Product Owner Certification (2 days)Arlen Bankston
Certified ScrumMaster Training (2 days)Sanjiv Augustine
Agile Tester Certification–ICAgile (2 days)Rob Sabourin
Integrating Test with a DevOps Approach (2 days)Gene Gotimer.
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2 days)Jeff Payne
Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training (2 days)Bob Payne
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is quickly being adopted by many large organizations that have had some success with agile at the team level but have not been able to scale up to large projects. Al Shalloway describes what SAFe is, discusses when and how to implement it, and provides a few extensions to SAFe. Al begins with a high-level, executive’s guide to SAFe that you can share with your organization’s leaders. He then covers the aspects of implementing SAFe: identifying the sequence of features to work, establishing release trains, the SAFe release planning event, SAFe’s variant of Scrum, and when to use the SAFe process. Al concludes with extensions to SAFe including creating effective teams—even when it doesn’t look possible—and implementing shared services and DevOps in SAFe using kanban. Get an introduction to SAFe, discover whether it would be useful to your organization, and identify the steps you should take to be SAFe.
SQL and MapReduce databases are great—when your data is well-partitioned and the same queries are run regularly. What happens when we don't know what we will want to know in the future? Graph databases are used in everything from Facebook to business intelligence apps. With nodes, edges, and properties to represent and store data, graph databases give us the opportunity to define the landscape as we learn more about our data. Using graph databases we can start at a location and ask for a description of where we are. This allows us to discover pathways and interesting data points that we might not otherwise have been aware of. Andy Palmer explains how you can discover the data landscape and bend it to your will with exploratory reports. Starting with the fundamentals of graph databases—using Neo4J as the tool—your skills with graph databases will increase through the day until you are able to explore and discover new gems of information for yourself.
Bring your laptop and try a big data tool.
Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find their paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail. Learn about personal strategies for identifying high-payoff activities and gain insight into being more effective as an individual contributor, manager, and leader. Discover how to identify and interact with the right set of career mentors and role models. Being successful doesn’t have to be an accident. Join James and learn how to succeed—on purpose.
On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall verification process―finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace a “test last” mentality with “specification by example.” Practice “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 guide development with concrete examples written in the language of your business. Start by joining a team for a humorous simulation of real-world issues and experience. Learn how specification by example helps build quality in instead of trying to test defects out. Progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with table-based and given-when-then formats. These paper-based simulations give you meaningful practice specifying concrete examples and will change the way you think about writing tests and collaborating as a team. This is not a tools session—no laptops required.
Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and focus instead only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into product design with pragmatic UX and test-driven thinking. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. This session is for testers, developers, product owners, and anyone else interested in improving their product thinking and product backlog. Bring your failing product backlog stories for discussion, too.
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 efficiently develop these requirements, 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.
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 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 and discusses the pros and cons of each.
Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical 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 available in practice 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.
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 system components 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 two 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 and comprehensive strategy for testability design that you can implement to gain the benefits in a cost-efficient manner.
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. The number four idea is that you can only fix processes, not people, so 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 does matter—and matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of attacks against mobile and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software. Like different kinds of software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be customized for particular contexts. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack—and why the attack works to find bugs. In addition to learning these testing concepts, you can practice the attack patterns on devices containing mobile and/or embedded software―so bring your smart phones.
Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation. Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.
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.
Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration processes monitor source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems. Jared Richardson explains the ideas and then the tools needed to implement both continuous integration and continuous deployment. Jared demonstrates the open source continuous integration tool Jenkins as the center of the process. These powerful concepts ensure issues are detected within minutes of most code changes, and the developer is notified so he can fix the problem and learn from the experience. Even a partial adoption changes the cadence of a development organization and eliminates a great deal of ongoing code maintenance. Learn how to sell the idea and set up the process in your own organization.
One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.
