Understanding the dynamics of how teams work and how to make them work better is one of the most difficult problems in software delivery. Adopting agile methods compounds this problem by breaking up groups who used to sit together and forming new cross-functional teams, adding stand-ups, and initiating retrospectives and other new social interactions. Agile also discourages process and technology focused experts in favor of "generalizing specialists." Dan North describes patterns, models, and techniques for creating and growing successful teams—and organizations—that will deliver great software. Starting with how people of different skill levels operate within teams, Dan guides you through the potential pitfalls and success strategies of agile practices such as stand-ups and pair rotation. He makes a case for less popular activities like code reviews and argues that having local experts and even specialist teams might not be all bad. Find out if the patterns present in your teams are optimized for delivering great software.
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Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule, by choosing from track sessions from both Better Software Conference East and Agile Development Conference East.
Although many organizations are successfully using agile practices to develop higher quality, customer-satisfying solutions faster and cheaper, an increasing number of companies are using the same practices to develop the wrong solutions—faster and with a higher level of quality, too. Why is that? Even though most people know that assumptions are the mother of all things that go badly wrong, many “agile” adopting organizations still invest time, money, and resources developing “solutions” based solely on assumptions, opinions, and guesses. Typically, in instances where opinions conflict, the person with the “biggest stick” wins—and when things go wrong, the blame game begins. Drawing on agile principles, lean practices, and personal experience, Ade Shokoya shares a scientifically proven approach for validating assumptions and minimizing the risks inherent in software development projects. Leave knowing where to get the empirical evidence that will enable you to confidently support or challenge—in a non-confrontational way, of course—the key assumptions made on your projects.
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Jim Trentadue describes the first year his organization used the cloud for its non-production needs: development, testing, training, and production support. Jim begins by describing the components of a cloud environment and how it differs from a traditional physical server structure. To prove the cloud concept, he used a risk-based model for determining which servers would be migrated. The result was a win for the organization from a time-to-market and cost savings perspective. Jim shares his do’s and don’ts for moving to the cloud. Do’s include ensure you identify all costs associated with the new cloud infrastructure, implement a risk-based approach to cloud migration, define a governance model, and define Service Level Agreements for your cloud vendor. Jim warns against creating an open-ended environment without a charge-back model to allocate costs and failing to continuously monitor the overall environment. Take back practical and proven recommendations and practices to make your move to the cloud a breeze.
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Developers and testers are, by their very nature, curious creatures. But when facing deadlines, they often become fixated on solving today's problem and miss the bigger picture. Over time and under pressure, they lose their motivation to learn new information and acquire new skills. Without a plan encouraging learning can be costly—and can backfire. A professional development plan should incorporate practical strategies and techniques for the entire team and managers. Fortunately many proven techniques exist for professional development: code katas, code dojos, workplace user groups, agile learning, and evaluation, as well as time management methodologies such as the prioritization matrix and Getting Things Done (GTD). Kick-start professional development by learning some of these opportunities and techniques, and see which can have the best return and long-term maintainability for your team’s developers, testers, and managers.
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Scrum has become very popular in agile development shops, but most organizations that adopt Scrum run into challenges when they expand beyond a few teams. Ken Paugh believes that you can overcome the challenging patterns of scaling Scrum by focusing on lean-flow (removing delays between the steps of a development organization’s workflow). Ken begins by discussing how cross-functional teams are a manifestation of the lean mantra of removing delays. He discusses ways to manage projects spanning multiple teams, including creating teams that don’t meet the definition of classic Scrum. Ken shows how hybrid methods of Scrum teams working within the context of lean-flow can result in much better coordination of multiple teams than the Scrum-of-Scrums approach. He concludes with a kanban/Scrum hybrid approach for particularly difficult situations. Join Ken to learn how you can employ lean-flow techniques to improve your Scrum teams’ flow almost immediately.
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According to studies, 64 percent of features in systems are rarely—or never—used. How does this happen? Today, the work of eliciting the customers' true needs, which often remains elusive, can be enhanced using data-driven requirements techniques. Brandon Carlson describes why traditional requirements analysis is so difficult and presents a set of seven data collection approaches and analysis techniques you can employ on your projects right away. Learn how to instrument existing applications and develop new requirements based on operational profiles of the current system. Learn to use A/B testing—a technique for trying out and analyzing alternative implementations—on your current system to determine which new features will deliver the most business value. With these tools at hand, you can help users and business stakeholders decide the best approaches and new features to meet their real needs. Now is the time to take the guesswork out of requirements and get the facts.
