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Tutorials

Begin your experience by attending half- or full-day tutorials. Please note that you must register for the tutorial(s) you want to attend as space is limited and many sell out quickly.

Tutorials
MA The Leadership Tutorial: Improving Your Ability to Stand and Deliver
Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman helps you wrestle with real-world leadership issues we all face—influencing without authority, motivating your team, and dealing with conflict. Explore the difference between leadership and management—and why it matters—and get a clear picture of a leader’s responsibilities, including the balance between short- and long-term focus and the need to deliver results while developing organizational capability. Discuss the importance of developing your team members’ leadership skills, including practical ways to do so even with a limited training budget. Andy delves into the importance of one-on-one relationships and delivers proven insights on managing upward, dealing with peers, and developing stronger bonds both inside and outside your organization. Accelerate your ability to influence your organization, your projects, and your career to become the leader your team needs and demands. Take away practical tools to help you lead your team, including a template for formalizing a team charter and a reproducible survey to solicit leadership feedback from bosses, peers, stakeholders, and team members.

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MB SOLD OUT! Agile Release Planning, Metrics, and Retrospectives
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

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

Laptops Preferred. To take full advantage of this tutorial, delegates should bring a Windows-based PC (with admin rights) for use during data capture and productivity calculations. If you can’t bring one, share with another delegate.

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Learn more about Michael Mah.
MC Requirements Engineering: A Practicum
Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality Services BV
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

Identifying, documenting, and communicating software requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are “How do we discover the real requirements?”, “How do we  document requirements?”, and “How do user stories fit into requirements?” Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions. Practice finding, specifying, and evaluating requirements while learning how to gather information through varied elicitation techniques. Erik explores advantages and disadvantages of each technique, and offers guidelines for developing both functional and nonfunctional requirements. Learn a rule set for determining how much documentation you need for “good enough” requirements. Explore requirements review techniques—walkthroughs and inspections—to determine what will work best for you. Together, collaboratively create a set of Golden Rules for requirements engineering that every project can use.

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MD Dealing with Estimation, Uncertainty, Risk, and Commitment
Todd Little, Landmark Graphics Corporation
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Software projects are known to have challenges with estimation, uncertainty, risk, and commitment—and the most valuable projects often carry the most risk. Other industries also encounter risk and generate value by understanding and managing that risk effectively. Todd Little explores techniques used in a number of risky businesses—product development, oil and gas exploration, investment banking, medicine, weather forecasting, and gambling—and shares what those industries have done to manage uncertainty. With studies of software development estimations and uncertainties, Todd discusses how software practitioners can learn from a better understanding of uncertainty and its dynamics. In addition, he introduces techniques and approaches to estimation and risk management including utilizing real options and one of its key elements—understanding commitment. Take away a better understanding of the challenges of estimation and what software practitioners can do to better manage estimation, risks, and their commitments.

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ME Twelve Heuristics for Solving Tough Problems Faster and Better
Payson Hall , Catalysis Group, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

As infants, we begin our lives as problem-solving machines, learning to navigate a strange and complex world in which others communicate in ways we don’t understand. Initially, we hone our problem-solving talents. Then many of us find our explorations thwarted and eventually stop using—and then begin losing—our natural problem-solving ability. It doesn’t have to be that way. Psychologists tell us that people can regain lost skills and learn new ones to become better problem solvers. Payson Hall shares techniques and skills that apply to situations in real life. Specifically, learn techniques to better define problems and explore twelve heuristics for generating solutions that can help when you and your team are staring at a blank paper, struggling to find candidate solutions for further consideration. Learn when random search is appropriate, how binary search can help with diagnostics, strategies for identifying and overcoming opposition, and when transferring the problem to someone else just might be the best strategy of all.

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MF SOLD OUT! Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from “tests as verification” to “tests as specification” and to guide development with acceptance tests written in the language of your business. Get started by joining a team for a simulation and experience how ATDD helps build in quality instead of trying to test defects out. Then progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with plain-language and table-based formats. This isn’t a “tools” session. These are tabletop, paper-based simulations that give you meaningful practice with how executable specifications change the way you think about tests and collaborate as a team. Leave empowered with a kit of exercises to advocate ATDD with your own teams.

