Agile Dev East 2016 - Process & Metrics
Monday, November 14
Planning to Learn and Learning from Delivery: Scrum, Kanban and Beyond
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...
Tuesday, November 15
Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
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 are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—...
Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes
Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, that’s a stupid question because who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are, unfortunately, still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not...
Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. You’ll gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common...
Wednesday, November 16
Managing Technical People and Teams: You Can Do It Well
Technical teams are complex and managing them is challenging. Technical and organizational leadership often collide, and balancing the two is vital to an organization’s success. Furthermore, it is uncommon to find an individual who possesses strong technical and organizational leadership capabilities. AshLea Allberry shares her experience with unique teams and her efforts to find a uniform answer to team structure and management. AshLea describes her experience managing creatives, their greatest strengths and their deepest complexities. Once she covers the...
A New Approach to Software Safety, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis
Software has found its way into almost every part of our lives. Increased automation in the cars we drive can lead to failures which could result in physical injury, unacceptable risk, or cyber security vulnerabilities. In order to prevent accidents, identification of hazards, risks, and security vulnerabilities is required during development. The problem is the traditional hazard analysis techniques—failure effects and modes analysis, fault tree analysis, and root cause analysis—were developed for simplistic hardware controllers and are based on single point...
Testing and Measurement in DevOps: Find Solutions—Not More Problems
The promise of DevOps is to deliver new features faster following today’s best practices. However, blindly automating the delivery pipeline by installing Jenkins, Chef, and Docker without adapting test approaches will cause a great number of deployments to fail. While the tester’s role and testing are critical for the success of DevOps, the tester’s objective changes—from finding more defects to understanding the patterns that make deployments fail. Then, the job is to automate the detection of these patterns through quality gates into the pipeline. Using examples...
Thursday, November 17
Stop Saying No … Start Saying Throwdown
Have you ever been on a team and said, “We should try [insert crazy idea here]” only to immediately hear “No!” from a team member, manager, or coach? Talk about stifling innovation. To prevent this, Anthony Crain says that their teams are adopting a new philosophy. Stop saying No … start saying Throwdown! Using this idea, they can distinguish between a favorite way and a better way. “My story writing technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “My estimation technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “SAFe is better than traditional...
Agile Metrics: Make Better Decisions with Data
Some consider measurement in agile development destructive—or at the very least useless. Larry Maccherone disagrees and offers insight into how you can use metrics in an agile environment to make life better. How do you know when you are ready to introduce metrics into the environment? What are the sources for these metrics? What tools and techniques are necessary to make decisions probabilistically? What are the mindset shifts necessary for metrics to help you making better decisions? How do teams and organizations avoid the anti-patterns that so often derail a...