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Development Manager

Keynotes

K1 The Art of Change: Influence Skills for Leaders
Dale Emery, DHE
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 8:30am

An organization’s ability to make improvement, whether for greater agility or other goals, involves two components—a technical component and a people component. The technical component is generally logical, linear, and relatively straightforward, and the technical change agents are often skilled at implementing the technology. On the other hand, the people component is never straightforward.

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K2 Know the Way, Show the Way, Go the Way: Scaling Agile Development
Dean Leffingwell, Leffingwell, LLC
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 12:45pm

Tired of the claims that Scrum, XP, and kanban don’t scale beyond a few teams? Overwhelmed by management’s resistance to the organizational changes needed to really follow agile principles? Concerned with the lack of proven practices required to scale agile methods to the next level? Exploring the Scaled Agile Framework™, Dean Leffingwell dispels these claims and answers these questions—and more.

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K3 Magnificence: Culture Hacking, the Common Platform, and the Coming Golden Era
Jim McCarthy, McCarthy Technologies, Inc.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 8:30am

A culture is the set of shared attitudes, values, goals, and practices that both describes and shapes a group. The unique challenges of creating software have demanded totally new types of corporate culture. In response, we have created agile, Scrum, and XP. These represent the birth of culture engineering and, although significant, are very primitive compared to what will follow. Jim McCarthy introduces “culture hacking,” a kind of cultural engineering that focuses on protecting personal freedom, extending openness, and embodying rationality.

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K4 Lean Software Delivery: Synchronizing Cadence with Context
Mik Kersten, Tasktop
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 12:45pm

Daily, we are told that adopting agile, PaaS, DevOps, crowdsourced testing, or any of the myriad of current buzzwords will help us deliver better software faster. However, for the majority of software development organizations, naïve agile transformations that don’t look beyond the needs of developers will fail to produce the promised results.

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Tutorials

MA The Leadership Tutorial: Improving Your Ability to Stand and Deliver
Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman helps you wrestle with real-world leadership issues we all face—influencing without authority, motivating your team, and dealing with conflict. Explore the difference between leadership and management—and why it matters—and get a clear picture of a leader’s responsibilities, including the balance between short- and long-term focus and the need to deliver results while developing organizational capability.

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MB SOLD OUT! Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning.

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ME Twelve Heuristics for Solving Tough Problems Faster and Better
Payson Hall , Catalysis Group, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

As infants, we begin our lives as problem-solving machines, learning to navigate a strange and complex world in which others communicate in ways we don’t understand. Initially, we hone our problem-solving talents. Then many of us find our explorations thwarted and eventually stop using—and then begin losing—our natural problem-solving ability. It doesn’t have to be that way. Psychologists tell us that people can regain lost skills and learn new ones to become better problem solvers. Payson Hall shares techniques and skills that apply to situations in real life.

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MF SOLD OUT! Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

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MG What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.

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MH Tuning and Improving Your Agility
David Hussman, DevJam
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Are you using agile practices but struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others, and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, roadmapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings.

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MI Design Patterns Explained: From Analysis through Implementation
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Alan Shalloway takes you beyond thinking of design patterns as “solutions to a problem in a context.” Patterns are really about handling variations in your problem domain while keeping code from becoming complex and difficult to maintain as the system evolves. Alan begins by describing the classic use of patterns. He shows how design patterns implement good coding practices and then explains key design patterns including Strategy, Bridge, Adapter, Façade, and Abstract Factory.

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MJ Scrum: An Experiential Workshop
Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

Scrum is a popular and proven project management framework for rapidly changing development projects, especially those with significant technology uncertainty or evolving requirements. Since its inception fifteen years ago, Scrum has grown to be the leading agile methodology, boasting nearly 100,000 Certified ScrumMasters. In this highly interactive (no slides) introductory session, Mitch Lacey serves up the tools you need to get started with Scrum.

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MK Agile Model-Driven Development
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

In this interactive session, Scott Ambler explores a vitally important, nitty-gritty, down-in-the-weeds aspect of agile—how to take an agile model-driven development (AMDD) approach to enhance and scale your software delivery capabilities. Correctly applied, AMDD enhances your modeling and documentation efforts, streamlines agile development, and reduces false starts and rework.

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MN SOLD OUT! Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

While first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors.

