Skip to main content

Process Improvement

Tutorials

MH Tuning and Improving Your Agility
David Hussman, DevJam
Mon, 06/03/2013 - 8:30am

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.

Read more
TB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps Practices
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

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.

Read more
TF Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

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.

Read more
TM Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

Read more
TQ SOLD OUT! Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond
David Hussman, DevJam
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 1:00pm

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.

Read more
TH The Flow of the Agile Business Analyst
Steve Adolph, WSA Consulting
Tue, 06/04/2013 - 8:30am

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.

Read more

Concurrent Sessions

AW2 Governing Agile Teams: Disciplined Strategies to Increase Agile Effectiveness
Scott Ambler, Scott W. Ambler + Associates
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
BW2 Building Customer Feedback Loops: Learn Quicker, Design Smarter
Sherif Mansour, Atlassian
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
BW4 Mobile Application Testing: Challenges and Best Practices
Jimmy Xu, CGI
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
BW5 Turbocharge Your Team’s Productivity: Increase Your Ability to Deliver
Rob Maher, Rob Maher Consulting
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 2:15pm

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.

Read more
BW9 Designing Your Team and Organization for Innovation
Jim Elvidge, BigVisible Solutions
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

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.

Read more
BW10 Enhancing Developer Productivity with Code Forensics
Anthony Voellm, Google, Inc.
Wed, 06/05/2013 - 3:45pm

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.

Read more
BT1 The Four Dimensions of Performance Improvement
Marisa Müller, Micro to Mainframe (Pty) Ltd.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
BT7 Quality Debt: Is Your Project Going Bankrupt?
Jordan Setters, Planit Software Testing, Ltd.
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

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.

Read more
BT9 Unlocking Innovation in Your Organization
Derek Neighbors, Integrum Technologies
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 3:45pm

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.

Read more
AT1 The Five Facets of an Agile Organization
George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
AT3 Agile Development in a Regulated Environment
Chris Ampenberger, PHT Corporation
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 10:15am

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.

Read more
AT8 The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow
Brad Swanson, agile42
Thu, 06/06/2013 - 2:15pm

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.

Read more