Numbers, models, and measurements are often used to describe. Just as often, they are used to persuade. Sometimes, they are used to intimidate. In order to avoid being fooled or bullied, testers must be able to examine information, claims, and evidence critically. They must apply critical thinking to their own observations, interpretations, and reports in order to avoid fooling themselves—or worse, their clients. Michael Bolton and Laurent Bossavit help you look thoughtfully and skillfully at reports, research, and common claims about testing and software development. Learn methods for analyzing those claims and a framework for evaluating them. Apply this approach to real-world cases and exercises, and refine your approach to collecting, assessing, and presenting data. Throughout, remain engaged as you look at the original data, assess the relationship between numbers and their representations, evaluate the methods of measurement and, in a nutshell, refine your current skills and build new ones. Caution: This workshop may interfere with your enjoyment of your daily newspaper.
Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3 days)Sanjiv Augustine
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3 days)Dale Perry
DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enable 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 implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.
A story map is a simple model, built from index cards or sticky notes, which helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Jeff Patton explains that within a design process story maps are a core practice 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 service. The design process and story mapping can identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Join Jeff to learn how to map your customer’s and user’s experience today and then how to deliberately improve that experience. Use empathy maps, persona sketches, archetypes and stereotypes, story mapping, and design studio concepts to speed your design work. Since all solution ideas are speculative, learn how to validate solutions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. In the end, discover an essential design process that allows you to identify and validate innovative product solutions.
This is a hands-on workshop. Come prepared to learn.
Perhaps you’re a programmer, trying to identify important problems in your code before they affect customers. Or a tester with skills in reading or writing code on a mission to find coding defects. James Bach presents Rapid Software Testing, a universal methodology for testing that consists of both a mindset and a skillset that can be applied whether or not you have a technical background. However, for people with coding skills, it has additional dimensions. Long before you can apply tools or write code to help solve problems, you must identify technical risk and consider the costs and benefits of various testing tactics. This is not a session about canned test tools and how to use them. It does not cover the mechanics of any specific tool or simple technique. Instead, we use practical exercises and Socratic questioning to explore the deeper skills of investigating, framing, and solving real testing problems using the skills and perspective of a programmer.
LAPTOP REQUIRED. Delegates must bring Windows-based laptops to this tutorial.
Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it. Learn how to use oratory and literary instruments to make the story come alive for your audience. Do your part to put an end to bad presentations―attend this tutorial.
Transitioning to agile can be difficult—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 transition 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. Ken 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 establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban 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 and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.
Congratulations! Your boss has selected you for a Product Owner role ... or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how to play with your Product Owner ... or you’re an experienced Product Owner struggling achieve balance among your stakeholders, customers and team ... or you’re newly CSPO certified but don’t know how to be a REAL Product Owner. Well fear not. Join author and Product Owner coach Bob Galen in this fast paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and delivering high-impact sprint reviews. Then we’ll raise the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively interact with your teams. Leave this workshop with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner you—and your boss—envisioned you to be.
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. Learn ways to avoid being yet another project failure statistic, how to make better tradeoffs using a simple technique based on a design hierarchy, and adopt innovative ways to better collaborate with product management to focus on what’s really important to the customer. To become an effective leader, discover how to size up and then help your team rise up in their hierarchy of needs while adapting your leadership style to effectively communicate with stakeholders. This workshop is designed to give you practical tools to help you lead and motivate your team to deliver projects on time, every time.
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? When done with utmost skill and to its greatest advantage, risk management starts before a project is even born. Tim Lister presents the advantages—and the dangers—of practicing risk management like a grown-up. Tim offers a process for you to consider tailoring for your organization and discusses how your organization can grow up.
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. 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 communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. 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.
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 from their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that 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 you through the remainder of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.
Today, many organizations are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, user experience becomes paramount. Currently, there are no formal models describing UX. Philip Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving user experience on the mobile platform. Philip uses examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX to build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.
Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.
