Skip to main content

Concurrent Sessions

Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule, or choose to follow one of our track schedules.

Concurrent Sessions
AW1 Leading the Creation of an Agile Culture
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Even today, to the detriment of agile success, most organizational cultures remain delivery date-driven—resulting in delivery teams that are not focused on creating value for the customer. So how can we redirect stakeholders, the business, and the project team to concentrate on delivering the greatest value rather than simply meeting dates? Pollyanna Pixton describes the tools she has used in collaboration sessions to help participants begin the process of adopting customer-centric agile methods. These tools include laying out an end-to-end customer journey, forming reusable decision filters to help prioritize backlogs, converting features into actionable user stories, and developing a solid process for making group decisions and communicating those decisions. Pollyanna shares questions that product owners and managers can use to define the problem while making sure they don't solve the problem. After all, that is the responsibility of the delivery team.

More Information
Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton.
AW2 Governing Agile Teams: Disciplined Strategies to Increase Agile Effectiveness
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Many organizations have successfully adopted agile on a subset of their projects, while, at the same time, struggled to do so across entire departments. A common challenge is the need to overhaul the IT governance strategy so that it will work with agile teams. This is a serious issue for governance bodies with little or no practical agile experience, particularly when experience shows that traditional governance strategies increase the risk of failure on agile projects. Scott Ambler introduces The Disciplined Agile Delivery framework for managing and monitoring enterprise agile teams. This framework goes beyond offering an IT governance strategy to provide advanced strategies such as development intelligence and the goal-question-metric measurement approach. Learn the do’s and don’ts of governing agile teams, how governance fits in and enhances the agile project lifecycle, how to measure agile teams, and most importantly, why teams should demand good governance.

More Information
Learn more about Scott Ambler.
AW3 Seeking the Agile Path through Database Design
Jonathan Wiggs, Netmotion Wireless, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Being first to market or meeting rapidly changing customer demands compels development teams to build systems while requirements are still being discovered. Developing a relational database design ahead of its requirements can paint you into a corner—with a product that suffers from legacy-like limitations. Jonathan Wiggs shares ideas to solve this problem in an agile way that provides both support for the present and flexibility for the unknown future. When a database design is trying to meet too many requirements, you can tie its architecture to product concepts and get answers to questions such as one database or many? Learn to balance design flexibility with operational requirements including understanding the role of disk storage and physical implementation across various technologies from the desktop to the cloud. Jonathan covers specifics including the proper use of minor entity tables, denormalization, and elastic scaling mechanisms. Join Jonathan to see how your data architecture can lead innovation rather than drag behind as an obstacle to success.

More Information
Learn more about Jonathan Wiggs.
AW4 Agile Testing: It’s a Team Sport
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. Join Cheezy Morgan as he paints a different picture. With the help of volunteers from the audience performing skits, Cheezy demonstrates practices that not only foster collaboration among all team members but also dramatically improve quality. These practices help teams achieve a better flow resulting in a more streamlined development effort. This new picture is a picture of teamwork and quality assurance.

More Information
Learn more about Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan.
BW1 Seven Deadly Habits of Dysfunctional Software Managers
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are mishandling employee incentives; making key decisions by consensus; ignoring proven processes; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified—but liked by everyone. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these habits—or better yet, for avoiding them altogether. As a bonus, every attendee will receive a copy of Ken’s full-color 7 Deadly Habits comic.

More Information
Learn more about Ken Whitaker.
BW2 Building Customer Feedback Loops: Learn Quicker, Design Smarter
Sherif Mansour, Atlassian
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. He explores how to create a feedback strategy, how to make feedback fun using gamification techniques, tips and tricks for reducing friction in the process, how to validate ideas before writing a single line of code, and how to manage the process when you get too much feedback. Each of these techniques provides a deeper understanding of your customers, making software development more effective and productive. Don’t finish your next software project thinking, “I wish I’d known that earlier.” Obtaining valuable feedback is easier and more fun than you might think.

More Information
Learn more about Sherif Mansour.
BW3 Implementing Cloud-Based DevOps for Distributed Agile Projects
Thomas Stiehm, Coveros, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. Geographically-distributed software delivery teams are now the norm for large projects, and the cloud is a perfect enabler to level the playing field for your distributed teams and to give them all the same ability to achieve high productivity. Since the road to the cloud isn’t always paved, learn many of the trade-offs that must be made to implement cloud-based delivery and discover the situations that will derail a move to cloud-based development.

