable rapid application evolution and greater resilience — if they’re implemented correctly. Many IT organizations are attracted to the promise of microservices but unsure of how to design, implement, and manage them.

This presentation will discuss the requirements of a microservices-based application and how IT organizations can most rapidly move to using microservices.

Specific topics covered in the presentation include:

Service discovery
Service update
Resilience and high availability
Critical operational support

Jens Donig
Senior Consultant
HOOD

Martin Kuenzle
Program Manager, ALM
evosoft

Smart ALM
Thursday: 1:30 - 2:15pm

All users of integrated ALM face the same problems: Predefined tool configurations prescribe the detailed way of working. No differentiation between small, collocated and large, distributed teams. No support for individual development practices that proved beneficial in the past or are required for regulatory reasons. The lack of adaption to fundamental project characteristics leads to the infamous “one size fits all” syndrome. Thousands of developers are confronted with rigid processes, inadequate vocabulary, poor usability, and other limitations every day. All these aspects unnecessarily decrease development efficiency and adversely affect product quality. We saw a large number of teams that tried to customize their working environment but did not succeed.

This talk introduces our Smart ALM approach that domesticates process adaptations and delivers continual improvements as a service. This helped customers in the industry, energy, healthcare, finance, and other sectors to focus on product or solution development, optimize team velocity, and reduce waste.

Our Sponsors

Business of Software Delivery Track

Breakout Sessions

Related Resources:

All ALM Forum 2015 conference
attendees also receive:

ALM Forum Logowear

ALM Forum Bag

Business of Software Delivery Track

Breakout Sessions

Related Resources:

All ALM Forum 2015 conference attendees also receive:

ALM Forum Logowear

ALM Forum Bag

All ALM Forum 2015 conference
attendees also receive: