The Blurred Boundaries Between Dev, Test, and Ops Ken Johnston, Microsoft It’s like watching a chase scene in a major summer blockbuster movie. You’re totally focused on the action when suddenly you realize the background is a blurry mess. Trees, buildings, street signs, and pedestrians on the sidewalk have become one mass of smeared colors. As we increase the rate of new software releases and rely more and more on running web services for both interfaces and apps, we are beginning to see the boundaries blur between development, test, and operations. Ken Johnston pokes some fun at the walls between our disciplines and then dives deep into working examples of organizations that are erasing the lines between Dev, Test, and Ops to create more fluid and innovative businesses. Using his experiences from the Bing search development team at Microsoft, Ken describes the impact of lean thinking, kanban, cloud computing, and continuous deployment on role definitions. He shares his insights on the evolution of testing in this new data rich, continuously evolving ecosystem of live web services. Rather than redrawing the Dev-Test-Ops lines, you can become part of the revolution that helps blur the lines into total obscurity.

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Influence and Authority: Using Your Personal Power to Get Things Done Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc. How often have you been in a situation where you could see the solution and yet did not have the authority to make a change? You tried persuasion; you tried selling your ideas; you might have even tried friendly manipulation to get your way. And nothing worked. Here’s a new plan. We can learn to develop and use personal power and influence to effect positive changes in our companies. Johanna Rothman describes how we can be specific about the result we want, look for what’s in it for everyone, and consider short- and long-term options to foster change while acting congruently and authentically. Although it’s not easy to do, with preparation and persistence you can transform yourself into a person with personal influence. When you’re influential, you build your power and, by extension, your informal authority in the organization. Join Johanna to examine what engenders personal power, how it might be affected by your company’s culture, and how you can become more influential in any organization.

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Sustainable Software Quality—at Warp Speed Richard Hensley, McKesson Health Solutions Businesses demand high levels of product quality, development productivity, planning reliability, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And yet, people and organizations often ignore all those goals and focus on building systems with as many features as possible delivered by a specific due date. When the work is complete, retrospectives surface the dissatisfaction concerning missed dates, poor quality, technical debt, and more. Richard Hensley describes his last three years at McKesson, where they have delivered 103 production releases with no significant defects, fulfilled sixteen multi-million dollar contracts, maintained high employee morale, and trained 5,000 users. Employing the Kanban approach for change management, McKesson implemented new tools selected from RUP, XP, Scrum, and lean—daily focused planning, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, TDD, information radiators, user stories, etc. They automated anything they could and measured everything possible. Most importantly, though, they developed a culture that puts quality and continuous improvement at the forefront. Richard outlines the ideas behind McKesson’s cultural and delivery success, and describes how their approaches can work in your business.

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The Paths to Innovation Patrick Copeland, Google There are many paths to innovation. At one extreme, many large companies create research labs, staff them with world-class Ph.D.s, and set them working for years to solve complex technical problems. At the other end is the proverbial "two entrepreneurs in the garage" working on a shoe-string budget. Between these extremes are all sorts of organizational structures, team sizes, budgets, and time horizons to encourage innovation. Patrick Copeland introduces basic models for innovation—top-down, democratic, and his personal favorite “eXtreme”—and describes how Google's core beliefs, culture, organization, and infrastructure have successfully encouraged and enabled democratic innovation throughout its growth. From the now famous “twenty-percent time” offer to engineers to its culture of trust, Google is famous for its innovation and out-of-box thinking and execution. Patrick concludes with an "Unleash the Innovators" manifesto/guide that any team, department, or organization can adapt and adopt to stimulate and leverage eXtreme Innovation. Find your own path to innovation and set out to change your world—one step at a time.

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