Setting Priorities: How to Balance Planned vs. Unplanned Work

When people think about agile software development it’s often in a context of colocated teams working through problems and building features in an iterative way. This is how digitally native companies work and it’s broadly what all organizations have been marching towards.

But the world has changed and in the wake of Coronavirus, employees and organizations everywhere are scrambling to stay safe and constrain the spread of this novel virus by working remotely. This can be daunting to say the least. How do you maximize the productivity of remote-only software teams? Can teams share knowledge and ramp-up new people efficiently? Can they avoid siloed decision making and ensure all people have a voice regardless if they’re introverted or extroverted?

VMware Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development for over 25 years. We have successfully delivered amazing business outcomes using distributed teams for hundreds of customers. Join us on March 26 to hear practical advice, processes, practices, and enabling technologies that we’ve developed for fully remote software development. Learn how to incorporate a few occasional "remotes," maintain teams split across regions and timezones, and even how to adopt an "everyone's remote" approach to your distributed agile teams.

There is a misconception that “agile” means faster delivery, however it really means being able to quickly react and respond. In this 4-part webinar series, we’ll be sharing some of the ways we help our clients adopt modern, agile practices for building software, so that they can respond faster to changing customer needs.

Measuring how a product performs in users hands is the ultimate validation of user and business value.

Part 4: In this webinar we will discuss why, once a software-based product is in the wild, user behaviour metrics become a critical source of insights and learning. We'll review the AARRR Analytics Framework (a.k.a. Metrics for Pirates) and discuss how the implementation of user activation and user retention metrics varies, depending on the type of product and business model.

To watch part one in the series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/415310

There is a misconception that “agile” means faster delivery, however it really means being able to quickly react and respond. In this 4-part webinar series, we’ll be sharing some of the ways we help our clients adopt modern, agile practices for building software, so that they can respond faster to changing customer needs.

In order to quickly respond to customer needs and rapidly deliver value, application teams need support and alignment from their organisation's leadership. Ongoing, regular communications between agile teams and leadership on topics including product progress and key findings, is vital to enabling quick decision-making. As delays and friction impact how successful you are at implementing and maintaining business agility, ensuring you have clear communication approaches in place is key.

Part 3 - In this webinar, we’ll cover our best-practices and recommendations for communication and decision-making approaches, including:
- How User-Centered Design, Lean Planning and Extreme Programming can work together to help to shorten feedback loops
- How agile teams can be organised and supported across the business
- How tools like OKRs, OGSM and Growth Boards can help achieve strategic alignment between teams

For the next webinar in the series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/415371

There is a misconception that “agile” means faster delivery, however it really means being able to quickly react and respond. In this 4-part webinar series, we’ll be sharing some of the ways we help our clients adopt modern, agile practices for building software, so that they can respond faster to changing customer needs.

The goal of an agile team is not just to go fast, it’s to go fast in the right direction. So how do we avoid wasting time and resources to identify and build the right thing? On trick is to ensure we have the shortest possible feedback loops between our agile product teams and our customers.

Part 2 - In this webinar we will investigate how you can reduce business risk by implementing ongoing product discovery and lean planning. Learn how you can shorten feedback loops through intensive product discovery and framing methods to maximise productivity, ensuring you start working on building the most valuable software on day one.

This session will cover:
- Conducting market and customer research
- Modelling business processes and user journeys
- Generating and testing ideas/prototypes
- Prioritising and planning your work
- Clearing a path to production

For the next webinar in the series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/415364

There is a misconception that “agile” means faster delivery, however it really means being able to quickly react and respond. In this 4-part webinar series, we’ll be sharing some of the ways we help our clients adopt modern, agile practices for building software, so that they can respond faster to changing customer needs.

One of the changes organisations have had to urgently respond to, especially in recent times, is shifting to increasingly remote software teams. How can large organisations deal with the challenge of moving in-person agile team practices to a fully remote environment, as well as maximise the productivity of remote-only agile teams?

Part 1 - Join us on this webinar for practical advice on how we've adapted our product management, design and engineering practices to better support distributed teams. Hear how we've overcome some of the challenges associated with collaboration and communication in balanced agile teams.

