Accelerate Shifting Left with Value Stream Optimization

Keeping your testing teams on the same page isn't easy. Global QA Leaders have testing teams spread across the globe: US, EMEA, AP, and India. Timezones, tools, and cultures can impose challenges to aligning your teams. In our on-demand world, interconnecting disparate tools is critical to achieving operational success for software quality assurance and testing. In this Friday webinar, we will talk about the challenges facing QA and Testing Managers across the globe and provide real-world suggestions on how to bridge the tool, timezone, and culture gaps. We will demonstrate the integration of Azure DevOps and Micro Focus ALM/QC.

Lance Knight and Andrew Fuqua Fix Santa’s Broken Value Stream
And digital transformation of the “Naughty and Nice List”

Ever wondered how Santa delivers all those toys overnight to all the children in the world? An elf told us that St Nicholas has a very lean-agile operation going on up at the North Pole, but is that true?

Every factory needs a value stream map and what better one to look at this holiday season than Santa’s workshop. ConnectALL’s Andrew Fuqua and Lance Knight are going to take a trip to the North Pole and sneak into Santa’s workshop to look at the value stream and fix it before Santa arrives. We’ll help Santa accelerate his digital transformation using value stream optimization so that he can deliver all the toys (and coal!) on time.

We’ll look at the current state of Santa’s workshop value stream — every gift starts at the North Pole toy supply depot and makes its way through receiving and the rest of the value stream before ending up in homes around the world. How do you optimize this further?

Join us and find out!

Give Testers Earlier Visibility into Requirements (Featuring TestRail and Micro Focus ALM Octane)

TestRail is another best-of-breed test management tool that many organizations have adopted. While your Product teams are brainstorming and documenting high-level requirements in other tools like Micro Focus ALM Octane, why not give your QA Leads early visibility into what's coming down the pike? In this Friday TechTalk, we will demonstrate how easy it is to setup a synchronization between TestRail and Micro Focus ALM Octane.

Give Testers Early Visibility into Requirements — Featuring Tricentis Tosca and Jama Software

Wouldn't it be great if your Quality Assurance team knew what was coming down the pike? Why not give them early visibility into high-level requirements? In this Friday webinar, we will demonstrate how easy it is to setup a synchronization between Jama Software and Tricentis Tosca. Your QA team doesn't need to be in the dark. As high-level requirements are documented, they can get a sense of what is possibly coming down the pike. When the requirement is 'hardened' and approved, the status will automatically change and your QA team can start working on their test plans.

Larry Maccherone and ConnectALL’s Lance Knight talk DevSecOps, Agile Practices, Metrics, Value Stream Management and more

Join a fun-filled conversation between two thought leaders about DevSecOps, Value Stream Management, agile and metrics. No topic is off the table!

While Lance Knight believes that ‘the value stream is human’ and without the right metrics there is no real value in software development and delivery, Larry Maccherone’s secret superpower is data and analytics and he believes that ‘behavior transformation within the development organization would be impossible with the lack of trust between devs and security.’

Do not miss this chance!

Automating workflows in a software delivery pipeline is imminent to accelerating your DevOps practice. In this webinar, we will show you how to easily automate workflows by integrating a production deployment tool like Kubernetes. We'll show you how you can create a Kubernetes container via a Jira request using ConnectALL’s Universal Adapter.

Is Slack a central part of your organization's communication strategy? If so, why not extend its capabilities to alert people of various events? With ConnectALL, you can setup event-based triggers into Slack channels. For example, nothing is worse than a failed build. Sure, you probably have the necessary resources monitoring Jenkins builds and perhaps even an automated email notification -- but when everyone is hammering away on their keyboard in Slack, why not immediately alert a channel with a failure notification? In this Friday webinar, we will show you how easy this hack is to setup with ConnectALL.

Customers will often suggest product enhancements within a complaint. What do we mean by this? Well, when a customer perceives a deficiency in your product -- they'll log a ticket. In that ticket, they'll gripe about XYZ and then suggest an improvement to your product. More often than not, your Operations Team is providing a quick fix to the problem.

Maybe it's a refund to appease the customer, or possibly a voucher as a "make good" for the complaint. What your Operations Team may not be doing is properly communicating the suggested enhancements to your product management team.

In this Friday webinar, we will explore best practices of training your Customer Service team to properly tag ZenDesk tickets for escalation into Product Management tools like Jama Software. With comment synchronization, your Customer Service team can also provide insights to further explain the "voice of the customer" to your product management team.

The gap between Product and Development is real. Your Product Owners are in constant contact with the customer community, while your AppDev team isn't always invited to the table for the important conversations. In fact, your AppDev team is often fully realiant on the thoroughness of the documented User Stories, especially if they are offshore. Of course, conversations occur over GoToMeeting, Zoom, or Slack -- but the reality of the situation is that the voice of your customer needs to be fully documented by your Product Owners and properly communciated to your AppDev team. When Product and Development are using different tools to manage their work activities, disconnects can occur. In this Friday TechTalk, we will showcase how your organization can use ConnectALL to bridge the gap between Jama Software and Atlassian Jira Software.

There are a few definitions of Value Stream Management (VSM) floating around out there. Most seem pretty good, but they are necessarily very broad and maybe vague. That’s because value stream management is a very broad concept. Given the hype around these three words, and how it’s often shortened to two words, there is a lot of confusion. Maybe it will help if we discuss what value stream management isn’t.