Data warehouses have become a popular mechanism for collecting, organizing, and making information readily available for strategic decision making. The ability to review historical trends and monitor near real-time operational data has become a key competitive advantage for many organizations. Yet the methods for assuring the quality of these valuable assets are quite different from those of transactional systems. Ensuring that the appropriate testing is performed is a major challenge for many enterprises. Geoff Horne has led a number of data warehouse testing projects in both the telecommunications and ERP sectors. Join Geoff as he shares his approaches and experiences, focusing on the key “uniques” of data warehouse testing including methods for assuring data completeness, monitoring data transformations, and measuring quality. He explores the opportunities for test automation as part of the data warehouse process, describing how you can harness automation to streamline and minimize overhead.
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 might 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. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Employing lean principles, you optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, cross-functional teams, implementing pull, and managing work in process. Al will describe how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.
Ken Pugh 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. Ken 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.
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. Jeffery 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, Jeffery 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.
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. Join Bob to 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, and engagement. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in to provide guidance and direction. Examine the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and to examine the patterns of the bad.
DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radical new approach to rapidly deliver and manage 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. When done well, DevOps drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove quality and productivity impediments throughout the entire software lifecycle. When done poorly, critical bugs are deployed directly into production and software failures increase. Today, team members are often confused about their changing role and become frustrated. Jeffery Payne discusses how DevOps changes everything and what you must implement to reap the benefits of this movement. Learn what steps to take to successfully implement a DevOps process while avoiding the pitfalls. Take home ideas for how to leverage DevOps to advance your career.
To paraphrase a famous Albert Einstein quote—We cannot solve our problems by applying the same level of thinking that we used when we created them. Although Einstein was originally talking about war, this also is applicable to software development, where one level of thinking—known as software engineering—has prevailed for the past four decades. Laurent Bossavit explores why several of the key assumptions are no longer—or never were—credible. These include the cost of defects curve, the notion of 10x engineers, and the origin of software bugs. Not stopping at debunking suspect claims and sharing techniques to expose them, Laurent goes on to explain the driving motivation which helped the claims become widespread―a misguided search for universal laws of software development―and suggests an alternative approach at a different level, hinted at by lean and agile practices. In this alternative approach each of us, backed by hard data and critical thinking, puts on the scientist's lab coat in search of local truths within our development organizations.
A cornerstone principle of the Agile Manifesto is periodic reflection on how to be more effective. So it's a bit ironic that retrospectives, widely practiced as a way to improve performance, are so ineffective. Teams often produce few, if any, significant improvements. Why is this? What can teams do instead to produce better results? Jay Packlick suggests that “Journey to Paradise Island” is a powerful exercise that introduces the practice of PRO-spectives―a forward-facing approach to continuous improvement that helps teams create and focus on achieving a compelling vision of their own creation. Unlike retrospectives which tend to be backward facing and reactive, producing superficial responses to transient problems, PRO-spectives begin with the end in mind. They incorporate the goal-focused power of the Toyota Kata model of improvement. Join Jay to learn how your teams can create their own Paradise Island, discover just how far they are from it, and determine the best course to get there.
“Can we do agile?” is a question individuals often ask as they look at the impressive results reported by other organizations that have adopted agile practices. Their usual concerns are about the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy architecture, tooling; and demanding governance and compliance practices. Many organizations with these challenges do agile very well despite these perceived barriers. Others wonder why, even with their training and shiny new tools, they can’t do agile. What they’re not seeing are the social barriers that impede fast decisions and ultimately doom many agile adoption programs. Steve Adolph explains why social factors are the dominant determinant of agile success, introduces a fast decision cycle model to resolve issues, and provides a configuration guide to help you identify and evaluate social impediments. Using a case study of a “high ceremony” organization, you and Steve work together to find ways to resolve your company’s impediments to doing agile.