More Information
Learn more about Thomas Stiehm.
BW4 Mobile Application Testing: Challenges and Best Practices
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

With the rapid rise of mobile devices including smartphones and tablets, many organizations are rolling out mobile apps to extend the reach of their traditional web applications. Although the methodology for mobile application testing is fundamentally the same as that of traditional web and desktop application testing, mobile apps testing presents some unique challenges and issues including coverage of a myriad of mobile devices, usability testing, integration of mobile testing with web interface testing, mobile app performance, and security issues. Jimmy Xu describes these issues and current best practices for solving them. Jimmy introduces the latest technologies and tools in mobile application test automation, mobile application usability, performance, and security testing. In a non-technical and easy-to-understand approach that does not require previous mobile app testing or development experience, Jimmy  uses a real world mobile app project to illustrate the challenges—and solutions—of mobile app testing.

More Information
Learn more about Jimmy Xu.
AW5 Agile Redefines Global Economics: What Recent Data Reveals
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. As a result, we may be seeing a major shift in software economics made possible by the promises of agile. Michael Mah shares this latest research in the QSM SLIM industry database, which contains more than 10,000 completed projects—waterfall, agile, offshore, onshore—collected worldwide. Michael offers consulting tricks to accelerate your success. Learn how to derive your own measurements to inform your executive teams, quantify your successes, or spotlight areas that need help.

More Information
Learn more about Michael Mah.
AW6 How to Jumpstart Enterprise Agile Adoption
Alan Padula, Intuit
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. Each milestone has a description of everyone’s job responsibilities, the measurements to take along the way, the personal and business benefit, and the set of activities planned in order to achieve each succeeding milestone. Key transition activities include training, infrastructure, change leadership, planning, and governance. Join Alan for the jumpstart you need to successfully adopt agile in your organization.

More Information
Learn more about Alan Padula.
AW7 Behavior-Driven Design in Practice
Nir Szilagyi, eBay, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. BDD relies on specifying the behavior of a product through a ubiquitous language that can be understood by anyone with the domain knowledge—stakeholders, analysts, developers, and testers. The definition and visibility of the product's behavior are crucial to aligning the actions of all players to deliver the right product—from beginning to end of the development lifecycle. Join Nir and Janarthanan to learn how eBay's product platform group adopted BDD and used an end-to-end solution to verify requirements continuously, thus departing from the traditional “test” vocabulary to one of “behavior.”

More Information
Learn more about Nir Szilagyi.
AW8 The Agile Tester’s Mindset
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

On traditional projects, testers usually join the project after coding has started—or even later when coding is almost finished. Testers have no role in advising the project team early regarding quality issues but focus only on finding defects. They become accustomed to this style of working and adjust their mental processes accordingly. On agile projects, where testers must collaborate closely with customers and programmers throughout the development lifecycle, their focus changes from finding defects to preventing them. Janet Gregory shares ways to change the tester’s mindset from How can I break the software? to How can I help deliver excellent software?—a critical mental shift on agile projects. Another aspect of the mindset change is learning how to test early and incrementally. Janet uses examples to help you understand how effective this mindset change is—and how you can apply it on your agile projects.

More Information
Learn more about Janet Gregory.
BW5 Turbocharge Your Team’s Productivity: Increase Your Ability to Deliver
Rob Maher, Rob Maher Consulting
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. Sharing case studies, Rob demonstrates how techniques—adopting Scrum and kanban, decentralized decision making, self-organizing teams, and even changing a company’s staffing model—can dramatically improve a team’s productivity. In the same way that investing in tangible assets (physical capital) or training and education (knowledge capital) can increase a team’s ability to produce, so can investing in social capital. Rob describes the impact social capital can have on your team’s productivity and well-being, and provides techniques to improve your team's social capital.

More Information
Learn more about Rob Maher.
BW6 Find Requirements Defects to Build Better Software
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. John Terzakis shares powerful tips and techniques for quickly identifying requirements defects and providing feedback on how to improve them. Learn the ten attributes of a well-written requirement and how to detect various categories of requirements issues including ambiguity, passive voice, subjectivity, and missing event triggers. Using the concepts presented, John leads the analysis of a set of requirements. Leave with checklists that will make your requirements reviews more effective.

