DevOps World has established a reputation for delivering compelling, high-quality sessions that challenge and inform its audiences year after year, conference after conference. DevOps World 2020 is continuing that pattern, offering what could be the best program yet.
The conference, to be held virtually this year Sept. 22-24, is rolling out more than 100 keynotes, workshops, panels, breakout sessions and “lightning talks.” Topics range from high-level themes such as promoting diversity in the workplace to on-the-ground technical discussions about automated testing in CI/CD pipelines.
If you have unlimited time and boundless energy, you can experience it all, without leaving your home office. Just sign up for the conference and join at the appointed time to ensure that you take advantage of the back-and-forth discussions each session will enable.
This year, you can do it all. Or, if you’re like most of us, you’ll probably want to cherry-pick the best of the best—the sessions that engage you the most and offer you the best perspective on issues that are important to you.
For those who are looking for a great DevOps World experience, here are five sessions that you won’t want to miss.
“Data-Driven DevOps: The Key to Improving Speed & Scale,” Kohsuke Kawaguchi, Launchable
What better place to start than with one of the most respected, most influential programmers in the history of computing? Kohsuke Kawaguchi, founder of Jenkins and former CTO at CloudBees, will deliver a session focusing on how development teams can be more successful.
Kawaguchi, who is now heading a new software testing startup called Launchable, will focus his talk on how a software delivery initiative can rise or fall based on the organization’s ability to use available data. Automation produces tons of data, but most of it gets thrown away. At the same time, leaders don’t have a good handle on how to make their delivery projects successful because they’re not mining the right insights from their data. Kawaguchi will draw on his own experiences and specific user stories to share how organizations can leverage their data to move at a faster speed and make developers feel great.
“Automated Testing as a Part of Pipelines,” Rosalind Radcliffe, IBM
Anybody who’s developed software for a long time knows just how important—and how big a headache—testing is. Without a dependable, effective, automated testing capability, teams end up spending way too much time documenting progress and re-doing work.
Automated testing is critical but organizations often struggle to do it when they have a large number of back end applications running on the mainframe. Rosalind Radcliff, IBM’s chief architect for DevOps, will discuss actual use cases for how unit testing and automated regression testing can be added into software pipelines, even for those COBOL and PL/I applications organizations have running. This session is great for web and application developers and system architect designers. Radcliff will drill into test automation approaches and go over CI/CD and DevOps for classic tools and tech stacks.
“Five Reasons Value Stream Thinking Is the Future of DevOps,” Steve Pereira, Visible
DevOps World attendees come to the conference not just to hear about what teams are doing today. They also want to know what the standards are going to be in the future, so they can help their organizations get a leg up on the competition.
One of those futuristic concepts that’s embedding itself into organizations’ DevOps strategies is “Value Stream Thinking.” The value stream, in and of itself, isn’t brand new. Corporate leaders starting with Henry Ford built processes around delivering value. But the emphasis on thinking, managing and mapping their DevOps strategies around the concept of a value stream is taking hold today at companies including Nationwide, Walmart, Barclays, BMW, Verizon, Liberty Mutual, AT&T, John Deere and Adidas.
Steve Pereira, a consultant who describes himself on Twitter as a “value stream whisperer,” will present real-world transformation stories and results achieved with this new form of management.
“Bad Code Kills: Five Essential Quality Gates You Need in Your CloudBees Core Pipeline,” Eric Mizell, OverOps
You can have the greatest ideas, the greatest team and the most well-designed software in the world. But if your code isn’t up to the required standard, your whole software delivery initiative is going to struggle.
Eric Mizell, vice president of solution engineering at development consulting firm OverOps, will discuss ways organizations can improve the quality of their code while continuing to deliver at a high velocity. The session will delve into common challenges and problems with current QA methods, then define and walk through each of the five quality gates teams can build into their pipelines: Dealing with static analysis, new errors, critical exceptions, resurface errors and unique error counts. Attendees can learn how to fill quality and testing gaps left by existing tools and processes and the open source resources available to build these gates into their own CI/CD tooling.
“Successfully Implementing DevSecOps at Scale At a Large Financial Services Organization,” Nagaraju Kakarla, Fidelity Investments
Many organizations with the size and scope of Fidelity Investments struggle to create a functional DevSecOps practice across the organization. They often get trapped into implementing waves of tools or end up doing it in a piecemeal fashion, leading to inefficiency and frustration.
Nagaraju Kakarla, senior director and chapter leader at Fidelity, will present a session detailing how Fidelity scaled its continuous delivery component and integrated security functions earlier in the delivery process. He will share some challenges he faced as an engineer and as a leader in implementing DevOps and SRE at various large organizations.
To take advantage of these and other sessions at DevOps World 2020, register today!