Al Shalloway introduces Leanban, the next major agile approach following Scrum, XP, and Kanban—and the first explicitly based on lean software development principles. While each of these earlier approaches is a manifestation of selected Lean principles, none of them were fully Lean. The result is that each approach, while valuable, is incomplete and useful in only certain situations. Al explains how Leanban is an explicit manifestation of Lean principles while incorporating what we’ve learned from previous agile methods. It encompasses culture, Lean flow, how people learn, the importance of systems thinking, technical practices, and management, providing a consistent set of principles and core set of practices. Al presents Leanban's well-defined starting points and then discusses Leanban's well-defined migration path from one practice to another as teams learn or their situation changes. Al concludes by discussing how teams currently doing XP, Scrum or Kanban can extend their current practices with Leanban.
In this presentation, we’ll discuss how busting software bugs does more than ensure the reliability and performance of your software—it helps ensure application security. We’ll cover:
It is challenging—if not impossible—to find local experts in low-level Linux or specific open-source software projects. However, this isn’t a challenge with a fully-distributed organization which has this talent worldwide. So the challenge becomes how to effectively manage, motivate, and retain this talent. At Linaro, Alan Bennett is responsible for producing many of their open source products. Having successfully worked with Kanban and Scrum in the past, Alan was surprised how difficult implementing agile practices was when the workdays of most team members overlapped only an hour or less. Realizing that their sprint planning and retrospectives were not going to be sustainable, the team knew they would have to make some changes. Alan shows you how his teams effectively manage their workload, combine agile with open source software processes, and create a system that survives and thrives even with the extreme communication latencies of a fully-distributed team.
Garren DiPasquale says that holistic design strategy in an iterative agile environment is difficult. So how does design thinking deliver awesome applications and features for your customers? Why should your agile team care? How do you develop a macro understanding while developing micro solutions? Can you get designers and developers on the same page? As the market continues to move forward, our customers are expecting polished, delightful, and easy-to-use software. To deliver software that matches these expectations, we must adjust our product design practices to move as fast as our development counterparts. Garren introduces a model for getting designers and developers to work together―breaking problems down, and aligning both design and agile methodologies to form one cohesive team. Discover the objections designers have to agile, eliminate handoff problems, and deliver better software with a practical design framework that can be implemented on agile teams large and small.
Whether you’re new to agile or Scrum or an experienced practitioner, everyone has had a bad sprint review here and there. But do you consistently miss the mark? Have limited attendance, engagement, and feedback? Feel you might be developing the wrong products and simply going through the motions? Your demos should be lively, powerful, insightful, and valuable. In this energized session, join Bob Galen as he shares stories of common patterns he’s seen again and again that increase the value and vibrancy of sprint reviews. Bob discusses agenda setting, marketing, customer focus, why planning is crucial, and execution principles for your sprint reviews. He explores how to gather feedback, measure success, and take further action. Finally, Bob discusses how to demo non-functional and other types of work so your stakeholders “get” the value proposition. In the end, take away strategies and techniques that will change your reviews forever.
Heated debate swirls around agile methods and how to scale them. Most of this energy is created by the perception that there exists but one true way to do agile. Einstein once said, “In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice they never are.” And the topic of agile at scale is the same. Bob Payne pragmatically approaches the discussion of how and when to scale agile. Not surprisingly, the theories about scaling agile methods exhibit similar properties and patterns despite all the dogma. So, why do certain patterns prevail, and how do those patterns change when confronted by the realities of practice? Tradeoffs are inevitable with the choice of how to scale agile practices. Explore the pros and cons of interlinked planning, teams of small teams, transparency, and continuous cross team integration. Let's bust some dogma and at the end of the session discuss specific scaling techniques.
Have limited time monitoring complex projects? Need to be fast on your feet during your teams’ standups? It’s a daunting task to keep track of the current work in flight. Steve Dempsen shares a mnemonic technique―WATCH—to help you think of and articulate critical questions to ask on the fly. For story cards remember W―Where is the card? Where should it be? A―What is the average time for a story this size? Are we on schedule? T―What is the status of testing? Test coverage and complexity? C―Is the story complete? consistent? And H―Is help needed? Who should we turn to? With limited time and complex subjects, ScrumMasters can use each letter in WATCH to quickly help their teams remain aware of the key aspects of development and remain focused on delivering effective solutions.