More Information
Learn more about John Terzakis.
BW7 Testing Cloud-Based Applications: What’s Different, What’s the Same
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Cloud platforms are being rapidly adopted because of their beneficial properties including scalability, multi-tenancy, and self-managed functionality. As a result, more and more organizations are moving applications and services from traditional hosting to the cloud. This change in platform architecture introduces new challenges for testing—data integrity, authentication, and authorization. After presenting an overview of cloud architecture, Bindu Laxminarayan discusses how testing traditional applications differs from testing applications hosted on private, public, and hybrid clouds. These differences include the addition of new categories of tests—fail-over, infrastructure, data integrity, and others. She shares her experience with data integrity, compatibility, performance, stress, and load testing of the cloud applications. Bindu discusses her experience with functional testing of various cloud applications. Learn the techniques that will make you a more effective tester of cloud-based applications.

More Information
Learn more about Bindu Laxminarayan.
BW8 Software Security Goes Mobile
Erik Costlow, HP Enterprise Security
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Erik Costlow says that, as more and more business is transacted on mobile platforms, securing the applications and data that run on them is a business imperative. Developers and their managers are asked to make key decisions regarding data caching, authorized permissions, authentication requirements on the backend, and safe coding practices—all of which contribute to the protection of their organization’s intellectual property. However, hackers have taken advantage of a knowledge gap to develop creative attacks against mobile applications. Becoming more common is “intent spoofing” in which hackers write a special application that targets an existing app on the Android platform and directs it to take malicious actions. Erik guides you through the steps you can take—use of two-factor authentication, code analysis, and obfuscation—to protect your intellectual property and your customers’ data against these and other potential threats.

More Information
Learn more about Erik Costlow.
AW9 Building Hyperproductive Agile Teams: Leveraging What Science Knows
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Michael presents a holistic model for building lean/agile teams that combines what science knows enables teams to achieve that elusive state of “flow.” He describes the key external forces—safety for learning, team formation, team tasking, the motivational system, and leadership style—that affect an agile team’s ability to achieve flow. Learn the basics of this model and how Michael is applying it with clients today. Use this model to build your teams and drive agile at scale while evolving the broader organization to harness the promise of agile and lean product development.

More Information
Learn more about Michael DePaoli.
AW10 The Evolution of Agile: Dealing with the Growing Pains
Jonathan Thorpe, Serena Software
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Jonathan describes the evolution of agile and discusses why organizations are feeling growing pains as the methodology grows from the IT department to the business level. Learn how agile methodologies can be applied to business analysis, release management, and other IT processes to ensure applications are being delivered to customers on time and on budget. Are you ready to ensure your entire organization is truly agile?

More Information
Learn more about Jonathan Thorpe.
AW11 Agile and CMMI: Yes, They Can Work Together
Ed Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. When mixing approaches that seem contradictory, the first step is to understand the benefits, drawbacks, and cost of each approach and then identify complementary additions. This includes myth busting the misperceptions about both agile and CMMI. The second step, using a formal CMMI appraisal to evaluate organizational performance, requires an understanding of the CMMI model that goes beyond a “checklist approach” requiring extensive documentation. Using lean principles, the appraisal team minimized “appraisal documentation” by using the day-to-day team output. Ed shows that agile and CMMI can be complementary due to executive leadership, lean implementation, and organization training, as demonstrated by a formal appraisal and business results.

More Information
Learn more about Ed Weller.
AW12 Transform Your Agile Test Process to Ship Fast with High Quality
Penny Wyatt, Atlassian
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Until 2009, the Atlassian JIRA team shipped a major release of its software every nine to twelve months. Everything was tested—every story and every bug fix—and everything still contained serious bugs. Story development moved quickly, but after the feature-complete date, several month-long hardening periods were required to make the software actually shippable. Integrating the release into Atlassian’s hosted platform took another three or four months. Now, the team ships JIRA from master directly to the hosted platform every two weeks, with features being written and tested within an iteration, and then bundled into a shippable release at the end. Penny Wyatt describes how to move the responsibility for quality back to developers, find bugs before development work even starts through early communication, use an active feedback loop to prevent classes of bugs, and reinforce the concept that “done means done”—ruthlessly backing out changes that aren’t fully completed by the end of the iteration. You, too, can learn how to ship fast with high quality.