In this webinar, we will learn:

- What VSM isn’t: Misconceptions about VSM that lead to critical mistakes — spending time, resources, and money
- Phrases and language found on the internet that leads to these misconceptions
- To get a better understanding of what VSM really is and what VSM helps organizations/businesses achieve
- The difference between Value Stream Management Platforms (VSMPs) and Value Stream Delivery Platforms (VSDPs) and how they play an important role in DevOps and Lean and Agile Planning and Scaling
- The need for a VSM solution or a company that provides such services and can guide an organization through the efforts

Imagine a world where Project Managers have line-of-sight visibility into the code changes for User Stories, Tasks, and Bugs. Most PM-types avoid SCM tools at all costs, but by rolling the data up into ConnectALL's Value Stream Insights solution - you can provide management with a deeper look at development activity across work items. In this Friday TechTalk, ConnectALL's own CJ Henry will showcase how you can further empower your Program Management Office (PMO) with ConnectALL's Insights.

Watch Lance Knight, COO, at the DevOps Experience 2020 as he talks about the importance of Value Stream Management in DevOps and Agile practice, and how it all ties together for a software delivery value stream to be healthy, non-siloed, secure, and tied to business objectives, ultimately driving your digital transformation goals — and he does it by discussing how you make a PB&J sandwich.

To find out more about ConnectALL VSM Solution and how we can help you, schedule a demo or contact us.

Source Code Management: BitBucket with Jira software and ServiceNow - Flowing Pull and Commit information to ServiceNow Work Notes

Many organizations today are adopting Atlassian Jira with BitBucket for Source Code Management (SCM). Yet some companies see the value in BitBucket for SCM, but are deciding to use other best-of-breed tools like ServiceNow. In this Friday TechTalk, ConnectALL's own Doug Bass, will showcase how your organization can use ConnectALL to provide ServiceNow end users with visibility into pull requests and code changes.

Source Code Management: Gaining Visibility to Code Commits between Azure DevOps and Rally Software

Does your organization use Azure DevOps for Source Code Management? Perhaps another team in your organization is using Rally Software for their product development efforts. Wouldn't it be nice to have visibility into the code changes within Rally for each user story or bug? With ConnectALL, you can. Join us on this Friday to see how it works -- LIVE. ConnectALL's own, Johnathan McGowan, will demonstrate how your end users in Rally will have full visibility into the code changes occuring from Azure DevOps. We will show you the plumbing of how this all works too.

As a managed services organization handling break-fixes and software enhancements for your customers, you are often left with a choice: adopt their tools, or ask them to adopt your tools. But what if their was another option? In this Friday TechTalk, ConnectALL's own, Doug Bass, will demonstrate how managed services organizations can leverage ConnectALL's Value Stream Integration platform to streamline and optimize communication with their customer base. Your customers can continue using their tools of choice, while your managed services company works in your own. Let ConnectALL handle everything else in between.

Learn how VSM enables leaders to manage at scale and manage exceptions more efficiently.

Manage the exceptions and let the rest take care of itself. Sounds easy until everyone starts working remotely and suddenly your management style that relied on physical line of site, gut instinct, and the weekly status round up is no longer cutting it. 

In this webinar, guest speaker Christopher Condo, Forrester Principal Analyst, and ConnectAll COO Lance Knight will discuss:
- Value Stream Management solutions
- How they help management get back to managing the exceptions with capabilities that capture data. From planning to production, enabling managers to "see" the exceptions amongst all the effort.

Every Scrum practitioner monitors the velocity of their team. By measuring the average work completed by a team in a given sprint, a historical record is created, which can then be used for future sprint planning. At ConnectALL, we can help teams measure velocity across a variety of tools. We can help a team measure velocity by either story points or hours worked. Either way, a Scrum Master can build a historical record of sprints to better predict the actual capacity of their team in the future. Inevitably, every Scrum Master is faced with the question of: "Can your team deliver this feature in 2 weeks?" With accurate velocity charts, spanning the breadth of tools in use across an organization, that question can be answered with more confidence. Little's Law demonstrated that increased Work In Process (WIP) results in higher cycle times.

Lead Time was borrowed from Lean Manufacturing principles. In software development, Lead Time is the time elapsed between the identification of a software requirement and delivery to the customer. When calculating lead time for work items, such as user stories, flowing between multiple Agile Planning tools - it is important to focus on the overall time elapsed between the status changes of the focus requirement. In this short discussion and demo, we will focus our attention on how lead time was calculated for a particular change requested from our Product Owner to an existing application. I will show you the progression of that User Story through multiple tools and how ConnectALL recognizes the time elapsed from initiation to fulfillment. Many practitioners make a clear distinction between Lead Time vs. Cycle Time as it relates to Software Development. Lead Time is often defined & measured from a "user's point of view" whereas the latter is often defined from a "developer's point of view". ConnectALL calculates lead time from the moment a request is submitted (from the customer) to when it is fulfilled. Our indicator to track the elapsed time is the status and timestamps of the work items flowing through an organization's value stream. On the other hand, cycle time is measured from the moment a work item (e.g., a user story) is started (e.g., in progress). In this discussion and demonstration, we will show you how ConnectALL detects and measures both metrics across multiple Agile Planning tools.