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Rally's Culture of Quality - Leadership and Engineering

Event Details

Time: June 25, 2012 from 6pm to 8pm
Location: Tivoli Student Union - TV TIV 444 - LoRaine Good Room
Street: 900 Auraria Pkwy
City/Town: Denver
Website or Map: http://www.tivoli.org/tivoli/…
Event Type: meeting
Organized By: Frank Vega
Latest Activity: Jul 5, 2012

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Event Description

NOTE: we'll start presentations @ 6:15 pm instead of our usual 6:30 pm. Please join us for food, networking, and announcments @ 6:00 pm.

Abstracts:

Testing to go Faster – Steve Neely

The Software-As-A-Service model is popular, in part, because it enables fast-paced agility in shipping features to customers. But the Project Management Triangle indicates that moving fast means either costs increase or scope decreases, or quality will suffer. Quality cannot and must not suffer. Testing to the rescue!

In this talk, Steve Neely, a Research and Development Engineer at Rally Software, will describe multi-level test processes and how these allowed for Rally’s engineering team to rapidly double in size. Thus, dropping from 8-week to at-will deployments while shipping with fewer defects and overall increased system uptime.

The Answer is Always More Agility - Ryan Martens
In this presentation, Ryan Martens, Founder and CTO at Rally Software will share his unique perspective on the continuous testing practices implemented by Rally teams. Hear how the culture of quality at Rally has transitioned over time and learn Ryan’s techniques for scaling test-driven development to the enterprise level of agility.

Steve Neely | Rally Engineering

Steve Neely is research & development engineer at Rally Software. His interests include: agile techniques, continuous delivery, distributed systems, internet technologies, mobile and pervasive computing, middleware, informatics and data management, and semi-structured data. He likes to move fast and break things.

Ryan Martens | Rally CTO & Founder

Ryan Martens brings to Rally proven leadership in dynamic, high growth software companies and is an expert in assisting organizations transition from traditional development processes to more Agile techniques. Before founding Rally Software Development – his fourth software start-up – Ryan directed the corporate adoption of Internet technologies within Qwest Communications, and then moved on to co-found Avitek, a Boulder-based custom software development firm where he served as Vice President of Marketing & Business Development. Ryan's successful efforts at Avitek culminated in an acquisition by BEA Systems in 1999. At BEA, Ryan served as Director of Product Management for the eCommerce applications division and he was instrumental in growing that division to more than $50 million in revenue within its first twelve months.

Agenda:

6:00-6:15 - Food, networking, announcements

6:15-7:00 - Steve Neely's Presentation

7:00-7:45 - Ryan Marten's Presentation

7:45-8:00 - Open Questions for Both Presentations

Attendance, parking and food are free! Parking vouchers will be provided for free parking in the Tivoli Auraria Parking Structure to the NW of the Tivoli Student Union.

To find the room: Take the Tower elevator on the east side of bldg

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Comment by Frank Vega on July 5, 2012 at 11:35am: Hi All,

I've uploaded a PDF of Rally's slides for this presenation onto our Google Docs location. Hit the link below to download the pdf.

http://bit.ly/RkRVRb

Take care,

Frank

www.vissinc.com

Comment by Frank Vega on June 27, 2012 at 3:11pm: Hi All,

Check out the comment below too for a brief summary of Steve's and Ryan's presentation along with supporting links. Check back too as I'll post a PDF of slides when I get it from Steve.

Take care,

Frank

www.vissinc.com

Comment by Frank Vega on June 26, 2012 at 7:34pm: Hi All,

Thank you to all who attended our Agile Denver presentation last night. A big THANK YOU to Steve Neely and Ryan Martens, both from Rally, for their presentations on our Double-header Night!

Their dual and complimentary perspectives of Rally’s own corporate lean-agile journey was a very interesting “real world” experience report. Ryan started off the presentation from the business perspective, providing some very candid insights into the early background and context of Rally’s journey. He used the concept of S-curves to frame key challenges and issues that Rally as an organization needed to address recently to continue their success and support future growth. This provided a great foundation for understanding the why and what related to some of the significant changes they’ve embarked on over the last couple of years in the way they develop and deliver their product to customers today. From this foundation, Steve picked up the baton and went deeper from a technical perspective on how many of those issues were addressed, noting too along the way a few surprises and the learning that occurred from them. Ryan brought things home, again from the business perspective, on where these changes have brought Rally today on their journey, and the two of them ended Rally’s Culture of Quality: Leadership and Engineering presentation with a very interactive session of questions from those who attended. Based on the lively chatter that continued long after the presentation ended I’d say the dual perspectives hit their mark. Thanks again to Steve and Ryan for sticking around, after I’m sure a busy day, and answering questions one-on-one until the last attendees left.

This presentation was our second in a row that mentioned Dave Snowden and the Cynefin model, so once again I’ll include the following two YouTube links for more info. Definitely try to catch the YouTube link (How to organize a Children’s Party) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Miwb92eZaJg to see how one might view the Cynefin model in real life situation :>), it will definitely make you laugh a bit and help re-enforce the concepts. This second link is a bit longer and provides another overview of the model again as a YouTube video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N7oz366X0-8 Enjoy! Here too is a related link they provided in their presentation http://www.anecdote.com.au/archives/2008/12/when_should_we.html. Check back for a PDF of their slides, as I’ll post them here when I receive them from Steve.

Again, please also share with Brad (Swanson), Som (Ghosh), Walt (DenHaan), Tom (Smallwood), or me (Frank Vega), topics that you'd be interested in seeing (and volunteering to present on :>). We want to hear from many more out there, from your latest real world on the floor experiences. If presenting is the issue holding you back, I’m confident we can "team" you up with someone to "advise and coach" as you prepare your presentation. Team presentations work too. Agile Denver’s monthly meetings are a great opportunity for you to improve and tune a presentation prior presenting at a larger conference.

Lastly, we tried Lightning Talks last December and they were very well received. We agreed back then to try adding Lightning Talks as well to our presentations. So, if you’re interested in “testing” out a Lightning Talk please also let us know. If we get enough, we might try another night of Lightning Talks. However, we’re also open to adding one to a presentation as well and see how that works.

Take care,

Frank

www.vissinc.com