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MG What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

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

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine.
MH Tuning and Improving Your Agility Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Are you using agile practices but struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others, and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, roadmapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings. 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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MI Design Patterns Explained: From Analysis through Implementation
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

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

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Learn more about Alan Shalloway.
MJ Scrum: An Experiential Workshop
Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Scrum is a popular and proven project management framework for rapidly changing development projects, especially those with significant technology uncertainty or evolving requirements. Since its inception fifteen years ago, Scrum has grown to be the leading agile methodology, boasting nearly 100,000 Certified ScrumMasters. In this highly interactive (no slides) introductory session, Mitch Lacey serves up the tools you need to get started with Scrum. Using Scrum to manage the session, you will learn the value of prioritization and how to do it, why timeboxing works, and how to determine a release plan using team velocity and more. As you are learning these techniques, Mitch answers your questions to help ensure your successful Scrum and agile adoption. Mitch also describes the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, the product owner, and each member of the Scrum team. This experiential workshop gets you started on the path to success.

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Learn more about Mitch Lacey.
MK Agile Model-Driven Development
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

In this interactive session, Scott Ambler explores a vitally important, nitty-gritty, down-in-the-weeds aspect of agile—how to take an agile model-driven development (AMDD) approach to enhance and scale your software delivery capabilities. Correctly applied, AMDD enhances your modeling and documentation efforts, streamlines agile development, and reduces false starts and rework. Scott addresses critical modeling issues that pertain to all agile projects—how to successfully model the complexities of modern-day software without getting bogged-down in mountains of paperwork, how to document systems in an agile manner, how to scale agile development methods with an agile approach to modeling and documentation, how to take an evolutionary approach to user interface and database design, and how modeling extends and supports test-driven development to address the full exploration of requirements, architecture, and design. Join Scott to dig into this vital—yet often ignored—aspect of agile development.

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ML The Developer’s Guide to Test Automation
George Dinwiddie, iDIA Computing, LLC
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Your shrinking project deadlines are increasing the need for automated tests—but, simultaneously, reducing the time available for writing them. The system requirements are continually changing. The implementation is changing. You spend more and more time maintaining old tests, leaving less time to write new ones. The tests take longer and longer to run. And when they fail, the problem is as likely to be in the tests as in the system. What’s a developer to do? Dale Emery and George Dinwiddie share hard-won lessons learned from their decades of software development and test automation. Discover the factors that make automated tests maintainable, expressive, informative, fast, reliable, and repeatable. Practice achieving these qualities in hands-on exercises. Apply new techniques and your existing software development expertise in new ways. Take home powerful principles and practices to meet the unique challenges of test automation and to help your project deliver sooner with greater confidence.

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Learn more about Dale Emery.
MM Configuration Management Best Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Robust configuration management (CM) practices are essential for creating continuous builds to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore. Bob Aiello presents an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change management and control, release management, and deployment. Bob describes current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, cloud computing, and mobile apps development—and reviews the industry standards and frameworks essential in CM today. Take back an integrated approach to establish proper IT governance and compliance using the latest CM practices while offering development teams the most effective CM practices available today.

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MN SOLD OUT! Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

While first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors. 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. He 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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MO Understanding and Managing Change
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

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 more important in these challenging economic times.

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine.
MP Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Monday, June 3, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Bob Hartman shares his experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together. You’ll practice with exercises that are easy to use, fun, and encourage working together in a structured fashion. This structure guides successful collaboration, helping participants stay on track and avoiding non-productive, free-for-all discussions. Learn how to choose the best Innovation Game for each situation. Leave with an understanding of how and why structured collaboration with intellectual games is one of the most productive ways to help people work together toward a common goal.