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TB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that empower teams and organizations to rapidly deploy systems and application updates while maintaining—and even improving—quality. By lowering barriers between development, testing, and operations, DevOps practices can add tremendous business value to software projects and systems. Bob Aiello explains how to prepare for and implement continuous delivery—in both agile and non-agile environments—employing industry standard processes and automated frameworks.

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TC Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams
Bob Galen, RGalen Consulting
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could.

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TE Design for Testability: A Tutorial for Devs and Testers
Peter Zimmerer, Siemens AG
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all. Testability is not free; it must be explicitly designed into the system through adequate design for testability.

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TF Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.

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TG SOLD OUT! User Stories: Across the Seven Product Dimensions
Paul Reed, EBG Consulting
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

User stories are a powerful technique agile teams used to communicate requirements. Yet all too often, the stories are poorly written or even incomprehensible. Some stories are too big and overlap across delivery cycles. Others are too small and don’t deliver sufficient details for developers. Join Paul Reed to learn the Seven Product Dimensions—the 7 D’s—which yield “just right” stories that users and product owners can write and developers can understand. Explore and experience the Seven Dimensions: user, interface, action, data, control, quality, and environment.

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TI Eight Steps to Kanban
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Alan Shalloway shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

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TJ Software Metrics: Taking the Guesswork Out of Software Projects
Ed Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

Why bother with measurement and metrics? If you never use the data you collect, this is a valid question—and the answer is “Don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.” In that case, you’ll manage with opinions, personalities, and guesses—or even worse, misconceptions and misunderstandings. Based on his more than forty years of software and systems development experience, Ed Weller describes reasons for measurement, key measures in both traditional and agile environments, decisions enabled by measurement, and lessons learned from successful—and not so successful—measurement programs.

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TK SOLD OUT! Scaling Agile Up to the Enterprise and Staying Lean
Dean Leffingwell, Leffingwell, LLC
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

Scaling agile from the team to the program to the portfolio level of the enterprise requires the inclusion of additional roles—product manager and system architect; activities—release planning and program retrospectives; and artifacts—portfolio and program visions and backlogs. Practitioners must constantly increase scale and scope, while keeping both the system and the process lean and agile.

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TL Essential Test-Driven Development
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

Test-driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

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TM Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.

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TP Influence Strategies for Software Professionals
Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way.

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TQ SOLD OUT! Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate.

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MO Understanding and Managing Change
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it fails. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. It may be that your great idea didn't mesh well with your organization’s culture or a host of other reasons. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work well within your organization.

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MP Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 1:00pm

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Bob Hartman shares his experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together.

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Concurrent Sessions

BW2 Building Customer Feedback Loops: Learn Quicker, Design Smarter
Sherif Mansour, Atlassian
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Listening to your customers is critical to developing better software. Their feedback enables you to stay in sync with customer expectations, to make changes before those changes become costly, and to pivot if necessary. Sharif shares five practical tips for building, capturing, and scaling feedback loops, providing real examples of what his team has learned.

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BW3 Implementing Cloud-Based DevOps for Distributed Agile Projects
Thomas Stiehm, Coveros, Inc.
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Cloud-based development, delivery, and deployment environments are the future of IT operations. Thomas Stiehm shares the hard-learned lessons of setting up and running cloud-based solutions that implement DevOps for geographically distributed agile projects. Thomas describes how to best leverage the cloud to enable your teams to use it effectively. Learn why cloud software delivery is different from traditional software delivery environments, and how to optimize your platform and team to get the most out of the cloud.

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BW5 Turbocharge Your Team’s Productivity: Increase Your Ability to Deliver
Rob Maher, Rob Maher Consulting
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

Many factors impact a team’s productivity. Some are well understood—collocation, size, common purpose. Others are less well known including social capital—the value of social networking. Rob Maher describes techniques that have been successfully used within organizations to enhance team productivity. Even geographically dispersed teams can benefit from techniques that build social capital to enhance productivity and reduce risk.

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BW6 Find Requirements Defects to Build Better Software
John Terzakis, Intel
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

Requirements defects are often the source of the majority of all software defects. Discovering and correcting a defect during testing is typically twenty-five times more expensive than correcting it during the requirements definition phase. Identifying and removing defects early in the software development lifecycle provides many benefits including reduced rework costs, less wasted effort, and greater team productivity. This translates into software projects that deliver the committed functionality on schedule, within budget, and with higher levels of customer satisfaction.

