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See Sessions From:
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Tuesday
TB
Deliver Projects On Time, Every Time
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
How do you help your team deliver quality results on time while striking a balance between letting the team self-organize and classic management command and control? Based on his software project experiences, case studies, and the PMI’s PMBOK® Guide, Ken Whitaker shares practical techniques to help project managers learn innovative scheduling techniques, make the right customer-focused decisions, reduce project risk, work more effectively with product owners and management, and transition their teams to become more agile. Ken pays special attention to projects that have not gone well and techniques to get them back on track. Participate in exercises to understand how you and your team really spend your days, estimate delivery dates more accurately, understand why multi-tasking is bad, and improve your communications skills. Ken illustrates key project management imperatives with case studies on why software projects fail, the impact of postponing quality validation, the impact of disruptions, and how to get a team to work in the “flow.”
 PMI® members looking to keep up with PMP credential learning requirements earn 6 PDUs. PMP® and PMBOK® are registered trademarks of the Project Management Institute.
Learn more about
Ken Whitaker
TC
Consultants’ Skills You Can Use Today
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
What do great consultants bring to an engagement—other than experience and expertise—that distinguishes them from their mediocre peers? A skilled consultant must be able to hit the ground running, quickly grasp the situation, listen attentively, communicate effectively, gather and analyze data, present suggestions in a business context, and manage expectations. These are skills that effective consultants bring to every engagement. Payson Hall teaches you these consultant skills to make you more effective on the job, whether on projects, problem solving, or beginning a new assignment. Specifically, learn and apply techniques to better define problems and projects, learn an effective communication model that improves both listening and speaking/writing, gain data gathering and analysis tools to help model problems and potential solutions, explore the basics of meeting management to help avoid wasting time and improve the effectiveness of meetings that are necessary, and examine the advantages of seeking frequent feedback on progress.
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Payson Hall
TD
Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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, the larger organization can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors. Alan Shalloway explores the lean principles of mapping value streams, creating visibility, managing work levels, and more. Together, these lean principles and practices can help your organization dramatically reduce the amount of waste in the work that teams perform. Alan also introduces Kanban, an agile method that is a strong implementation of lean principles. Alan closes with agile adoption case studies that illustrate how lean thinking can extend Scrum practices.
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Alan Shalloway
TE
Agile Test Automation
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration—typically, one to four weeks—but possibly as often as daily. This goal can't be achieved without comprehensive automated tests, a place where many teams struggle. The challenge of automating functional regression tests even frightens many experienced and competent testers. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By combining collaborative teamwork with appropriate tools and design approaches, you not only can automate regression tests, but the team also can use test automation tools to enhance exploratory testing. Janet Gregory describes how to implement automation early in the project to guide development by providing real-time feedback to the team. She explores techniques for determining which tests to automate and which should remain manual. Janet demonstrates with examples how to design automated tests for maximum effectiveness and ease of maintenance. By the end of this session, you’ll understand how to fit automation activities within each iteration so testing “keeps up” with coding.
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Janet Gregory
TF
Usability Testing in a Nutshell
Julie Gardiner, Sage UK
Because systems are now more complex and competition is extreme, testing for usability is crucial for ensuring our products not only stand out from the crowd but even exceed our customer’s expectations. As testers, we often encounter requirements such as “The system must be user-friendly.” What does this mean? And, more importantly, how do we test against this vague notion? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents usability testing techniques to help evaluate system efficiency, effectiveness, and user satisfaction. Take back a toolkit full of usability testing techniques—heuristic evaluation, cognitive walkthroughs, focus groups, personas, contextual task analysis, usability labs, and satisfaction surveys—for your next testing project. Learn how to define usability goals and how to get your development team to take usability issues seriously. If you want to improve your confidence and skills in usability testing, this session is for you.
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Julie Gardiner
TG
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams
Bob Galen, iContact
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of the agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, often these teams 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. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the ”thinking models” of mature agile teams—so that you can model them within your own teams. Along the way, you’ll examine patterns for large-scale emergent architecture, relentless refactoring, quality on all fronts, pervasive product owners, lean work queues, providing total transparency, saying “No”, and many more. Bob also explores why there is still the need for active and vocal leadership in defending, motivating, and holding agile teams accountable.
