Conference archive

Agile Dev East 2016 - Tutorials

Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of the conference. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into a specific topic so that you can learn to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you.

Monday, November 14

Bob Aiello
CM Best Practices Consulting
MA

Configuration Management: Robust Practices for Fast Delivery

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous application build, package and deployment 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,...

Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton & Associates
MB

Great Product Design with User Story Mapping

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model, that helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map...

Ken Mugrage
ThoughtWorks
MC

Creating a Continuous Delivery Pipeline: A Hands-On Workshop

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Although continuous delivery (CD) and DevOps are growing in popularity, not much practical information is available about how to get started. This hands-on technical tutorial is the place to get your feet wet and your questions answered. Bring a laptop with the appropriate software installed (see note below), and Ken Mugrage will provide everything else you need for this workshop. You will configure a complete continuous delivery pipeline from source code commit through deployment. Learn when to run each common type of automated test for the fastest possible...

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
MD

Fostering Sustained Agility

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Has your team been struggling to become one of those high-performing teams that you were assured it would be if you started doing agile? Are your teams stuck on the agile transformation plateau? Most organizations start off strong in their transformation toward an agile mindset, successfully implementing team practices such as sprints and stand-ups but often a plateau or even a slip back occurs. Why? Because many leaders do not focus on fostering sustained agility—that is, creating an overall environment that influences individuals and teams to be focused on...

ME

IoT Testing Workshop

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

No longer a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. With the proliferation of connected devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes, the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Jennifer Bonine says our testing, product management, and development teams need to be addressing how to develop and test in this new world of IoT. Testers accustomed to traditional platforms are now asked to test on newer devices and more advanced platforms, some never tested on...

Ken Pugh
Net Objectives
MF

Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on...

MG

Docker Fundamentals Jumpstart

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Docker is a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization that is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architectures. Interest in Docker—with its lightweight, portable, “build once, configure once, and run anywhere” containers—is growing. Aater Suleman presents and demonstrates best practices, pitfalls, and practical advice from real-world case studies using Docker. Aater discusses basic Docker concepts, Docker terminology, Docker commands, must-know Docker features, and real-world examples of Docker projects. He focuses on eight common use cases and explores the...

David Hussman
DevJam
MH

Planning to Learn and Learning from Delivery: Scrum, Kanban and Beyond

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 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...

Ken Pugh
Net Objectives
MI

Acceptance Test-Driven Development

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase...

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
MJ

Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning

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Monday, November 14, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an...

Tuesday, November 15

Bob Aiello
CM Best Practices Consulting
TA

Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices, starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
TB

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability,...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TC

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle....

Andy Kaufman
Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development, Inc.
TD

How to Make Better Choices for You, Your Team, and Your Projects

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

As leaders of teams and projects, we regularly face choices and decisions that have downstream consequences. Do you want to be able to make better decisions in your personal or professional life? Do you want to help your team members make better choices when it comes to decisions on their projects? Or are you simply curious about how and why people make certain choices? In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman shares why the familiar pros-and-cons approach seems to make sense—but is profoundly flawed. He discusses how our biases influence the options we...

Robin Goldsmith
Go Pro Management, Inc.
TE

Writing Agile User Story and Acceptance Test Requirements

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Poor requirements are often the major cause of project problems. Yet nobody does much about them—at least not effectively. Traditional approaches advocate writing voluminous requirements documents that often don’t help much and may even contribute to difficulties. Agile goes to the opposite extreme, relying on brief requirements in the form of three-line user stories that fit on the front of an index card and a few user story acceptance criteria that fit on the card’s back. In this exercise-focused interactive workshop, Robin Goldsmith reveals reasons user...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TF

Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 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 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—...

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TG

Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
TH

The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills...

Philip Lew
XBOSoft
TI

How to Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX)

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TJ

Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery 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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
TK

Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster. You are ready to take on the world—when reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from “What is management’s role on a scrum project?”...

Rob_Sabourin
amibug.com
TL

Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams by combining test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and...

David Hussman
DevJam
TM

Producing Products and Coaching Agility: Make Agile Practices Matter

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns on their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TN

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and...

Larry Maccherone
AgileCraft
TO

Lean/Agile Metrics for the Rest of Us

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Tuesday, November 15, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...