More Information
Learn more about Penny Wyatt.
BW9 Designing Your Team and Organization for Innovation
Jim Elvidge, BigVisible Solutions
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Jim Elvidge explores a path to changing such an environment by improving team empowerment and creating an environment where it is safe to fail. Leaders championing this approach of “environment design” present people with a wider range of learning experiences, resulting in increased responsiveness to change, unleashed creativity, and greater job satisfaction. Learn how to use thinking and analysis tools—including double-loop learning and current reality trees—to find and remove your impediments to innovation.

More Information
Learn more about Jim Elvidge.
BW10 Enhancing Developer Productivity with Code Forensics
Anthony Voellm, Google, Inc.
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. This approach was motivated by today's test systems, tools, and processes that are all designed around the premise that “all developers are created equal.” Studies have shown developer error rates can vary widely and have a number of root causes—the mindset of the developer at the time the code was written, experience level, amount of code in a check-in, complexity of the code, and much more. With Digital Code Forensics, a set of metrics that can evaluate developers, Anthony demonstrates how even modest applications of this approach can speed up development. Discover and use the cutting edge of engineering productivity.

More Information
Learn more about Anthony Voellm.
BW11 Continuous Delivery at Ancestry.com
Seng Lin Shee, Ancestry.com
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Seng Lin Shee describes how Ancestry.com has transitioned from small scale web deployments to rapidly deploying new features without compromising product quality—all while not adding more complicated processes in the development lifecycle. A disciplined team is necessary to successfully use a delivery pipeline to its utmost potential. Seng Lin shares his team’s experience in the development of pipeline testing processes, introducing different sets of environments for different testing purposes, isolation testing, and test case management in a continuous delivery environment. Take away key ideas for implementing continuous delivery in your organization.

More Information
Learn more about Seng Lin Shee.
BW12 Hybrid Security Analysis: Bridging the Gap between Inside-Out and Outside-In
Arthur Hicken, Parasoft
Wednesday, June 5, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Unlike traditional penetration testing, this pinpoints where attacks really succeeded—not just areas that may be vulnerable to attack. Hybrid analysis involves running penetration attack scenarios against existing functional test scenarios, monitoring the back-end to determine whether security is actually compromised, and correlating source code with the failed tests so you can trace each error to a particular requirement. Learn the drawbacks of static analysis and penetration testing—and how to turn these drawbacks into strengths.

More Information
Learn more about Arthur Hicken.
AT1 The Five Facets of an Agile Organization
George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. It is from these neglected areas that most resistance and regression come. George Schlitz presents these five facets—execution, delivery, product, organization, and leadership. This holistic view helps us understand the complex nature of the changes we are introducing; provides a basis for a simple, evolving change strategy; and helps us head off problems before they occur in any organization—but only if we are serious about change.

More Information
Learn more about George Schlitz.
AT2 Enterprise Lean-Agile: It’s More Than Scrum
Jeff Marr, Cisco
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. The lean/agile tenets must be understandable to and appropriate for executive leaders, non-agile product development teams, hardware development, manufacturing, customer support, sales, regulatory compliance, and other elements of the enterprise. Jeff describes how enterprises typically view agile and ways common misconceptions play to your advantage and disadvantage. Finally, Jeff describes an approach to establishing partnerships of mutual interest across the enterprise. If you are a leader, champion, coach, or team member struggling with or preparing for agile adoption in the enterprise, you’ll take away invaluable tips to help you avoid pitfalls, improve communication, and spread the sanity.

More Information
Learn more about Jeff Marr.
AT3 Agile Development in a Regulated Environment
Chris Ampenberger, PHT Corporation
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. With real-world examples, Chris demonstrates how you can produce the required documentation as a byproduct of the scrum team’s everyday work and illustrates how his teams succeeded in an agile way, achieving significant increases in productivity. Chris points out common pitfalls, details the hurdles they had to overcome, and discusses how to obtain buy-in from stakeholders at all levels of the organization. If you are working in a regulated environment, this session is for you.

