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See Sessions From:
Monday
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Tuesday
MA
Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases
Tim Brown, ThoughtWorks
Businesses need to deliver new features as frequently as possible to users in order to capitalize on new business opportunities and create a competitive advantage. However, they also need to ensure that releases are stable and well tested. Tim Brown discusses how to deliver features rapidly and reliably through an automated build, deploy, test, and release pattern called the deployment pipeline. Start with the value proposition and principles of continuous delivery. Then take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. Spend the second half of the day discussing the continuous delivery ecosystem, including managing components, data, infrastructure, and organizational transformation.
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Tim Brown
MB
Product Discovery with User Story Mapping
Jeff Patton, Comakers, Inc.
Exactly how much work should you do up front in an agile project? How long should it take? Who should be involved? On agile projects, these are difficult and often-unanswered questions for product owners and those responsible for developing the requirements. Jeff Patton gives a simple recipe for the fast-paced and collaborative discovery phase—often-called sprint zero—that precedes the first delivery sprint. Practice creating simple personas that guide construction of a story map to describe your users’ experience with your product. As a team, identify minimal viable releases driven by market outcomes. Learn a practice for quickly sketching user interfaces. Get tips on sizing the higher-level stories expected in an incremental release plan. Leave with the essential workflow and practices you’ll need to plan your next product discovery phase.
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Jeff Patton
MC
Agile Benchmarking and Release Estimation: Building Your Own Metrics Database
Michael Mah, QSM Associates
How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices to 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 create measurements of productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action in retrospectives and release estimation and planning. Using hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
To take full advantage of this session, participants need to bring a PC-based laptop computer with Admin rights to install software for metrics capture and productivity calculations.
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Michael Mah
MD
What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
Ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? 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. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”
Delegates are encouraged to bring a laptop to this session.
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Jennifer Bonine
ME
Brewing Up Exploratory Testing in an Agile World
Matt Barcomb, LeanDog, Inc.
Lanette Creamer, Spark Quality, LLC
Wondered how quality considerations beyond the story cards should be tested? Ever get a feeling there needs to be more to agile testing than your automation? Tried exploratory testing to bridge the gaps and struggled with how to do it in an agile context? Then you need to brew up a refreshing, aromatic blend of exploratory testing and agile! Lanette Creamer and Matt Barcomb share their experiences on how agile teams can employ exploratory testing at and beyond the story level. Discover ways to visualize and share exploratory test results with the team and stakeholders. Then, practice developing an exploratory charter and translating it into adaptive test ideas. Lanette and Matt share ways to integrate exploratory testing techniques in an iterative and incremental way, dynamically syncing with changes in the product. Take back ways to stir in proven exploration techniques that get the whole team working together to set priorities for quality initiatives.
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Matt Barcomb,
Lanette Creamer
MF
Project Management Dashboards: Clear, Concise, Actionable
Julie Gardiner, Sage UK
All project managers and teams need to gather data about product quality and project status, synthesize that data into actionable information, and report to key stakeholders. When composed of too much detail and raw data, these reports can appear confusing and contradictory. Join Julie Gardiner as she challenges your current project reports and explores ways to replace them with a dashboard of graphs, charts, and other clear and concise visual displays. Julie helps you determine the data you need from the project team, when you need it, and how to most easily obtain it. Delve into the details of graph correlation, significant numbers for analysis, and predictive techniques that help stakeholders make informed decisions. Julie demonstrates and provides participants with utilities and spreadsheets you can adapt into custom project dashboards. Take back these powerful dashboard tools for communicating the many dimensions of product quality, cost, and effort to your information-hungry stakeholders.
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Julie Gardiner
MG
Tuning and Improving Your Agility
David Hussman, DevJam
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, road mapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings. David divides the journey to deliver value into four essential areas: growing community and vision, planning releases and iterative delivery, delivering value, and continuing to improve and learn. For each area, David shares tools for evaluating the value you are receiving relative to the ceremony you are using. If your stand up lacks value or energy, learn new ideas for truly getting value instead of merely meeting and standing; standing is the easiest part.
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David Hussman
MH
Designing Development Process Transformations with Kanban Thinking
Karl Scotland, Rally Software Development
Large-scale software and systems development involves a complex mix of people, teams, technologies, skills, architectures, and organizational structures that must all interact for projects to reach their goals. However, many organizations struggle to scale up agile approaches for their various programs, products, and services. Karl Scotland introduces a process model for designing a contextually appropriate Kanban system for complex and large-scale development. The model is based on the central theme of systems thinking to achieve optimal flow, deliver high value, and enhance business capabilities. Karl shows you how to design a custom Kanban system by studying the current development process, reaching an initial system understanding, sharing that understanding, putting limits in place, sensing how the system is performing, and continually learning from the system to guide improvements. Rather than providing a cookbook solution, Karl describes a framework for your organization to establish and evolve unique and relevant solutions that will enable a successful development process transformation.