Today's mobile application development is a complex endeavor made more difficult by teams often working at cross purposes. Separation of roles and responsibilities leads to intricate technological and personnel dependencies that makes projects challenging. Mark Hashimoto shares personal insights and lessons learned during the agile development effort of Comcast XFINITY Home iOS and Android mobile apps. Mark suggests that defining system interfaces first allows client, server, and test teams to develop in parallel; limiting mobile UX reviews to objective matters rather than subjective opinions builds trust and respect; creating binary acceptance criteria removes sprint completion ambiguity; and adhering to disciplined meeting goals reduces wasted time. However, not all lessons learned were of a technical or procedural nature. Mark describes the human dynamics involved and the most common frustrations facing your team—too many meetings, rework caused by ambiguous mobile requirements, missed deadlines, and problems that arise from a lack of time.
“Going agile” at a fifty-person startup is easy; at a 5,000 person ISV it’s impressive; and in a Fortune 500 company it’s often a nightmare. At large scale, the sheer number of legacy systems, stakeholder specific tools, and governance processes can turn even a simple agile deployment into a water-scrum-fall abomination. The ability to scale agile is critical for any size organization aspiring to remain competitive in a software-driven economy. Jeff Downs leads a discussion about being agile by keeping the focus on people—rather than processes and tools—through integration. Jeff introduces several tool-agnostic integration patterns, including defect unification, agile orchestration, and supply chain integration, which are critical to any organization trying to succeed with large scale agile. Learn how these integration patterns lead to an integrated agile tool suite that breaks down the barriers between teams, puts your people in a position to continuously collaborate, and enables a scaled agile initiative.
How agile are you? Once you jump off the waterfall and drink from the agile pool, there will probably be varying opinions as to the state of the organization’s agility. Some will be concerned that they are not agile enough; others will think they are agile while still adhering to old waterfall principles. Adapting to agile requires process changes that can cause friction within and between teams. Max McGregor’s organization Venafi has several teams working on multiple projects, spread worldwide. Even after a number of software releases using agile methods, teams still have challenges. Max provides insight into one mid-sized organization’s evolution through this process—where it’s working well, what the biggest challenges are, and what’s being done to increase its success with agile. Join Max to determine how agile you can or should become, and take back new ideas and methods to your teams to help them succeed.
Since 2009, the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has been researching the adoption and application of agile and lean methods and principles in US government and other highly regulated settings (e.g., finance, healthcare) with regulatory constraints on their development lifecycles. At first, there were few of these organizations practicing agile; six years later the interest level in agile approaches to software (and systems, in some cases) development has increased tremendously. Suzanne Miller shares how agile affects areas such as management and governance, contracting, security, measurement, testing, and systems engineering. Suzanne provides insights into the constraints government organizations and regulated industries typically face when adopting agile principles, notes how changes in the regulatory environment are affecting those adopting agile, and shares both adoption risks and some of the strategies organizations are employing to address them.
It’s usually the finer points of the user experience (UX) design that separate good-enough software from really-great software. For companies launching new products or adding new capabilities, how well they understand their users and their needs differentiates the wild successes from the dismal failures. This is user experience design, and doing it well in the past took experienced specialists and lots of time. But the world has changed. Jeff Patton describes how Lean UX turns product design into a team sport in which everyone participates. Learn how Lean UX thinking breaks what we thought were good design rules. In Lean UX design, it’s OK to guess. It's OK for developers to talk to users. It’s OK for bad artists to design user interfaces. And, it’s OK to demonstrate half-baked ideas. You’d think that if we break all these rules, good user experience couldn’t possibly result—but it does. Jeff shares examples of how all this rule breaking is supported by a culture of experimentation and learning—and that makes all the difference.