More Information
Learn more about Chris Ampenberger.
AT4 Scaling Your Tests: Continued Change Without Fear
Ryan Scott, Rally Software Development
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Agile teams move faster when cycle times are short and code deployments are frequent. To release often, a robust suite of automated tests is a must-have. Tests are the safety net that enables fearless change. Throughout a software system's lifespan, its test suite grows, evolves, and decays. Left unchecked, test execution times increase and non-deterministic failures erode confidence. Ultimately, the test suite that once served as a change-enabler becomes an anchor, grinding progress to a halt. Scaling a test suite is complex and difficult—and vital to successful organizations. Drawing from experience in the trenches, Ryan Scott describes real-world examples of how and why test suites can become burdensome and shares solutions for keeping your test suites tidy. Ryan explores techniques for test parallelization and code restructuring that his company used to decrease the execution time of its test suites by more than 90 percent while more than tripling the number of tests. Take back new ways to fearlessly scale your agile testing.

More Information
Learn more about Ryan Scott.
BT1 The Four Dimensions of Performance Improvement
Marisa Müller, Micro to Mainframe (Pty) Ltd.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a team dealt with unrealistic deadlines, impossible stakeholders, and demotivated testers, who had  no time to do things smarter and faster, just hammering away on the project “hamster wheel.” Then one day, as if heaven sent, a magical, but systematic approach to performance improvement, solving performance problems, and enhancing testing service delivery arrived in the form of the Four Dimensional Performance Improvement model. Marisa Müller describes this model that recognizes that performance relies on more than just people. Four dimensions of performance improvement—worker, workplace, work, and world—make up the total system. Marisa shares how her organization went about identifying and closing gaps, and provided empirical evidence that raised the understanding of the important value added by software testing. Join Marisa in exploring practical ways to apply to your own team what they did and empower you to transform testing’s value add and service delivery.

More Information
Learn more about Marisa Müller.
BT2 Mob Programming: A Whole Team Approach
Woody Zuill, Hunter Industries
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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? Woody explores the whole team concept and shows the specific practices his team uses for communication, collaboration, coding, and accelerated learning in their daily software development work. Learn how Woody and his team discovered this highly productive practice, see what it looks like, and take home some ideas you can use in to your software development work.

More Information
Learn more about Woody Zuill.
BT3 You Said What? Becoming Aware of the Things We Say
Steven “Doc” List, Santeon Group
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. You’ll engage in discussion and reflection as part of the activity, gaining greater insight into your own use of language and understanding of how language affects your interactions and your teams. Learn how to read the subtle messages in your own and others' language. Learn how to craft what you say so that it means what you want it to.

More Information
Learn more about Steven “Doc” List.
BT4 Non-Pathological Software Metrics
Stephen Frein, Comcast
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 10:15am - 11:30am

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. Mindful of the pitfalls of quantifying knowledge work, Stephen Frein examines some typical software development metrics and why measuring them tends to be harmful. Then he recommends alternate metrics—such as “truck number”—that give software development teams a chance to engage in meaningful measurement with a lower risk of harmful side effects. If you want or need to measure your team’s success without ruining it, join Stephen for helpful advice.

More Information
Learn more about Stephen Frein.
AT5 The 21st Century Needs Radical Management
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Most management methods in use today have been around for more than fifty years. During that time, the work has changed dramatically and so have the types of workers. The new ways of working that have emerged do not align well with the old ways of managing. In the 21st century, management must change to accommodate these new realities. Radical management involves changing the focus from stakeholders to customers, from controlling to enabling, from coordination to linking, from efficiency to improvement, and from telling to communicating. Radical management changes the culture of an organization by focusing on what truly drives long-term bottom line success. Bob Hartman shares an in-depth look at both the problems and solutions. Learn how to change from traditional management to radical management and develop a culture ready for business at the speed of the 21st century.

More Information
Learn more about Bob Hartman.
AT6 Agile Requirements Is Not an Oxymoron
Paul Reed, EBG Consulting
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. Drawing on what we know about chaos theory, complex adaptive systems, metrics on software projects, and practical application on numerous agile projects, discover how agile and requirements are congruent. Learn how agile and requirements combine to form a sound and sensible union that drives successful delivery of business value. Leave with a clear understanding of how requirements done right leverage agile practices and how agile projects depend on requirements to deliver business value.