For the next webinar in the series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/415347

Most organisations today are at some stage of their digital journey, which typically requires application teams to navigate the challenges of application and infrastructure modernisation. During your journey of application modernisation, you are likely to face challenges especially when dealing with heritage processes and teams. In this two part webinar series we will explore the processes and practices to help enterprises successfully modernise their legacy applications.

In this talk Ananda Bose, Director, Application Platform Architecture, APJ, VMWare Tanzu will share how organisations can leverage modern architectural methods to decompose heritage monolithic systems, enabling the creation of business value in the areas of revenue and cost optimisation. We will look at how the modern design patterns of Domain Driven Design - eg. Event Storming and C4 Modelling, can be applied to help achieve these results.

To watch the first part of this two part series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/392505

In this webinar, Jack Vanlightly will explain quorum queues, a new replicated queue type in RabbitMQ, the most popular open-source message broker. Quorum queues were introduced in RabbitMQ 3.8 in order to achieve high availability and data safety. Jack will cover and contrast the design of quorum and mirrored queues. After this webinar, you'll understand:

- Why quorum queues offer better data safety than mirrored queues
- How and why server resource usage changes when switching to quorum queues from mirrored queues
- Some best practices when using quorum queues

Most organisations today are at some stage of their digital journey, which typically requires application teams to navigate the challenges of application and infrastructure modernisation. During your journey of application modernisation, you are likely to face challenges especially when dealing with heritage processes and teams. In this two part webinar series we will explore the processes and practices to help enterprises successfully modernise their legacy applications.

In this talk we will focus on the 3 P's (People, Process and Platforms) of application modernisation. Here, Ananda Bose, Director, Application Platform Architecture, APJ, VMWare Tanzu will share the pragmatic strategies that large enterprises can apply, enabling teams to perform in cohesion with highly automated processes and distributed systems.

To watch part 2 of this two part series, click here: https://www.brighttalk.com/webcast/14891/392508

Should we ever prioritize software development work that doesn’t add user or business value? Developers advocate for planned refactors, fixing flaky tests, and enhancing CI pipelines to reduce development toil. Yet, product managers often struggle to justify this type of work to business stakeholders. Luckily, everyone involved in modern app development wants to move fast and be happy!

In this webinar, developers and product managers will learn how Tech Debt Audits can be used to bridge communication gaps, helping cross-functional teams prioritize work to reduce the tech debt that matters most.

- How to run a Tech Debt Audit and address unhealthy practices
- How to pay down your tech debt using tools such as Spring boot, Spring boot tests, Concourse, and VMware Tanzu
- Tips for effective collaboration between developers and PMs to prioritize what tech debt needs to be addressed

When people think about agile software development it’s often in a context of colocated teams working through problems and building features in an iterative way. This is how digitally native companies work and it’s broadly what all organizations have been marching towards.

But the world has changed and in the wake of Coronavirus, employees and organizations everywhere are scrambling to stay safe and constrain the spread of this novel virus by working remotely. This can be daunting to say the least. How do you maximize the productivity of remote-only software teams? Can teams share knowledge and ramp-up new people efficiently? Can they avoid siloed decision making and ensure all people have a voice regardless if they’re introverted or extroverted?

VMware Pivotal Labs is a recognized leader in agile software development for over 25 years. We have successfully delivered amazing business outcomes using distributed teams for hundreds of customers. Join us on March 26 to hear practical advice, processes, practices, and enabling technologies that we’ve developed for fully remote software development. Learn how to incorporate a few occasional "remotes," maintain teams split across regions and timezones, and even how to adopt an "everyone's remote" approach to your distributed agile teams.

For all the talk of digital transformation, most organizations still struggle to get new code released into production. In fact, according to a Forrester survey of developers, 60% of respondents stated they release applications twice a year or less. How is software going to transform your business if it only changes twice a year?

It turns out that getting software into production frequently benefits business in a number of ways. Developers are more productive. Revenue-generating applications get features to generate more revenue. Security patches are less disruptive and downtime costs decrease.

In a recent study, commissioned by Pivotal (now part of VMware), Forrester Consulting quantified many of these types of improvements in a Total Economic Impact™ Study of Pivotal Platform (now part of VMware Tanzu). In this webinar, you’ll learn about the stringent methodology used by Forrester Consulting to calculate a 142% three year ROI for Pivotal Platform from our guest speaker Sarah Musto of Forrester Consulting. You’ll also hear best practices from Kyle Campos, SVP of SaaS Ops at Smarsh.