Agile—a single word that sparked unprecedented confusion in the technology world. When it went agile, did your organization throw out your business analyst team? Have they banned all requirements documentation? Are teams struggling to see the big picture? Brian Watson has encountered each of these scenarios. Brian reveals the facts and busts the myths about requirements, documentation, teamwork, and the role of the business analyst in an agile environment. The relationship between the product owner and the team often develops through the activities normally associated with business analysts. Learn how this relationship grows through identifying and building a minimum viable product, see which Agile Manifesto principles are critical to business analysts, uncover the truth behind the cost of extensive documentation, determine how to use just enough documentation to be successful, and find out how to harness your business analysis skills to navigate the stormy waters of an agile transformation.
In a classical agile team, testers and developers work together on feature teams to produce functioning software in each sprint. As enterprises scale up their agile adoption, the agile feature teams must work in concert with many other teams, such as component teams and system teams. They may find that they need to interact with a number of technical experts and domain experts—DBAs, architects, user experience experts, business analysts, and others—who form part of the supporting cast. Together, these teams and individuals make up the “team of teams,” often known as the release train. Testers play a key role in each of these teams along the way. Malcolm Isaacs explores each of these teams, their functions, and their interactions with the rest of the enterprise from the perspective of the tester. He discusses testing tools and techniques that testers in each of these enterprise teams can leverage to increase overall quality.
Do you find your work exciting and fulfilling? Is your agile team rewarded for finding better ways to work and innovating? Even though many organizations have adopted agile approaches at a project level, few have effectively aligned their HR processes with agile values or made finding better ways of working a truly rewarding and exciting proposition. With a new generation of employees who are as interested in purpose as in profit, it is imperative that we revisit schemes like the annual review and recognize its limitations, and the damage it causes to individual morale and team productivity. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore the subject of creating a holistic performance management system that not only adheres to agile principles but also actively promotes individual drive and team innovation. Learn how de-link merit pay from feedback, the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, and how to create a “flow state” on your agile teams to enhance performance and spark innovation.
In this session you’ll learn about:
Agilists employ user stories to capture requirements and drive the planning process for iterative and incremental delivery of software. Traditionalists with experience in “big requirements up front” often struggle with the brevity of user stories and how to best communicate requirements. Fadi Stephan explains the basic concepts of user stories, explores the benefits of employing user stories to represent customer requirements, and discusses the attributes of a good user story. He takes a deep dive into common anti-patterns and mistakes that teams make when writing user stories so you can learn to identify and avoid these mistakes. Along the way, determine the right size for a user story, learn how to properly split a user story, and discover different boundaries for prioritizing stories. Understand when a story is ready for development—and how to decompose a story that is not ready. Leave with new insights on how to write effective user stories.
Does speaking to your company’s management or executives about agile scare you half to death? If so, you aren’t alone. Bob Hartman explains the most common scenarios that trigger these fears. An interactive exercise using these scenarios gives you a baseline of insights into the causes of the fear or anxiety we experience in these situations. Bob uses these insights to help you understand the basic skills necessary to effectively communicate with people in positions of authority. He explores the importance of having empathy, understanding motivation, and using basic negotiation skills in the context of having meaningful conversations. In addition, he shares several common communication methods that fall flat when speaking to executives. Bob concludes with an exercise to ensure everyone leaves with the critical understanding of both the positive techniques to use and the negative techniques to avoid during these difficult conversations.
Scrum is an iterative, incremental framework for delivering business value. It is not a Verification and Validation (V&V) approach. So how do we merge Scrum and V&V when a product must be subjected to formal V&V activities? How do we plan V&V work, incorporating it into a Scrum roadmap and backlog? How do we execute the V&V plan while performing development activities? Julie Bouchard and Kathy Aragon briefly describe what V&V is—and what it isn’t. They introduce V&V Navigator, a Government-developed, web-based tool to aid in identifying candidate V&V activities. Julie and Kathy demonstrate the use of Navigator to plan activities and artifacts for V&V, show how to map V&V activities into a Scrum backlog, and explore how to bake V&V into epics and stories “done” criteria. Learn ways to integrate V&V within the Scrum development process—the same as we do testing activities.