More Information
Learn more about Paul Reed.
AT7 Building a Team Backlog: The Power of Retrospectives
Kanchan Khera, McKinsey & Company
Bhuwan Lodha, McKinsey & Company
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

“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. Kanchan Khera and Bhuwan Lodha believe that one approach to solving this problem is to bring the rigor, structure, and discipline we use for maintaining healthy product backlogs to team improvement by creating a “team backlog”—items the team needs to do to improve itself. The team backlog introduces three keys to successful and sustainable team improvement—a structured framework, visibility of its impact, and creative ways for building the backlog. Just as a healthy backlog is the basis for a great product, so a healthy team backlog helps create great teams.

More Information
Learn more about Kanchan Khera.
AT8 The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow
Brad Swanson, agile42
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. Join Brad Swanson as the proprietor of your very own pizza shop to experience how kanban helps to eliminate bottlenecks, minimize waste, and keep up with customer demand—all while competing against other teams for the title of “Pizza King.” Find out if you can really improve throughput and profit through the—sometimes counterintuitive—practices of single-piece flow and limiting WIP. Finally, Brad relates your experience back to the software world to show how kanban can be an evolutionary path to lean-agile development. Whether you are a novice seeking to learn kanban in a memorable way or a seasoned practitioner looking for a great simulation to teach kanban to others, this is the session for you.

More Information
Learn more about Brad Swanson.
BT5 Gamification to Solve Real-World Challenges
Ram Srinivasan, inRhythm
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. A well-defined gamification framework translates these principles to business contexts to maximize engagement, increase collaboration, and create positive behavioral changes. Organizations including Microsoft, Nike, LinkedIn, and Salesforce have benefited from this approach. Ram identifies some of the challenges when applying gamification inside an organization and explores the legal and ethical issues surrounding gamification. Get in the game with new ideas and approaches for solving your team and project challenges.

More Information
Learn more about Ram Srinivasan.
BT6 Trends in Big Data Testing
Stefano Rizzo, Polarion Software
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. minimal testing with spreadsheets, and testing the final products of development vs. test-driven development. After reviewing these challenges, Stefano  shares practices and tools to address both testing Big Data and managing the Testing of Big Data—the huge amount of data coming from massive and continuous testing practices.

More Information
Learn more about Stefano Rizzo.
BT7 Quality Debt: Is Your Project Going Bankrupt?
Jordan Setters, Planit Software Testing, Ltd.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

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. “Quality debt” is the cost in time and money paid by the system's users through productivity lost due to inefficient functionality. Learn how to measure, track, and prioritize this debt. Discover ways to manage your quality debt and how to organize development to pay back the interest and principal as soon as possible. Take back an approach for using quality debt as a tool to inform project stakeholders of both the costs and the added business value of their decisions and choices.

More Information
Learn more about Jordan Setters.
BT8 How to Survive the Coming Test Automation Zombie Apocalypse
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Test automation is software development. To automate tests well, you have to have brains. Unfortunately, the very brains that make you good at your job also make you highly attractive to zombies. Like all zombies, test automation zombies are brainless, insatiable, and relentless. Unlike human zombies, test automation zombies can be difficult to recognize. They don’t look like people at all. Some look like org charts. Some look like best practices. Some you can’t see at all—bad habits that “seemed like a good idea at the time.” Dale Emery has survived numerous test automation zombie attacks with almost no permanent damage. Dale knows zombies, and teaches you to recognize them. Automating only at the end of a sprint? Zombie. Sprinkling fixed delays through your tests to accommodate unresponsive web pages? Zombie. Automating only by record and playback? Zombie. Make no mistake—the test automation zombies are coming. Learn how to spot them before they eat your brains.

More Information
Learn more about Dale Emery.
AT9 Lean Management: Lessons from the Field
Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Learn the basics of lean, including its origins in the Toyota Production System, and how to apply lean to software development with disciplined practices such as automated build-and-test and test-driven development. Find out how to apply kanban to non-software activities including operations and maintenance. Take away new approaches for PMOs to manage WIP, how executive teams can use visual control to manage their enterprises, and how kaizen teams drive continuous improvement across the organization.