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BW9 Designing Your Team and Organization for Innovation
Jim Elvidge, BigVisible Solutions
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

If innovation is not part of your team or organizational DNA, your company risks falling behind its competitors, losing market share, and demoralizing your best talent. And yet, you cannot create an innovative organization by simply saying “Be innovative” or adding it to the company values statement. Innovation requires a solid understanding of what motivates people and a deep examination of organizational structure, culture, and leadership styles—such as top-down project control or directive leadership—that may be barriers to innovation.

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BW10 Enhancing Developer Productivity with Code Forensics
Anthony Voellm, Google, Inc.
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

Imagine an engineering system that could evaluate developer performance, recognize rushed check-ins, and use that data to speed up development. “Congratulations Jane. You know this code well. No check-in test gate for you.”  Anthony Voellm shares how behavioral analysis and developer assessments can be applied to improve productivity.

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BW11 Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com
Seng Lin Shee, Ancestry.com
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

Continuous delivery is a practice that enables teams to release code at any time, based on changing business requirements. However, continuous delivery requires a substantial investment in infrastructure and possibly fundamental architectural changes to support the process. Anti-patterns that would render a continuous delivery pipeline a burden rather than a beneficial tool for continuous delivery must be avoided.

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BW12 Hybrid Security Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Inside-Out and Outside-In
Arthur Hicken, Parasoft
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

With the rising adoption of the cloud and the mobile revolution, software security is more important and complex than ever. The efforts of developers and testers are frequently disconnected, wasting time and reducing effectiveness. Arthur Hicken describes how hybrid security analysis bridges the gap between static analysis and penetration testing by detecting security vulnerabilities with unprecedented accuracy—and few false positives. Testers receive an instant assessment of where security attacks actually penetrated the application.

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BT5 Gamification to Solve Real-World Challenges
Ram Srinivasan, inRhythm
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

What can we learn from Angry Birds, which has been downloaded more than one billion times? What makes games engaging and fun? What is the secret that motivates players to mastery, even when they fail 80 percent of the time? What if we could reverse-engineer the principles behind a well-designed game and graft them to a real-life business challenge? Based on psychology, design, strategy, and technology, gamification is an emerging and exciting concept. Ram Srinivasan describes the principles behind player engagement, social connectivity, and self-motivation to mastery.

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AW4 Agile Testing: It’s a Team Sport
Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan, LeanDog
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

Who is responsible for testing on agile teams? The answer is “Everybody”—and yet this is rarely the case. Often the testers write their test cases in isolation and execute them after development is finished. Developers write their code without talking to the testers except to understand how to reproduce the latest discovered defect. Product owners elaborate requirements in isolation and then hand them off to the team only to check back at the end of the sprint. Business analysts spend their time working on documents that have questionable usefulness.

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AW5 Agile Redefines Global Economics: What Recent Data Reveals
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

Kent Beck, inventor of eXtreme Programming, defined agile success as delivering more useful functionality with fewer defects. Against that definition, early research revealed mixed success. Many organizations did not know how to measure and thus could not have “fact-based” conversations about productivity and cost. Some teams achieved faster delivery, but quality did not improve. Others found both. What factors made the difference? New benchmark analysis by QSM Associates reveals the latest productivity, time-to-market, quality, and cost patterns.

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AW6 How to Jumpstart Enterprise Agile Adoption
Alan Padula, Intuit
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

Want to get a jumpstart on agile adoption in your organization? Begin by leveraging a roadmap that Intuit has used for rolling out enterprise agile to its business units. While there is no single way to bring enterprise agile into your organization, Alan Padula describes a model that has worked repeatedly. The important first step is to create a vision of what full agile adoption looks like. Once a rich vision is created describing what people will be doing and how they will be doing it, create a roadmap, a time-sequenced plan with milestones.

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AW7 Behavior-Driven Design in Practice
Nir Szilagyi, eBay, Inc.
Janarthanan Eindhal, eBay, Inc.
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

One of software development’s  greatest challenges is combining business needs with technical abilities to build products that customers want. Many development methodologies attempt to achieve this, but Nir Szilagyi and Janarthanan Eindhal think that few connect the dots as well as behavior-driven development (BDD), an agile development methodology derived from test-driven development (TDD) and other agile practices. Unlike TDD, which focuses on code design, BDD focuses on the customer.

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AW9 Building Hyperproductive Agile Teams: Leveraging What Science Knows
Michael DePaoli, cPrime
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

The key impediments that prevent many organizations from ever realizing the promise of agile and lean aren’t rooted in processes or tools. The impediments stem from the organization’s leaders. Sharing an interdisciplinary overview of the most compelling science and research in the aspects of team performance, Michael DePaoli shows that it is largely ignored.