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With so many technologies branded as “cloud” products, it can be difficult to distinguish good technology from good marketing. The resulting confusion complicates the work of software development teams who are trying not only to architect software effectively but also trying to accelerate building, testing, and delivering software. To cut through this confusion, Bill Wilder defines key cloud terms, compares the different types of clouds, and drills into concrete examples of specific cloud services. Introducing several software architecture concepts and patterns, Bill illustrates how to position applications to run reliably, at high scale (if needed), and with maximum cost efficiency on modern cloud platforms. Specific examples are drawn from the Windows Azure and Amazon cloud platforms, though the concepts are generally applicable. Leave with an understanding of relevant cloud concepts, a better idea of how moving to the “cloud” can impact application architecture, and some practical ideas for exploiting the cloud to improve software development team productivity.
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The past few years have seen a rapid increase in business efficiency through Web-based applications. Unfortunately, a dramatic increase in the number of web application vulnerabilities has followed. Insecure web applications can be disastrous for mission critical businesses and users' sensitive data. More than 70 percent of security vulnerabilities are due to flaws in the application rather than firewall breaches. Bennie Paul explains how security testing has become an indispensable part of the SDLC for businesses operating online today. OWASP (Open Web Application Security Project) provides open source tools, code, and materials to develop, test, and maintain application security. Monitoring the “OWASP Top 10” web application security flaws is highly recommended as part of an organization’s testing methodology. Vulnerabilities identified are compared against the organization’s security objectives and regulations, and categorized accordingly for remediation. Benny guides you through the OWASP vulnerabilities, technique, framework, and preventive measures that you can adopt for building better software.
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Have you ever watched a medical drama with scenes featuring doctors making split second, life-or-death decisions? As software professional, there may be less at stake when it comes to your decisions, yet you often need to act under time pressure, limited information, and conditions of uncertainty. How do you decide whether a particular course of action will help or harm your project? Are you rational: Do you identify, weigh and compare your options? Or are your decisions more intuitive: Do you size up the situation quickly and simply “know” how to act? Are you aware that—as a human being—your decisions are often susceptible to systematic biases? Through examples drawn from both the medical profession and his work as a software tester, Iain explores alternative decision-making models, the role of intuition, the cultivation of expertise, and debiasing decisions. Join Iain for a mind-blowing dive into how people make choices despite looming uncertainty and potentially dire consequences of a mistake.
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Agile methods have proven their ability to improve project success rates. However, when agile methods are applied to complex projects, we need to further explore the area of effective customer involvement. According to the agile philosophy, the users must be part of the development team. But, Stefano Rizzo asks: What if there are thousands of users with good ideas dispersed around the globe and around the clock? Can a Product Owner really represent all their interests? At Polarion, Stefano says they have used social media to successfully couple agile methods with more traditional requirements elicitation approaches. After hosting some user conferences, they created a community of users, project managers, and developers. Soliciting and nurturing their discussions regarding the product has created a lot of fuel for requirements definition and refinement process. Key benefits include the involvement of more stakeholders, a better company reputation, and the ability to harvest unusual requirements and unsolicited feedback that are helpful for the release strategy and product usability.
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Agile discussions often focus on stories, backlogs, development, and testing. At Experian they also brought product strategy management and strategy into the agile fold to ensure their teams were in lock-step with customer requirements and priorities. That resulted in the delivery of Experian’s first big data project—without adding a single new person or “big data expert.” How did they do it? Product guru Jeff Hassemer shares his (not-so) kumbaya moments of how he learned about the principles of agile within big data projects—in action. Jeff describes practical tools specifically focused on customer ROI valuation and developing the science behind embedding customer knowledge and prioritization. In addition, he shares the lessons he learned along the way as he implemented his first Hadoop/HBase project. Learn the key aspects of the process and practical tools he created and how you, too, can deploy big data within your organization.