More Information
Learn more about Sanjiv Augustine.
AT10 The Business Analyst’s Critical Role in Agile Projects
Mark Layton, Platinum Edge, Inc.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Discover the role of product owner agent and why business analysts do well in that role. Learn how business analysts approach documentation—especially requirements—on agile projects. Dive into the details of the product backlog and user stories. Bring your questions and be ready to learn all about the who and the how of the business analyst in agile projects.

More Information
Learn more about Mark Layton.
AT11 The Next Frontier of Agile: Journey to Continuous Delivery
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Nicole Sweeney and Martin Franklin describe how continuous delivery is supporting the needs of 25 million TurboTax customers and a 400-person development community. They share their strategy for making the transition to a continuous delivery process. Find out about the strategies they used to drive this change, including design-thinking, technology selection, platform approach, and change leadership. Learn how you can use these techniques in your organization to make the next step to continuous delivery.

More Information
Learn more about Nicole Sweeney.
AT12 Scrum for Global-Scale Development
James Lynn, SUTO Consulting
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

A global development organization—in seven cities on three continents—has developers all using agile practices to develop complex applications. In addition to the common problems faced by distributed teams, they must deal with attrition rates in excess of 50 percent, possible loss of intellectual property, and the need to integrate the work of multiple Scrum teams into a single build. James Lynn describes an organizational structure that includes implementation teams, known as “the Factory.” Developers in the Factory often have little in-depth knowledge of the application or customer. Assisting the Factory are architecture teams that provide oversight, communication, coordination, and technical direction. The architecture teams include new roles such as Code Trolls who develop reference implementations for services and patterns to ensure the production of consistent code to common coding standards and quality measurements. These trolls review code against metrics standards, test case standards, and coverage. Learn how one organization successfully coordinated the efforts of massive, distributed development projects.

More Information
Learn more about James Lynn.
BT9 Unlocking Innovation in Your Organization
Derek Neighbors, Integrum Technologies
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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. Many models try to explain what complex systems might look like or how to determine what kind of culture an organization may need. Walk away with real-life stories of how teams, organizations, and even cities are transforming themselves for the future. Apply what you learn to your own product, team, and organization as Derek helps you learn how to evolve for the future.

More Information
Learn more about Derek Neighbors.
BT10 A UX Strategy for Persona Research
Nellie LeMonier, Perforce Software, Inc.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

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? Nellie LeMonier describes persona research methods and techniques for conducting quick guerrilla research. She discusses how to ensure your research results are shared throughout the software team so that everyone has a common understanding of what your users care about and what they need. Nellie uses case studies to illustrate the benefits and consequences for projects conducted both with and without persona research. Join Nellie to get a UX strategy for your project!

More Information
Learn more about Nellie LeMonier.
BT11 Building Quality In
Dawn Haynes, PerfTestPlus, Inc.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Have you ever delivered software to testing only to receive unexpected feedback regarding quality issues of interoperability, reliability, usability, or testability? Or worse, delivered to customers a product that fully met its specifications but generated complaints and calls for urgent fixes? Substantial time and effort can be saved by understanding—before coding begins—the important quality factors a software system must have. Join Dawn Haynes to explore quick and effective ideas for defining quality factors for your software. Dawn demonstrates how to create a checklist—using general heuristics, standards, and your own research—to employ as a source of specific quality requirements for your projects. By adding these to your requirements gathering process, you will better develop detailed designs and code. Going beyond the basics, Dawn explains how to reduce reliability and/or security vulnerabilities, increase efficiency, and implement quality factors like testability and maintainability. Steer your code to acceptance rather than to rework.

More Information
Learn more about Dawn Haynes.
BT12 Exploding Management Myths
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Thursday, June 6, 2013 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

We’ve all heard management “nuggets” such as “make people come to you with solutions, nut just problems,” or “training time is wasted time,” or my favorite, “work smarter.” But how are you supposed to do that, especially if you may not have received any management training, or if your gut is telling you what you’re doing might not be working? Johanna Rothman explains that much of what you have heard about management is myth—based not on evidence, but on ideas dating from the Industrial Revolution. However, many myths have a germ of truth. If you would like to learn about these germs—the kinds of training that are useless and the kinds that are useful, how to really work smarter, how to help people develop solutions when they are stuck—the kind of management that empowers knowledge workers, join Johanna in exploding management myths.

More Information
Learn more about Johanna Rothman.