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Karl Scotland
MI
Software Endgames: Learn to Finish What You Start
Bob Galen, iContact
Nothing feels worse than when your team works their hearts out on a project only to have it fail—at the end of the project—to meet the customer’s needs and quality targets. We typically put so much focus on the beginning of a project that we fail to realize how important ending well can be. Bob Galen shares tools and techniques he’s used to successfully deliver on the promises of his projects. But there’s no magic involved. Bob explores how to plan an iterative model for testing in your endgame—create dynamic release criteria; connect the release criteria to your requirements and to the reality of the project; manage change control in agile and non-agile environments; handle defects; winnow down change via several code freeze models; and finally, define core metrics for guiding your project toward release. Bob wraps-up the session with a set of powerful patterns that help you engage your teams within the endgame scenario.
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Bob Galen
MJ
Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Free. Is anything free these days? Based on Pollyanna Pixton’s experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, she 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 to shares ways 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. Third is empowering teams to make decisions by helping them understand and internalize the project and product’s purpose and value. Number four—you can only fix processes, not people. Invest your energy toward the correct target. Idea five is to match people’s roles to their passions. Her sixth free tip is that integrity matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.
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Pollyanna Pixton
MK
Test Management: Being Relevant and Making a Difference
Julie Gardiner, Sage UK
As the manager of testing, do you sometimes feel you’re a lone voice for getting sufficient test resources on projects? Julie Gardiner provides a framework of "quick-wins" for test managers and team leaders who need to show the value of good testing on their projects. First, Julie shares examples of clear and concise testing policy statements—agreed to and sanctioned by senior management—which provide a foundation for testing goals and objectives. Then, Julie explores seven powerful monitoring and predicting techniques that enable you to provide timely, relevant information so that stakeholders can make the best decisions. Learn about three objective measures that demonstrate the concrete value of testing—even though testing does not produce a deliverable product. Take away a set of spreadsheets, sample documents, and utilities to support your activities as managers of test. Develop a new appreciation for the relevance of testing today, and the difference it can make on your development projects.
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Julie Gardiner
ML
Agile Project Design: Building Strong Backlogs
David Hussman, DevJam
Lasting agility includes meaningful project design. David Hussman shares techniques he uses to fill product backlogs with the right stuff. He explains story mapping, pragmatic personas, and sketching in ways that smoke out user needs, the source of real product value. David shows how to find the people with the right skills and get them aligned through collaborative chartering. From there, he moves on to pragmatic personas as tools that launch rich discussions about your target market and their needs. Using chartering and personas, David teaches story mapping as a tool to visualize the user experience and to discover real needs and delivery options. He explains each practice as part of an example product and then helps you try them on your product. David explores additional practices including architectural spikes, and concludes by showing how story maps improve planning and delivery for processes like Scrum or Kanban.
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David Hussman
MM
Understanding Scrum: An Experiential Workshop
Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.
Scrum is a popular and proven project management framework for rapidly changing development projects, especially those with significant technology uncertainty or evolving requirements. In the fifteen years since its inception, Scrum has grown to be the leading agile methodology, boasting nearly 100,000 Certified ScrumMasters. In this introductory session, Mitch Lacey serves up the tools you need to get started with Scrum. He leads you through a series of interactive discussions and hands-on exercises designed to reinforce the key tenets of Scrum. Learn about product and sprint backlogs, the sprint planning meeting, activities that occur during sprints, the sprint review, conducting a sprint retrospective, measuring and monitoring progress, and scaling Scrum to work with large and distributed teams. Mitch also describes the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, the product owner, and each member of the Scrum team. This experiential workshop session gets you started on the path to success.
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Mitch Lacey
MN
Essential Test-driven Development
Rob Myers, The Agile Institute
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 unit is complete and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates the basic and essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring code, and using mock/fake objects in development. During this hands-on session, you’ll use exercises to practice the techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of test-driven development.
Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and be familiar with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Delegates should bring a laptop installed with their favorite programming language and IDE—and come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java and NUnit for any .NET language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install (and verify) your chosen xUnit framework prior to the tutorial.
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Rob Myers
MO
Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—And What to Do about Them
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
Every large software project is unique with each one facing its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns—succumbing to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—make things worse. Payson Hall reviews a dozen patterns he has observed over and over again on troubled projects during his thirty-year career: trouble with subcontractors, challenges with project sponsors, friction within the team, perils of interfacing with adjacent systems, issues with data cleansing and conversion, and more. Payson shares the tools he uses to help identify the symptoms of common risks, reduce the likelihood of risks occurring, facilitate early detection of problems, and establish a foundation for helpful responses when problems arise. This session is designed for project managers, team leaders, project sponsors, and anyone responsible for building or rolling out large enterprise systems.
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Payson Hall
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