 

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TA Deliver Projects On Time, Every Time
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

Ken Whitaker shares pragmatic techniques to help project managers and software development leaders put into practice innovative scheduling techniques, make consistent customer-centric decisions, reduce project risk, quickly negotiate with product owners the most important project scope, and transition teams to become more agile. Ken shares revealing statistical data on how waterfall is simply not suited for modern-day adaptive software development projects. With fellow participants, you’ll spend time performing a “Scrum walkabout” to get the idea of just how an agile project really works. These best practices are presented to motivate your team to deliver projects on time, every time. Although this tutorial doesn’t incorporate intensive role-play, we’ll have lively interaction that will incorporate lessons learned from actual case studies and attendees’ project experiences. Take away powerful, yet simple, ways to bridge the gap between PMI’s PMBOK® Guide and agile.

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Learn more about Ken Whitaker.
TB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that empower teams and organizations to rapidly deploy systems and application updates while maintaining—and even improving—quality. By lowering barriers between development, testing, and operations, DevOps practices can add tremendous business value to software projects and systems. Bob Aiello explains how to prepare for and implement continuous delivery—in both agile and non-agile environments—employing industry standard processes and automated frameworks. Bob shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle through release and application maintenance. He introduces the emerging “Infrastructure as Code” concept that automates server and system provisioning within cloud computing environments. Learn ways to overcome technical, process, and cultural challenges with DevOps. Take back a set of practical and proven practices—for automated application build, automated packaging, and automated deployment—that will put your organization on the path to rapid and reliable releases.

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TC Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams
Bob Galen, RGalen Consulting
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so 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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TD Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Rick Craig as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Rick identifies several metrics paradigms—including Goal-Question-Metric—and discusses the pros and cons of each. Delegates are urged to bring their metrics problems and issues for use as discussion points.

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TE Design for Testability: A Tutorial for Devs and Testers
Peter Zimmerer, Siemens AG
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all. Testability is not free; it must be explicitly designed into the system through adequate design for testability. Peter Zimmerer describes influencing factors (controllability, visibility, operability, stability, simplicity) and constraints (conflicting nonfunctional requirements, legacy code), and shares his experiences implementing and testing highly-testable software. Peter offers practical guidance on the key actions: (1) designing well-defined control and observation points in the architecture, and (2) specifying testability needs for test automation early. He shares creative and innovative approaches to overcome failures caused by deficiencies in testability. Peter presents a new, comprehensive strategy for testability design that can be implemented to gain the benefits in a cost-efficient manner.

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TF Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to a failing project. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.

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TG SOLD OUT! User Stories: Across the Seven Product Dimensions
Paul Reed, EBG Consulting
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

User stories are a powerful technique agile teams used to communicate requirements. Yet all too often, the stories are poorly written or even incomprehensible. Some stories are too big and overlap across delivery cycles. Others are too small and don’t deliver sufficient details for developers. Join Paul Reed to learn the Seven Product Dimensions—the 7 D’s—which yield “just right” stories that users and product owners can write and developers can understand. Explore and experience the Seven Dimensions: user, interface, action, data, control, quality, and environment. Learn to identify options for high value business and user needs, and then assemble them into cohesive user stories. As you slice the options, you’ll see ways to leverage analysis models to quickly visualize and discuss options. Practice employing structured conversations about user stories to engage customers while taking business and technology perspectives into consideration. Find out how to establish acceptance criteria based on the value considerations to make your stories more valuable. Leave with a practical framework for writing “just right” stories.

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TH The Flow of the Agile Business Analyst
Steve Adolph, WSA Consulting
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders. BAs can leverage traditional tools such as use cases to Generate Flow and feed user stories to fast moving agile teams. However, large backlogs of stories are wasteful, so lean principles are applied to Lean Out the Flow. Finally BAs may need to Bridge the Flow between more traditional elements of the organization and its agile teams. Whether you are a BA new to agile or struggling to find the right fit in your team, join this highly interactive session to “get your flow” going.