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Bob Galen
TH
Experience an Iteration: The Joys of Agile Done Right
Darshan Desai, Microsoft
Ravi Shanker, Microsoft
Do you want to make your agile development process work with less friction and achieve more? Are you wondering how an iteration—a sprint in Scrum terms—should really work? If so, fasten your seat belt and hang on tight for a fast-paced ride into agile and how to do it right. In this dynamic tutorial, Darshan Desai and Ravi Shanker, from Microsoft’s Visual Studio team, take you through a single iteration in their agile development lifecycle—from capturing requirements to final retrospective. They describe and explore all of the activities performed within an agile team and its interactions with other stakeholders. You’ll experience identifying and prioritizing requirements, breaking them down into stories, optimizing engineering processes for team collaboration, and getting continuous feedback throughout the cycle. Based on their experiences, Darshan and Ravi share some common pitfalls they’ve seen and overcome to help ease your way down the agile path. This session will be highly interactive—and, yes, it will be a lot of fun!
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Darshan Desai,
Ravi Shanker
TI
A Visual Management System for Enterprise Agile Projects
Arlen Bankston, LitheSpeed
Bob Payne, LitheSpeed
Many companies struggle when scaling agile methods to large, multi-team projects and programs. Enterprise-level agile adoption is especially challenging in environments that are not fully agile and where delivery cadences often vary wildly. A visual management system is a valuable tool to help teams and management overcome these challenges. Arlen Bankston and Bob Payne explore creating a Portfolio Alignment Wall, a simple and effective agile-ready coordination system based on proven implementations at widely differing companies. Learn how to track progress, visualize dependencies, and increase collaboration on large programs and portfolios through a powerful system combining elements of the Scrum of Scrums, visual management theory, value stream visualization, and a simple set of rules to balance simplicity and sufficiency. Participate in a simulation to craft a physical coordination board and leave with a draft plan for implementing a Portfolio Alignment Wall at your organization. Arlen and Bob describe and demonstrate both physical and virtual boards to address the needs of both collocated and distributed teams.
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Arlen Bankston,
Bob Payne
TJ
Understanding and Managing Change
Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
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. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you analyze the type of change process needed in your organization, a set of questions you can ask to better understand your executives’ goals, techniques for overcoming resistance to change, and the formal roles necessary to enable successful change. These tools—together with an awareness of your organization’s core culture—allow you to identify the changes you can successfully implement. Cultural awareness helps you align your initiatives with the objectives of the organization, make your team successful, and demonstrate the value of the change, which is increasingly important in these challenging economic times.
Delegates are encouraged to bring a laptop to this session.
Learn more about
Jennifer Bonine
TR
Leadership for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
For years, managers of every ilk have attended courses on various aspects of management. Although the word leadership has recently become the new buzzword of choice, many of today’s courses, books, and articles are repeats of the same basic management theory we’ve known for years. Not so with this tutorial session! Retired Marine Corps Colonel Rick Craig engages participants with such provocative questions as: Are leaders made or born? What leadership traits do the best test managers exhibit? How can you develop a personal leadership style for your test team and organization? Who is responsible for the morale and motivation of test team members? Join this session to be challenged on how you can become a better—even great—leader within your organization’s structure and corporate culture. Learn to apply leadership principles to testing, explore the impact and importance of influence leaders, and learn how to sell testing within your organization. Leave with new skills and a renewed enthusiasm for leading your test team.
Learn more about
Rick Craig
TK
Disciplined Agile Delivery: The Foundation for Scaling Agile
Scott Ambler, IBM Rational
As they’ve adopted agile strategies, many organizations have tailored a combination of team-level Scrum and Extreme Programming (XP) practices. However, large enterprise organizations have learned that more is needed for them to succeed with agile. They need to rethink and redesign their delivery lifecycle from start to finish. Scott Ambler introduces Disciplined Agile Delivery (DAD), a hybrid agile process framework which addresses the full agile delivery lifecycle in a governed and enterprise-aware manner. Scott shares how to weave governance needs into agile development—from project initiation through the release of applications and systems into production. Explore the leadership and requirements management strategies of Scrum, the technical practices of XP, and strategies from Agile Modeling, lean, and Unified Process as applied in large-scale projects. Find out how to mitigate risk early in the agile lifecycle as you begin to deploy agile practices within your enterprise. Throughout this session, Scott will present findings from his ongoing industry survey into agile enterprise practices.