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AW10 The Evolution of Agile: Dealing with the Growing Pains
Jonathan Thorpe, Serena Software
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

Agile development has evolved into a lifecycle that not only affects the IT department but the overall business as well. Forward-thinking enterprises recognize this and benefit from the software efficiency that agile development delivers. Through real-world examples, Jonathan Thorpe explains how enterprises can improve their agile success. Discover how successful global enterprises are applying the principles of agile development beyond just software development to a level where it affects entire business groups.

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AW11 Agile and CMMI: Yes, They Can Work Together
Ed Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

There is a common misconception that agile and CMMI cannot work together. CMMI is viewed as a documentation heavy, slow, process-driven model—the polar opposite of agile principles. The cost of documentation for an appraisal is viewed as another drawback. Join Ed Weller to see why a large organization chose to use the practices in the CMMI to complement agile, and a formal appraisal to improve and evaluate their performance.

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BT2 Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach
Woody Zuill, Hunter Industries
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

Teamwork is an important component of agile software development. We all agree that teamwork must be nurtured and grown in our organizations. But what does it mean to work as a team in the world of software development? How can we encourage our “teams” to truly work “as a team?” Woody Zuill and his team at Hunter Industries have found tremendous benefits following the whole team approach they call Mob Programming. Everyone works together at the same time, in the same space, on the same problem, and at the computer—every day, eight hours a day! How can this possibly work?

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BT3 You Said What? Becoming Aware of the Things We Say
Steven “Doc” List, Santeon Group
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

Most of us take language for granted. We use words without thinking about how they may affect others and then are surprised at the reaction we get. Learn the importance of language in building and maintaining high performing agile teams. Become more aware of the words you choose and the impact of those words on your listeners. Steven “Doc” List presents a series of exercises in a game show format. Participants attempt to identify loaded words in seemingly simple statements and questions. Some of the exercises are written, others are acted out in role play.

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BT4 Non-Pathological Software Metrics
Stephen Frein, Comcast
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

As semi-scientific software professionals, we like the idea of measuring our work. In some cases, our bosses like the idea much more than we do. Yet, meaningful software development metrics are notoriously challenging to define, and many people have given up trying because metrics often incentivize pathological behaviors. Since you get what you measure, most metrics lead development teams to optimize numeric proxies for success rather than the goals these proxies were intended to represent.

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BT7 Quality Debt: Is Your Project Going Bankrupt?
Jordan Setters, Planit Software Testing, Ltd.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

Every decision made during the course of a project can affect the quality of the final product.  Compromises in functionality, design, or implementation invariably come with a cost, which must be paid. Without an adequate measure of the debt a product is carrying, no strategy to repay it can be formulated, and the project may ultimately become bankrupt, affecting your business case, your users’ productivity, and your organization’s bottom line. Taking from the concept of technical debt, Jordan Setters gives it a quality twist.

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BT9 Unlocking Innovation in Your Organization
Derek Neighbors, Integrum Technologies
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

According to a recent study, more than 60 percent of CEOs cite the need to discover innovative ways of managing their organization’s structure, finances, people, and strategies as their top priority. In order to compete in the 21st century, organizations must rethink how they function—they must adapt or die. Derek Neighbors shows you how to meld chaos, creativity, and collaboration within your organization to unlock innovation. Learn how to balance fun and excellence to achieve results while redefining your organization's culture.

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BT10 A UX Strategy for Persona Research
Nellie LeMonier, Perforce Software, Inc.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Research into your users’ personas can provide deep insights into their needs and validate your product design. This research doesn’t have to take months; it can often be done in two weeks, during sprint 0. Unfortunately, many companies using agile methods don’t invest in personas and a UX strategy because they think they have no time or believe they already know enough about their users. We typically spend months to years developing a software product. Don’t we owe it to our users and ourselves to devote some time to researching and understanding them?

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AT1 The Five Facets of an Agile Organization
George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

Is agile—or lean, kanban, lean startup, etc.—starting to follow the path of other management buzzwords in your organization? Is it losing steam, now resembling only a minor change from the old ways? Have you compromised to "make agile work in our organization?” As organizations introduce new paradigms, they often run into roadblocks of inertia. When these are not overcome, the initial excitement and the potential benefits drain away. Treating changes such as agile as merely a software delivery approach typically means disregarding four other key facets of the agile organization.

