Project Management

Tutorials

ML Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—and What to Do about Them

Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.

Mon, 11/10/2014 - 1:00pm

Every large software project is unique—each with its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns, and succumb to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented—or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—only make things worse.

TC Eight Steps to Kanban

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. 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. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

TE Agile Boot Camp for Project Managers NEW

Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

For a project manager, successfully transitioning from traditional project management to a more agile approach can be difficult due to the staggering learning curve. Using a combination of case studies, exercises, and best practices identified in the PMBOK® Guide, Ken Whitaker gets you up to speed on the essential fundamentals you need to effectively facilitate and lead Scrum-based agile projects.

TF Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups NEW

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then?

TI Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development NEW

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 8:30am

Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focusing on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you could otherwise get from lean. Al Shalloway describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Al explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean.

TQ Product Owner Imperatives for Championing Agile Projects NEW

Paul Reed, EBG Consulting

Tue, 11/11/2014 - 1:00pm

Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Paul Reed as he shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations.

Concurrent Sessions

AW1 Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption

Steve Adolph, Blue Agility

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

“Can we do agile?” is a question often asked by individuals enviously looking at the impressive results reported by other organizations that adopted agile practices. What they are usually concerned about are the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture and tools; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Yet, despite these perceived barriers, many organizations with these challenges do agile. Others wonder why, after all their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile.

AW2 Scaling Git for the Enterprise

Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

Due to its ease of use and distributed repository infrastructure, Git is quickly becoming the version control system of choice for many. Getting started takes only a few minutes, and available online tutorials explain Git basics and more advanced features including branching. As easy as Git is to implement, many developers find Git challenging to scale for large enterprises. Some go to Cloud-based Git service providers; others implement tools such as Stash and gitflow for effective branching patterns and variant management.

AW3 Shifting Left: The Evolution of Test Automation

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Michael Faulise, tap | QA

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

As the software development lifecycle shifts toward agile and lean methodologies, quality in every build becomes critical. Continuous integration allows development teams to receive immediate feedback on their code, creating more efficiency and higher quality. After exploring the differences in continuous integration, continuous delivery, and continuous deployment, Jennifer Bonine and Michael Faulise discuss what is needed for their successful implementation, including the technologies and resources required at each stage of the process.

AW4 Simplify Project and Portfolio Planning with “Real Options”

Matt Barcomb, DevJam

David Hussman, DevJam

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 11:30am

Do you work in an organization that spends too much time budgeting, road mapping, and planning their project roadmap or portfolio? Do you ever feel like all this effort is pointless and wasteful? Do you think perhaps there might be a simpler, more pragmatic way? If so, this session is for you. After a brief overview of necessary strategic and budgetary inputs to an investment-like product portfolio, Matt Barcomb and David Hussman share practical ideas for generating and validating projects as Real Options.

AW5 Why Agile Fails in Large Enterprises—and What to Do about It

Mike Cottmeyer, LeadingAgile, LLC

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 1:30pm

Agile works. We get it. You don’t have to sell people on the underlying principles anymore. Even so, many large-scale agile transformations are struggling. Some have failed. Others can’t figure out why things aren't working after multiple attempts. It’s easy to blame the people, the process, and the culture. And it’s especially easy to blame management. However, the underlying problem is that most large organizations weren’t built to be agile. You need a way to safely and pragmatically refactor your company into an organization that can adopt agile and sustain the transformation.

AW6 Transforming How We Deliver Value: Agility at Scale

Amy Silberbauer, IBM

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 1:30pm

Continuous delivery in software development allows us to deliver incrementally, get quick feedback, and react. A key enabler is the adoption of agile techniques and methods; key inhibitors in the enterprise are size, scale, and complexity. The Rational ALM organization is a typical enterprise, and our teams have (mostly) adopted agile principles. But agility at enterprise scale is not the same as team-based agile development. Now we must coordinate work across multiple interdependent teams to deliver value, rather than focusing on developing a single product or application.

AW7 Continuous Delivery: Never Send a Human to Do a Machine’s Job

Steve Povilaitis, LeadingAgile, LLC

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 1:30pm

Until your code is in production, making money for your business, or otherwise doing what it was built to do, you are merely building toy castles in a technological sandbox. Continuous delivery gets more business value into production as soon as possible, validates business decisions, and responds rapidly to customer feedback. Steve Povilaitis demonstrates what continuous delivery is all about and why automation is your only option for rapidly and reliably building, testing, and deploying software.

AW10 How Agile and Project Management Can Coexist

James Hannon, The Bentley Group International

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 2:45pm

Through the years—until agile software development took hold, that is—project management provided visibility to stakeholders and helped guide product development. However, as agile has risen to prominence with its de-emphasis on formal project planning, there are gaps that many organizations need to fill. James Hannon says that organizations now need to deal with the conundrum: Can agile and project management really coexist? Today’s manager must decompose both the standard project management flow and the agile development flow to look for symmetry and compatibility in their parts.

AW14 The Agile PMO: Right Work, Right Time, Right People

Heather Fleming, Gilt Groupe

Justin Riservato, Gilt Groupe

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 4:15pm

One of the core functions of a PMO is to help an organization standardize efficient processes to select and execute strategic projects. Unfortunately, many PMOs are finding themselves struggling to justify their own existence. In a recent survey, more than half of the respondents reported that the value of their PMOs is in question. By using a one-size-fits-all approach to best practices, we may set our PMOs up for failure, holding them accountable for predicting the future. There is no magic crystal ball!

AW15 Putting Quality in the Driver’s Seat with DevOps and ATDD

Adam Auerbach, Capital One

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 4:15pm

Capital One has a highly integrated environment, creating many dependencies for its agile teams. As a result, the teams faced prolonged and increasingly more difficult sprints over time, and did not realize expected improvements in time to market. As Capital One Technology worked through the implementation of various facets of agile, it wasn’t able to take full advantage of the real benefits that agile promises. To solve this, the group leveraged DevOps and ATDD practices, branding them quality-driven delivery or QDD.

AW16 Meeting Strict Documentation Requirements in Agile

Craeg Strong, Savant Financial Technologies, Inc.

Wed, 11/12/2014 - 4:15pm

Teams in many organizations are still expected to produce and maintain significant amounts of documentation. This is generally the case in Federal, state, and local governments where systems must comply with SOX, HIPPA, NAIC, FDA, or SEC directives. In recent years, Agile has made substantial inroads into government and other heavily regulated environments. However, some successful projects have been criticized for failing to generate the expected documentation.

AT9 Software Managers: Their Place in Agile

Brian Sobus, Teradata

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 1:30pm

No more managers! No more hierarchy! A truly self organizing, self-running team! These phrases strike fear into managers almost as much as: We are moving to agile. As successful companies like Zappos, GitHub, and Treehouse discard managers from their teams, other software managers are left wondering about their futures. The reality is that managers are even more relevant and necessary today—if they transform from command-and-control to a coaching-style role. Employees need to know they have an advocate—not just in the business but in their careers.

Keynotes

K3 The Future of Agile: Dilution, Calcification, or Evolution?

Jeff "Cheezy" Morgan, LeanDog

Thu, 11/13/2014 - 8:30am

The agile revolution began more than a dozen years ago. It was started by a small band of rebels who had radical ideas, shared a common vision, and wanted to change the world by challenging the status quo. Where is that agile revolution today? Has it continued the vision of its founders? Has it stayed true to its original values and principles as set forth in its manifesto or has it been watered down to make it more palatable to the masses? Cheezy Morgan ponders the answers to these and related questions.