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As agile practices become mainstream, compelling patterns are being revealed about defect rates, time-to-market, and effort/staffing. Industry data from QSM Associates reveals that many companies grapple with collocation, pair programming, offshoring, and combining agile with waterfall methods. Some of the best teams find significant schedule and quality implications that are literally redefining the economics of software; others are not. What factors make a meaningful difference? With the latest industry analysis, Michael Mah discusses productivity, time-to-market, quality, and cost patterns as agile communities mature. Serving as a comparison framework is the QSM SLIM industry database, with more than 12,000 completed projects—waterfall, agile, offshore, onshore—collected worldwide. Michael Mah shares findings that can help accelerate your success. Join Michael to find out how to assess your own patterns and apply the findings to your development practices.
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To be most effective when managing a large program, the component projects should limit their batch size, create networks of people, and report status in a way that works for the entire program. For those of you who are not quite ready for agile, Johanna Rothman explains how to use staged delivery, release trains, or RUP as lean(er) alternatives to waterfall and agile. Johanna explains how to encourage project teams to create communities of practice using their social networks—start with the existing rumor mill and build on it more formally. If you have managed programs in the past, you know you can never believe the Gantt chart, but we persist in using them. Instead, consider a product backlog burnup chart or a cumulative flow diagram. Join Johanna to discover how to use alternative measures of the program status including storyboards and alternative metrics to monitor your program's state.
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When the World Trade Center collapsed, the telephone switching systems in the basement correctly diagnosed which lines were still working and continued to connect calls for several days using backup power. One factor contributing to this remarkable product reliability was the AT&T/Bell Labs practice of early systems architecture reviews. Michael Dedolph shares an architecture review method based on the Bell Labs Systems Architecture Review Board (SARB) process and discusses how that method was institutionalized and managed. The review method is a team process that uses a problem statement developed by the project as the basis for the review. The method is "low tech" and portable. SARB-style architecture reviews can be easily and flexibly tailored to your context. The flexibility of the method makes it suitable for many kinds of systems and problem domains. Take away an appreciation for the method and see if it might be useful in your organization.
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Managers want teams to be empowered but often don’t want to give up their decision-making authority. Teams want to be empowered but may not know how to act on the power they already have. Executives want to drive engagement and action but see only half-hearted compliance. These are examples of power dynamics at play. Esther Derby explains that words won’t matter until people acknowledge power. Once people acknowledge the fact of power, it’s possible to look at how it is affecting people and actions. When we see power, we can see how power can make it harder—not easier—to achieve desired results. Esther explores different definitions of power, where power comes from, and how people respond to power. Learn the two definitions of power and how each affects leadership; the seven sources of power; how the use of power impacts people’s core concerns; and how to boost creativity and productivity by addressing sources of power.
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A major concern when developing new software features is that another part of the code will be affected in unexpected ways. With a typical development processes, testers often do not run a full set of product regression tests until late in the release when it is much more costly to fix and retest the product. Continuous automated regression testing to the rescue! Brenda Kise describes the team, project, and organization value and benefits of continuously performing automated regression tests throughout the development process. Brenda explains how this practice saves time and money in the long-run because the team and stakeholders gain an ongoing understanding of the quality of the code base every time a new build becomes available. Brenda describes the different approaches for introducing the practices of continuous automated regression testing into your organization. Find out how to create your immediate feedback mechanism to highlight the new code that creates regression defects.
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How do you know if you have too much process, too little, or just the right amount? If you ignore process completely, unpredictability and chaos can follow. If you define the process to the nth degree and follow it religiously, the work grinds to a halt. Janet Gregory shares her experiences about how to find the tastiest balance of process and creativity for your projects and organization. She proposes that a formally defined process is sometimes necessary, but that it should be the exception. Explore with Janet the many variables—team size, complexity, criticality, organization structure, and culture—you must assess to find just the right balance. Learn how to make existing processes better by adding visibility to the process, getting team members’ input, and adapting documentation you need. Learn how to transform complicated processes into simpler ones—such as reporting a simple “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”—and go home with new tools to sprinkle on just enough process.
More InformationThe question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one. Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require later rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort. How can we know what the right balance is? Ken Pugh shows how to use advice taken from Design Patterns, coupled with the attitude of not building what you don’t need from agile. The trick is in observing potential variation, how it may affect you in the future, and then how to isolate these risks in a simple manner. Ken describes the essence of emergent design – that is, start with a simple design and let it evolve as the requirements evolve. He also demonstrates how to refactor to achieve better designs and how this is different from refactoring bad code.