User stories are the basis for products built using agile development. User stories are relatively short, comprised of enough information to start the development process, and designed to initiate further conversation about details. Short doesn’t necessarily mean useful. Ambiguous stories are “mysteries wrapped in an enigma”—potentially leading us to develop the wrong product. Phil Ricci explores ways to turn fuzzy user stories into sharply focused stories from their inception. That involves addressing questions of Are we talking with the right people? and Are we asking the right questions? Phil shares a four-step process—Review Description, Clarify User Role, Check for Discrepancies, Critically Review Acceptance Criteria—that sharpens the stories. Setting up a story maintenance schedule sponsored by the Product Owner with guidance from the ScrumMaster ensures that stories remain useful throughout their lifetime.
Transforming an organization to become more agile requires leadership. But what kind of leadership? Who does the leading? When? How? Chris Sims guides you through the process of mapping the styles of leadership needed at various points in your company’s agile transformation. Chris explores the six leadership styles Daniel Goleman described in his Harvard Business Review Study Leadership That Gets Results and learn when each style is effective. He mixes in the Satir Change Model that describes how people and organizations process their way through change. Work in small groups to synthesize these two models, creating a map for applying different leadership styles at points along the change curve of an agile adoption. There is no one correct answer. Each group creates a map based on their experiences and their organizations. Chris facilitates a final review of the maps created to share insights and create deeper understanding.
Ryan Ripley says that Scrum failures can often be traced back to management not understanding their role in an agile world. What gets managed during an agile project? How is success measured? Will I keep my job in the transition? Managers have all these questions and more during an agile transformation. Unfortunately, these fears are not covered during the two-day certification courses. Agile coaches need a plan for how to talk with managers and teach them the best ways to contribute to agile projects. To better understand managers’ concerns, Ryan introduces the concept of personas, representing different managers. He explores ways to “coach up” management and help them get past their concerns and issues. Ryan shares his insights on where managers can improve agile projects, how they can add value in a newly transformed organization, and help pave the way for agile teams to succeed.
Many organizations use teams spread worldwide to develop valuable business applications. These organizations expect the teams to work as one harmonious unit without missing a beat—or should we say, a story point. A few organizations do it well; many not so well. Betsy Kauffman and Oscar Rodriquez share their experiences in working with globally distributed teams, discussing team models implemented in many organizations. They discuss how to transition from a model that may not be optimal (developers onshore and testing offshore) to a model where teams work together to deliver high quality working software regardless of their location. Along the way, explore “non-negotiables” and sustainable software engineering practices, i.e., DevOps and managing/maintaining solid team health, needed for building strong teams. Leave with a set of guiding principles you can implement day one that encompass agile leadership qualities, common sprint cadences, and “rules” to build strong successful teams.
Many agile teams have experienced big problems when implementing test automation. For example, they may discover that a purchased tool is often seen as a “silver bullet” and feel forced to use it even though better options may exist. Melissa Tondi discusses who is affected by automation, where it belongs in the development lifecycle, and when it should start. In addition, Melissa thoughtfully presents common pitfalls—unattainable metrics, tooling missteps, and transitioning a manual test team—that get in the way of a successful implementation and shares recommendations on how to address each of these pitfalls. Find out ways to quickly move up the learning curve from manual testing to automation and take back guidelines on what to automate and when. Don’t throw in the towel on test automation—it’s a critical and required part of all successful agile implementations.
Software development needs to continuously re-invent itself to take full advantage of new and evolving technology trends—and to keep up with user expectations. Are our agile approaches evolving as quickly as the new technologies, or are we being left behind as we use the same methods and techniques of a decade ago? Christin Wiedemann says that the future of agile development is ours to shape, and in shaping it we must be willing to question our habits and overturn today’s conventions. We must create a collaborative environment that encourages creativity and innovation. Christin shares what she means by innovation and why the future of agile depends on innovation. She explores ideas around brainstorming and collaboration, and discusses the importance of having the creativity and courage to investigate new approaches. Christin says we must continuously challenge and question methods, techniques, and core beliefs. Discover new insights that can change how you view the future of agile.
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