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AT2 Enterprise Lean-Agile: It’s More Than Scrum
Jeff Marr, Cisco
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

Introducing agile development into a large enterprise is like creating a bubble of sanity in the midst of bedlam. Unless the sanity spreads, the effort is ultimately frustrating, frustrated—and fails. Jeff Marr describes the web of the enterprise ecosystem and presents strategies to build a common agile and lean vocabulary and set of practices within your organization.

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AT3 Agile Development in a Regulated Environment
Chris Ampenberger, PHT Corporation
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

There is no doubt that agile is an accepted development methodology. However, if you work in a regulated industry like health care where you have to comply with its standard operating procedures, heaps of paperwork, and frequent audits, don’t these conflict with agile’s core tenets? Chris Ampenberger describes his operating environment and the applicable regulations that define the constraints for the software development process he can use. He shares how they overcame the incongruity between agile and regulatory requirements.

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AT6 Agile Requirements Is Not an Oxymoron
Paul Reed, EBG Consulting
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

Misconceptions abound about the way requirements fit—or don’t fit—into agile projects. Is “agile requirements” an oxymoron—two contradictory terms joined together? How is it possible for requirements to be agile? Do agile projects even need requirements? In reality, requirements are the basis for planning, analyzing, developing, and delivering agile projects. Paul Reed shares the value of requirements analysis on agile projects, the ways requirements form the basis for agile planning, and explains how effective agile teams collaborate to develop requirements.

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AT7 Building a Team Backlog: The Power of Retrospectives
Kanchan Khera, McKinsey & Company
Bhuwan Lodha, McKinsey & Company
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

“Inspect and adapt” is one of the basic tenets of continuous improvement, and agility in general. Holding retrospectives is one of the core processes that allows teams to look back and reflect on their progress. However, over time, teams may focus only on the product work and lose interest in their own improvement as a team.

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AT8 The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow
Brad Swanson, agile42
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

The Kanban Pizza Game is a hands-on simulation designed to teach the core elements of a kanban system—visualize the workflow, limit your work-in-process (WIP), manage flow, make process policies explicit, and improve collaboratively.

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AT9 Lean Management: Lessons from the Field
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Agile development methods such as Scrum, XP, and kanban have achieved notable success in improving speed to value, reducing waste, and raising customer and team satisfaction. Successful practitioners worldwide have cut development times, improved product quality, and reduced development cost. Underlying these agile methods are timeless lean principles—focus on customer value, respect for people, and continuous improvement. Sanjiv Augustine describes how agile teams are implementing lean management.

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AT10 The Business Analyst’s Critical Role in Agile Projects
Mark Layton, Platinum Edge, Inc.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Are you a business analyst, wondering how you fit into agile projects? Are you a ScrumMaster who wants to work with business analysts for a stronger project team? Are you a product owner who needs to supercharge your product backlog? Mark Layton introduces you to the critical role of the business analyst on agile projects. Get the essential information business analysts need to know to be successful members of an agile project team. Learn how business analysts can use their product knowledge and requirements translation skills to support product owners and stakeholders.

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AT11 The Next Frontier of Agile: Journey to Continuous Delivery
Nicole Sweeney, Intuit
Martin Franklin, Intuit
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

Organizations are under pressure to release faster with higher quality, while business and technology environments are increasingly becoming more and more complex. How can you deploy great products quickly in such a challenging environment? Intuit, maker of TurboTax, is solving this problem with continuous delivery practices. Continuous delivery is the next stage of agile, allowing organizations to achieve greater velocity, repeatability, and sustainability through a continuous build, test, and deploy process.

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BT6 Trends in Big Data Testing
Stefano Rizzo, Polarion Software
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

The Big Data has three unique characteristics—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Today’s big data applications are growing dramatically. We must process data ever more quickly so we can respond to events as they happen, and that data is arriving from an ever wider array of channels, sensors, and formats. Stefano Rizzo explains that the main challenges of testing big data by little agile teams, beside the apparent contradiction, are related to testing individual components vs. testing the big product, traceability, and organizing massive amounts of test data vs.

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Pre-Conference Training

Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-day)
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Sun, 06/02/2013 - 8:30am

Fundamentals of Agile Certification will present a roadmap for how to get started with agile along with practical advice. It will introduce you to agile software development concepts and teach you how to make them work. You will learn what agile is all about, why agile works, and how to effectively plan and develop software using agile principles. A running case study allows you to apply the techniques you are learning as you go through the course.

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