We were just in Dallas (more specifically, Grapevine) Texas for Agile Alliance’s 20th annual conference, Agile2024! This was a five-day, large-scale gathering of Agile practitioners from across the globe, and the Shipyard team got an inside look at what’s brewing in Agile software development.
Shipyard and Agile software development
At Shipyard, Agile principles are core tenets of how we design and build our platform. We believe that providing developers, product, QA, and stakeholders with easily-shareable environments makes feature development a much more collaborative process. When team members have the tooling to spin up environments on the spot to test or preview new code changes, they can get the feedback they need, and fast.
Ephemeral environments are regarded as an important internal asset for teams, but their value goes further — they can (and should be) shared with customers and relevant people on the business side. This way, teams get the full picture before pushing to production, and can keep moving forward on the roadmap, thanks to everyone being on the same page.
Agile Essentials: DevOps and SRE with Natalie
On Thursday afternoon, Natalie led a 75-minute session on DevOps and SRE basics for the Agile Essentials track.
She covered some of the most fundamental DevOps and SRE concepts, including:
- Trunk-based development
- Continuous integration, delivery, and deployment
- Service level agreements and objectives
- Metrics and measurability (and of course a DORA spotlight)
- Containerization
- Cloud native
Between these topics, there’s obviously a lot of ground to cover — if you’d like to see Natalie’s deck or accompanying resource sheet, send an email to natalie@shipyard.build.
We tied several concepts together with a very relevant case study of the CrowdStrike outage, learned why Meta changed their “Move fast and break things, but always know how to fix them” motto to “Move fast with stable infrastructure”, and discussed how to balance competing priorities (e.g. a crucial service outage occurring during a major feature release).
Natalie got some valuable feedback and context from the audience — we learned that many attendees are using DORA metrics to measure performance, and improving CI/CD processes is a high priority across the board.
Our learnings
With about 12 ongoing conference tracks, it was difficult to choose which sessions we wanted to catch. We had some important takeaways and experiences:
- Designing and optimizing cardboard boxes based on real human feedback with Darcie Fitzpatrick, during her session on Human Centered Design
- Learning how we can use Agile and DevOps core practices to aid us in space exploration with Robin Yeman and Suzette Johnson (emphasis on safety-critical!)
- Discussing the current impact of AI systems in decision-making, and learning how we can detect bias in generative AI outputs with Bill Allen
As always, the hallway track didn’t disappoint either. It was especially valuable to hear Cheryl Hammond’s wisdom on the intersection of DevOps and Agile practices, and hear Rob Gordick’s vision and concept for a DevOps-based card game.
The Texan experience
Everything was larger-than-life at the Gaylord Texan Resort. Its atrium had a sprawling landscape with rivers, canyons, waterfalls, trees, and footpaths, which was perfect for post-conference walks when the outside world was a little too hot for comfort.
Thanks Agile2024!
Our team enjoyed the intensive Agile experience, and we appreciated the broad selection of subject matter. We’ve since been applying our newfound Agile methodologies at work, and we hope that we’ve helped others learn the role of on-demand infrastructure in Agile software development.
Thanks to the team at Agile Alliance who made this conference possible! Your hard work made this a standout, memorable event, and we’re incredibly grateful to have attended.
