Craeg Strong
Agile Coach, CTO of Ariel Partners
New York City, New York, United States
Craeg Strong is the CTO of Ariel Partners, a small IT consulting company based in Times Square. He is currently teaching public classes in Kanban and Human Centered Design and helping organizations transform themselves by connecting strategy with execution, handling dependencies, and improving quality. He has 25 years of experience in information technology, starting at Project Athena during his undergraduate studies at MIT. Mr. Strong led a successful transformation of a major Federal Criminal justice program from a traditional waterfall lifecycle and manual intensive processes to lighter weight agile processes, full DevOps automation, and cloud.
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Seatbelts and Cruise Control: Project Management for Mere Mortals
Organizations large and small use application lifecycle management tools like Jira, Azure DevOps, VersionOne, Rational Team Concert, and others to manage their Agile products and programs
Every day in large organizations, ALM data is used to make forecasts and key decisions about budgeting, staffing, and risk management. Organizations increasingly rely on ALM tools to generate alerts to proactively warn about variances, risks, and shortfalls. Unfortunately, due to late, inaccurate, and incomplete data entry, ALM tools often end up emitting a large volume of false positives, while the real risks remain hidden.
We would like to propose a new approach that automates governance for ALM tools, leveraging the same proven approach used by linting tools like FxCop, stylecop, eslint, pylint and pmd. Rather than expecting perfection, let's provide some guides and seatbelts to enable mere mortals to use alm tools successfully!
Which certification should I get? Making Sense of the Agile Continuum.
So... you want to deepen your Agile knowledge, maybe pick up a certification or two. OK, will it be Kanban or Scrum? Go to the Nexus or @Scale up to Flight Levels? Do we need to make our Agile delivery more disciplined? Or model our Kanban maturity? Become a certified ICAgile coach, or get a SAFe SPC or LeSS Practitioner? What about training from the back of the room, liberating structures or Open Space technology?
What are all of these certifications anyway? How do they fit together? Which ones should I learn, and in which order?
As an Agile coach and trainer working with large and small efforts in government and commercial contexts, I have had the opportunity to experience a number of these Agile methods in practice. I have certifications from Scrum Alliance, Professional Scrum, Kanban, LeSS, SAFe, and ICAgile, and have taken trainings in half a dozen others. In this talk I share with you how all of these standard’s bodies fit together and what the different certifications focus on. As an aspiring coach, this should help you understand and better plan your certification journey. As a businessperson wanting to see their organization improve, this should help you understand which certifications to recommend for internal staff members in their journey to become enterprise coaches.
Tips and Tricks for configuring Jira to support your agile transformation
A poorly tuned Jira is a daily struggle for your team. Join this session to learn tips and tricks for making the Jira experience amazing for teams of any variety. We will show you how to turn all the knobs to 11 and create a state of the art Jira experience.
Serverless Security: Putting the Sec in DevSecOps for an AWS Lambda based system
What does it mean to implement zero-trust and DevSecOps principles in a serverless environment? This is our story of hardening an AWS application based on serverless architecture. It all began with an idea for a brand-new plugin for the Atlassian Jira Agile tool. Our plugin uses an innovative design based on GoLang, AWS Athena, Lambdas, and DynamoDB, and the Atlassian AtlasKit SDK for ReactJS. Serverless applications have many nice features that help make them secure. Lambdas get their credentials injected at runtime, eliminating the need to store keys or credentials. Our SSO solution improves security still further, by creating temporary credentials for every session, eliminating static keys and credentials. Given this excellent foundation, we thought our MVP was ready for production! Alas, how mistaken we were...
In order to meet Atlassian’s strict cybersecurity guidelines, we implemented security tools including GitHub’s dependabot, AWS credential management services, AWS app firewall, gosec, ZAP tester, and Nessus. We will discuss lessons learned and what was unique to the serverless environment. We will also cover privilege audits, data, and disaster recovery.
Using serverless architecture confers many benefits, and by reducing the attack surface, they can be inherently more secure than alternative architectures. Nevertheless, there are important steps that must be taken to further improve security. This talk will shed light on how to get where we need to be
How going Serverless enabled us to support an Agile transformation in the middle of a pandemic
This case study describes how we leveraged serverless technology and the AWS serverless application model (SAM) to support the needs of virtual training classes for a major US Federal agency. Our firm was excited to be selected as the main training partner to help a major US Federal government agency roll out Agile and DevOps processes across an organization comprising more than 1500 people. And then the pandemic hit—and what was to have been a series of in-person classes turned 100% virtual! We created a set of fully populated docker images containing all of the test data, plugins, and scenarios required for the student exercises. For our initial implementation, we simply pre-loaded our docker images into elastic beanstalk and then replicated them as many times as needed to provide the necessary number of instances for a given class. While this worked out fine at first, we found a number of shortcomings as we scaled up to more students and more classes. Eventually we came up with a much easier solution using serverless technology: we stood up a single page application that could kickoff tasks using AWS step functions to run docker images in elastic container service, all running under AWS Fargate. This application is a perfect fit for serverless technology and describing our evolution to serverless and SAM may help you gain insights into how these technologies may be beneficial in your situation.
Discovery Kanban, Human-Centered Design and Kanban Flight Levels: Innovation at Scale
Innovation at scale doesn’t happen by accident. And it isn’t magic, either. How can we encourage innovation and at all levels, ensuring that insights and findings are incorporated into organizational strategy so that we can react and adjust quickly — enabling true business agility? Discovery Kanban and Human Centered Design provide the keys to understanding our customers and managing R&D efforts to ensure we build the right things. In turn, Kanban flight levels provides a rich and robust framework to align these activities across the organization—connecting organizational strategy (at flight level three) down to the efforts of individual teams of knowledge workers (at flight level one).
In this session we will explore how the combination of Discovery Kanban, HCD, and Kanban Flight Levels give us a vocabulary and a rich set of tools to visualize and manage customer-centered innovation efforts at scale. We will start out by reviewing Kanban boards that are used by individual teams to manage their work—at flight level one. We will see how each team’s discovery or delivery efforts are beautifully visualized by Kanban so that they can be integrated and managed effectively. We will then proceed up to flight level two and see how Kanban boards at this level help coordinate multiple inter-dependent discovery and delivery teams. Finally, we will see how a flight level three board captures organizational strategy, tying strategic objectives to both current and future initiatives—that are in turn tracked on flight level one and two boards.
Kanban provides the alternative path to agility: a humane, evolutionary approach that works both within and outside of IT. The combination of HCD, Discovery Kanban, and Kanban flight levels provides a powerful, effective and low-overhead method for achieving true business agility.
2022 All Day DevOps Sessionize Event
2021 All Day DevOps Sessionize Event
miniVAte Virginia Spring 2021 Sessionize Event
Craeg Strong
Agile Coach, CTO of Ariel Partners
New York City, New York, United States
Links
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