Learn more about
Scott Ambler
TL
Collaborating with Non-Collaborators
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
We understand the vital importance of collaboration among team members. However, how can we deal with non-collaborators—people who won’t work with us? Although we may not be able to change them, we may be able to work with them or around them. Pollyanna Pixton describes how to identify non-collaborators—a leader, team member, team, or even a process. She then examines the system within which the non-collaborators work: their success factors, motivations, measurement and reward systems, fears, hot buttons, and hidden agendas. Pollyanna teaches you how to assess the risks in dealing with non-collaborators. Using a trust and ownership model, she maps the traits of non-collaborators and considers tools and techniques to cope with each trait. Finally, if all else fails, learn the options for working around non-collaborators. Learn to deal with non-collaborators by building a strategy that empowers you and your team to get the job done no matter what.
Learn more about
Pollyanna Pixton
TM
The TDD/Legacy Code Dilemma: A Hands-on Workshop
Rob Myers, The Agile Institute
Although we'd like to be reaping the rewards of TDD on all our projects, there is a large collection of challenging legacy code to maintain as well. How to proceed given the conundrum of needing good test coverage to safely refactor while at the same time needing to refactor the code to make it more testable? Although not a panacea, the solution to this dilemma lies in simple, pragmatic techniques for teasing apart the big code hairball into more manageable strands. Rob Myers shows how to start by getting critical areas protected with automated tests, which allows further refactoring of the code's design—and the tests—until eventually the code base resembles a great test-driven work product. Rob introduces guidelines for deciding which code to first wrestle into submission, offers a simple three-question preparatory exercise, and demonstrates precise tactical refactoring and testing tricks. Join in this hands-on session to experience these techniques first-hand on a small, but challenging, blob of untested code (your choice of C#, C++, Java, or VB.Net).
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. For C++, the unit-testing framework must already be installed and working. We will not have time during the tutorial to configure a project for you.
Learn more about
Rob Myers
TN
Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
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. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.
Learn more about
David Hussman
TO
Design Patterns Explained: From Analysis through Implementation
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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. He then explains key design patterns including Strategy, Bridge, Adapter, Façade, and Abstract Factory. In small group exercises, learn how to use patterns to create robust architectures that can readily adapt as new requirements arise. Lessons from these patterns are used to illustrate how to do domain analysis based on abstracting out commonalities in a problem domain and identifying particular variations that must be implemented. Leave with a working understanding of what design patterns are and a better way to build models of your application domains.
Learn more about
Alan Shalloway
TP
A Test Leader’s Guide to Agile
Bob Galen, iContact
Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized—but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective. Join experienced agile test leader and long-time coach Bob Galen to explore the central leadership challenges associated with agile adoption: how to transform your team’s skills toward agile practices, how to hire agile testers, how to create a “whole-team” view toward quality by focusing on executable requirements, and how to create powerful doneness criteria. Beyond the tactical leadership issues, Bob explores strategies for becoming a partner in agile adoption pilot projects, making changes to test automation strategies, and how to reinvent your traditional planning and metrics for more agile-centric approaches that engage stakeholders.
Learn more about
Bob Galen
TQ
Managing Requirements Risk: Concepts and Tactics
David Gelperin, ClearSpecs Enterprises
We focus so much effort on creating good requirements that we often forget something even more important—the risk that our developers don’t understand the requirements and develop the wrong solution. David Gelperin believes that you should objectively assess the developers’ understanding of requirements, their knowledge of the application domain—bank reporting rules, flight control, etc.—and their ability to actually create feasible solutions that satisfy the requirements. Join David and explore how creating acceptance tests early in the development process can be used to verify your developers’ understanding of the system, thus reducing the risk of significant rework or, worse, project failure. Through classroom exercises you’ll practice using risk mitigation techniques and learn ways to help developers build the right system the first time. All participants will receive a take-away resource CD they can use back at the office.
Windows laptop recommended. Bring a Windows-compatible laptop to access resource papers and explore a risk-focused requirements manager (LiteRM).
Learn more about
David Gelperin
TS
Essential Test Management and Planning
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
The key to successful testing is effective and timely planning. Rick Craig introduces proven test planning methods and techniques, including the Master Test Plan and level-specific test plans for acceptance, system, integration, and unit testing. Rick explains how to customize an IEEE-829-style test plan and test summary report to fit your organization’s needs. Learn how to manage test activities, estimate test efforts, and achieve buy-in. Discover a practical risk analysis technique to prioritize your testing and become more effective with limited resources. Rick offers test measurement and reporting recommendations for monitoring the testing process. Discover new methods and develop renewed energy for taking your organization’s test management to the next level.
Learn more about
Rick Craig
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