Check out the recent study here: https://content.pivotal.io/analyst-reports/the-total-economic-impact-of-the-pivotal-platform-2020

*The Total Economic Impact™ Of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, a December 2019 commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Pivotal.

Streaming applications are all the rage these days because they open up exciting, new use cases. Every streaming application demands a common set of capabilities. The most critical of all is reliability of the events delivery and processing. But what does reliable processing entail? How do you build a streaming pipeline that’s responsive to performance changes in a distributed system? That’s where the reactor back-pressure comes into the picture.

Join Pivotal Platform Architect Madhav Sathe and Pivotal Principal Software Engineer Marcial Rosales for this online class as they walk you through the ingredients of building streaming pipelines. You’ll learn:

● An overview of what Project Reactor is and how it works.
● How Project Reactor makes it possible to build an end-to-end streaming pipeline.
● How to use RabbitMQ’s native reactive support and Project Reactor to build stateful streaming transformations.
● How to demonstrate backpressure across multiple distributed systems in this architecture.
● How this stack is being used to solve real use cases.

We look forward to you joining us.

As an industry, we’ve been reasoning about RabbitMQ's behavior without having the right perspective. Existing tooling has prevented us from understanding what’s happening under the hood and sharing the state with those that really understand how the pieces fit together.

In this online class, you’ll learn how this changes with the new observability tooling in RabbitMQ 3.8. You can finally answer many of the RabbitMQ questions yourself, and share anything that you don’t understand with a RabbitMQ expert.

Join RabbitMQ engineer Gerhard Lazu to learn how:

● To start using the new metrics system in RabbitMQ 3.8
● Developers know when your application is using a RabbitMQ anti-pattern
● Developers who use Quorum Queues can understand the mechanics better
● Operators know when a RabbitMQ deployment is imbalanced
● Erlang experts can unlock deeper RabbitMQ insights
● To share your context when you come across a bug

We look forward to you joining us.

You’re faced with the business imperative to deliver value to your customers faster, with less risk, and at enterprise scale. But where do you start? There are so many approaches and products for implementing continuous delivery (CD) of modern apps.

Join our webinar to learn about three trends that can make your delivery pipelines inherently resilient, accessible, and continuous:

● continuous delivery as a relay race
● turning monitoring into automated action
● developer experience at the heart

We’ll share a demo of a delivery pipeline that includes Concourse CI, Pivotal Build Service, and Spinnaker CD with Pivotal Container Service as the destination. You’ll learn how a loosely coupled pipeline can provide speed with guardrails, enabling you to scale delivery of your modern applications.

This webinar is especially relevant for those who:

● think full software delivery automation is a pipe dream.
● have an app delivery pipeline that’s a brittle monolith to maintain.
● suspect all your delivery problems are solved with Kubernetes.

Speakers:
Olga Kundzich, Pivotal, Senior Product Manager Spinnaker
Tony Vetter, Pivotal, Technical Product Marketing Manager
Patricia Johnson, Pivotal, Product Marketing Manager CI/CD

Earning client trust every day is one of Fiserv’s core values. Its key reflection is the quality that gets delivered to Fiserv’s client. In this webinar, Fiserv’s Clint Myers, CTO Fiserv Bank Solutions, and Navdeep Singh, VP, Infrastructure Engineering, share how the company is modernizing its existing core application portfolio for scale, including how it broke up monolithic applications into microservices, running on Pivotal Platform, with no downtime or impact to the customer experience.

While the journey is ongoing, Clint and Navdeep will provide three (3) ingredients for a successful project, including lessons learned that you can incorporate into your modernization program and how Fiserv Business Technology Services can help. Join Pivotal and Fiserv to learn about application modernization challenges unique to companies in regulated industries, including:

● What’s required to modernize these applications into microservices.
● What the Fiserv team wishes they’d done earlier.
● What was most important to Fiserv’s success.