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TI Eight Steps to Kanban
Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Alan Shalloway shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. He begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step is to establish explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because kanban can easily be expanded to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises. By the end, you will have an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

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TJ Software Metrics: Taking the Guesswork Out of Software Projects
Ed Weller, Integrated Productivity Solutions, LLC
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Why bother with measurement and metrics? If you never use the data you collect, this is a valid question—and the answer is “Don’t bother, it’s a waste of time.” In that case, you’ll manage with opinions, personalities, and guesses—or even worse, misconceptions and misunderstandings. Based on his more than forty years of software and systems development experience, Ed Weller describes reasons for measurement, key measures in both traditional and agile environments, decisions enabled by measurement, and lessons learned from successful—and not so successful—measurement programs. Find out how to develop and maintain consistent data and valid measures so you can estimate reliably, deliver products with known quality, and have happy users and customers—the ultimate trailing indicator. Learn to manage projects dynamically with the support of current metrics and data from past projects to guide your management planning and control. Join Ed to explore how to invest in measurements that provide leading indicators to help you meet your company and customer goals.

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TK SOLD OUT! Scaling Agile Up to the Enterprise and Staying Lean
Dean Leffingwell, Leffingwell, LLC
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Scaling agile from the team to the program to the portfolio level of the enterprise requires the inclusion of additional roles—product manager and system architect; activities—release planning and program retrospectives; and artifacts—portfolio and program visions and backlogs. Practitioners must constantly increase scale and scope, while keeping both the system and the process lean and agile. Dean Leffingwell describes how to accomplish this with the Scaled Agile Framework™, a knowledge-base of proven lean and agile practices for enterprise-class software development. Dean approaches the scaling problem from the perspective of lean thinking and principle of product development flow, illustrating how their core principles help deliver business results at scale, while keeping the system—and the enterprise—responsive. Learn some key principles of lean thinking and product development flow, participate in lightweight exercises designed to reinforce these principles, and leave with an understanding of how to apply them in your organization.

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TL Essential Test-Driven Development
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Test-driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates the essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring as just-in-time design, plus Fake It, Triangulate, and Obvious Implementation. 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. The lab can be done in any programming language with a supporting xUnit test framework. Download your preferred unit-testing framework prior to the course. Rob can provide JUnit for Java, QUnit for JavaScript, 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 IDE and xUnit framework prior to the tutorial, as technical support for those platforms will be very limited.

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TM Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back. 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 passion. Her final free idea 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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TN SOLD OUT! Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Your organization is doing well with functional, usability, and performance testing. However, you know that software security is a key part of software assurance and compliance strategy for protecting applications and critical data. Left undiscovered, security-related defects can wreak havoc in a system when malicious invaders attack. If you don’t know where to start with security testing and don’t know what you are—or should be—looking for, this tutorial is for you. Jeff Payne describes how to get started with security testing, introducing foundational security testing concepts and showing you how to apply those concepts with free and commercial tools and resources. Offering a practical risk-based approach, Jeff discusses why security testing is important, how to use security risk information to improve your test strategy, and how to add security testing into your software development lifecycle. You don’t need a software security background to benefit from this important session.

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TP Influence Strategies for Software Professionals
Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. These strategies take advantage of a number of hardwired traits: liking—we like people who are like us; reciprocity—we repay in kind; social proof—we follow the lead of others similar to us; consistency—we align ourselves with our previous commitments; authority—we defer to authority figures; and scarcity—we want more of something when there is less to be had. Join Linda to learn how to build on these traits as a way of bringing others to your side. Use this valuable toolkit in addition to the logical left-brain techniques on which we depend.

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Learn more about Linda Rising.
TQ SOLD OUT! Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

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.

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TR Getting the Right Requirements—The First Time
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

One group—customers, users, and business—need a software system to help them work more efficiently or make more money, but they don’t know how to build it. Another group—software developers and testers—know how to build the system, but they don’t know what it is supposed to do. Bridging this gap is where requirements—the work products describing the system accurately and concisely while at the same time not missing important customer and user needs—are essential. To get the requirements right the first time, you need strategy, tactics, and a practical process for discovering the real requirements—which may not turn out to be what the users think they need. Tim Lister presents a strategy to get accurate and explicit requirements, tactics to develop those requirements efficiently, and a process to keep everything glued together when tackling a large, complex job. Take back an 85-page, annotated requirements specification template to help get your requirements right—the first time.

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Learn more about Tim Lister.