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Unfortunately, many people focus solely on their jobs and day-to-day task delivery rather than building their career. This often results in careers that happen by accident, rather than by design. How can you build a personal brand that you can refer to when making conscious choices about your next career move? How can you build your dream career while delivering the greatest value to your organization? Jennifer Bonine describes the tools she uses in leadership sessions to help people begin the process of defining their own personal brand. These tools include laying out a personal impact statement, creating your personal tag line, asking for what you want, developing a solid process for making career directional decisions, and communicating those decisions to your leaders. Jennifer shares techniques that can be used by any individual who is looking to map the next career move—and then to create an action plan to get there.
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How do you properly compare the quality of two or more software deliverables without an accurate normalizing metric? The answer: You can’t. Example: If project A has one-hundred defects and project B has fifty defects, do you automatically assume project B is a higher quality deliverable? Although the number of defects is often the end user’s quality perception, defect counts may not be the right measure. An effective normalizing metric allows you to accurately measure and compare quality levels across software deliverables. David Herron explains how to quickly and easily incorporate this important normalizing metric into your development process to start measuring and improving the quality of your software deliverables. You’ll have a new tool for managing end user expectations regarding software quality in relation to the value the software delivers. Even more, you can use this normalizing metric to predict software quality outcomes or delivery dates and to establish service levels for software quality.
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Learning organizations seem like a great idea to just about everyone. But how do you actually create them? In many organizations, attempting to promote learning can seem daunting at best and impossible at worst—especially when you don't feel particularly empowered to do so. Matt Barcomb focuses on what you can do from multiple perspectives. He first discusses what a learning organization is and why the concept is important for the future of many organizations. Next, Matt shares approaches and considerations for growing learning environments, including common organizational pitfalls. Then, he reviews various ideas he has seen or been a part of putting into practice in the real world. Learn techniques that cover areas from product development to creating organizational programs for both individuals and teams. Finally, work together in small groups to discover tangible learning ideas that you can quickly and practically put into practice when you return to work.
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What is the best way to learn a new programming language or improve coding skills with the language you already use? Cory Foy has developed a new method for learning—and teaching—new programming languages and improving programmer expertise on their current languages. His approach focuses on preparing the learner to listen to what the code is saying and, thereby, changing how we approach the language. To learn a natural language, we would not start by studying prepositions, nouns, and verbs. Instead we would apply real-world scenarios: ‘How do I say, “Where's the kitchen” in German?’ In the same way, we need a directed approach to study and absorb code examples to gain insight into what the programming language wants our code to say. With Cory’s “listening” approaches, you’ll help your code to come alive by naturally resolving the forces that are present in the problems you are working to solve.
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Organizations invest high levels of effort setting up elaborate employee performance tracking systems. In fact, these costly and onerous processes may even drive the wrong behaviors if inappropriate metrics are selected or employees learn to game the system. However, a simpler and more effective approach to personnel development is right in front of us. Bob Payne describes the Lean A3 problem solving and communication tool that can be used to improve processes and create a learning culture. This same tool can be used as a lightweight approach to develop individuals by generating actionable learning plans. Using the Personal A3 approach, employees evaluate their strengths, identify skills gaps, and plan for personal growth. Managers assist as mentors as they work with employees on their Personal A3, offering suggestions and helping align their growth plans with organizational goals. Practice creating your own Personal A3.
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Companies often go to great lengths to collect metrics. However, even the most rigorously collected data tends to be ignored, despite the findings and potential for improving practices. Today, one metric that cannot be ignored is customer satisfaction. Customers are more than willing to share their thoughts in a manner that can impact your bottom line. Social media gives consumers a stronger voice than ever, and damage to your brand is only one tweet away. The question is: Are you listening to your customers? Paul Fratellone helps you break down current process metrics so you can build them back up with business and customer value at the forefront. With feedback on how well you are attaining your objectives, you can create a powerful action plan for change that will receive the attention it deserves. If you are serious about improving the value of your projects to the business, join this session and let the right data drive your improvement actions.
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