Fiserv is one of the world’s largest payments and financial technology providers. Prior to the acquisition of First Data, they moved over $75+ trillion annually and have over 25m active bill pay users. With millions of consumers, thousands of financial institutions and hundreds of other organizations rely on Fiserv to move and manage money and information on their behalf every day—trust is everything.

Pivotal Privacy Statement:
https://pivotal.io/privacy-policy

Fiserv Privacy Statement:
https://www.fiserv.com/en/about-fiserv/privacy-policy.html

This webinar:
https://content.pivotal.io/webinars/sep-26-how-a-large-fintech-is-breaking-up-monolithic-applications-into-microservices-webinar

Supporting legacy applications—much less figuring out how to containerize them—is not high on anyone’s list. Everyone has old infrastructure hosting even older apps, and is asked to “get it in a container.” With the introduction of Windows clusters in Kubernetes, we’re given a straightforward way of accomplishing this that results in very little tech debt.

In this hour-long online class, we’ll set the following goals:

● Make no code changes during the move.
● Run the app in a true Windows container.
● Show step-by-step how it can be accomplished.

We look forward to you joining us.

The Accelerate State of DevOps Report is the result of five years of research—and more than 30,000 data points—and aims to understand how software delivery and operational (SDO) performance drives organizational performance. Our data also supports analyst reports that the industry is crossing the chasm: we see almost 3x the proportion of elite performers compared to last year, with low performers shrinking in comparison.

In this webinar, we discuss the key findings in the 2019 report. Join us and learn:

● the best strategies for scaling DevOps;
● how to leverage the cloud to drive superior outcomes and unlock effective change management;
● how to optimize productivity so you can improve work/life balance and reduce burnout; and
● new findings for how to build a great organizational culture.

Speakers:

Dr. Nicole Forsgren does research and strategy at Google Cloud. She is co-author of the Shingo Publication Award-winning book, Accelerate: The Science of Lean Software and DevOps, and is best known as lead investigator on the largest DevOps studies to date. She has been a successful entrepreneur (with an exit to Google), professor, performance engineer, and sysadmin. Her work has been published in several peer-reviewed journals.

Richard Seroter is the VP of Product Marketing at Pivotal, a 12-time Microsoft MVP for cloud, an instructor for developer-centric training company Pluralsight, the lead InfoQ.com editor for cloud computing, and author of multiple books on application integration strategies. As VP of Product Marketing at Pivotal, Richard heads up product, partner, customer, and technical marketing and helps customers see how to transform the way they build software. Richard maintains a regularly updated blog (seroter.wordpress.com) on topics of architecture and solution design and can be found on Twitter as @rseroter.

In-memory caching is not new technology. But it takes on renewed significance with cloud-native, distributed applications. Modern day caching can alleviate the performance and availability challenges associated with your most important modern apps.

In this webinar, we will explore why caching should be a vital part of your distributed systems. You’ll learn how:

● A highly available cache can keep apps online serving data, and protect against data loss, in the event of infrastructure failure.
● An elastic cache like PCC can adjust to the needs of your applications. Elasticity at the data layer is crucial for the elasticity of the entire system.
● A caching layer can reduce the adverse efforts of network latency on system performance.
● Enterprises use PCC alongside Pivotal Platform. We’ll also examine the day-to-day experience of managing the caching service.
● PCC can support caching patterns for Spring and .NET microservices.

Join us to find out how caching can improve the performance of your essential customer-facing systems.

Presenter Bio:
Nikhil Chandrappa is a data engineer at Pivotal. He focuses on helping enterprises to architect data platforms on cloud. He specializes in full stack development with focus centered around Spring Data, caching, and cloud native data pipelines. He is originally from Mysore, India, and has a masters degree in computer engineering from Syracuse University.

Operations practices have historically lagged behind development. Agile and Extreme Programming have become common practice for development teams. In the last decade, the DevOps and SRE movements have brought these concepts to operations, borrowing heavily from Lean principles such as Kanban and Value Stream Mapping. So, how does all of this play out if we’re using Kubernetes?

In this class, Paul Czarkowski, Principal Technologist at Pivotal, will explain how Kubernetes enables a new cloud-native way of operating software. Attend to learn:

● what cloud-native operations are;
● how to build a cloud-native CI/CD stack; and
● how to deploy and upgrade an application from source to production on Kubernetes.

We look forward to you joining us.