Conference archive

Agile Dev West 2016 - Business Analysis & Requirements

Sunday, June 5

Arlen Bankston
LitheSpeed

Product Owner Certification (2-Day)

Sunday, June 5, 2016 - 8:30am to Monday, June 6, 2016 - 5:00pm

Monday, June 6

Jeff Patton
Jeff Patton & Associates
MB

Great Product Design with User Story Mapping

Monday, June 6, 2016 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model,which 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 your customer’s and user’...

Ken Pugh
Net Objectives
MI

Acceptance Test-Driven Development

Sold Out!
Monday, June 6, 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 productivity and reduce...

Tuesday, June 7

Jez Humble
Jez Humble & Associates LLC
TI

High-Performance Product Development

Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Large organizations often struggle with the software part of product development when they attempt to create innovative services and products, Obstacles they face are often related to organizational culture and project/program management paradigms that do not take advantage of the unique characteristics of software. In this tutorial session—designed for directors of IT, program/project managers, and software professionals—Jez Humble describes how large—and small—organizations can take a lean approach to developing new products and run large scale product development programs. Jez shows how...

Wednesday, June 8

Ken Pugh
Net Objectives
AW2

Determining Business Value in Agile Development

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Both agile and lean focus on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible. On agile projects, story points are often used to estimate and track development effort for user stories. However, to concentrate on delivering value, we must be able to place a business value on these stories. Through lecture and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh explains how to estimate and track business value, presenting two methods for quickly estimating value for features and stories. He shows the relationships between business value and story points, and discusses how to chart business...

David Hussman
DevJam
AW3

Blending Product Discovery and Product Delivery

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

More and more organizations are realizing that while they are getting more done, they are not necessarily getting more value. More code does not mean more product and more product does not mean more market share. According to David Hussman, we need to shift our focus toward a balanced investment in discovery and delivery without going back to gathering big requirements up front. To accomplish this, we need to embrace new discovery metaphors and practices. David draws on his years of experience working with product managers, heads of product, and product owners as he introduces ideas like...

Jamie Lynn Cooke
Both Hemispheres, LLC
AW7

From Unclear and Unrealistic Requirements to Achievable User Stories

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

"What do you want the system to do?" can be a loaded question for agile teams. Ideally, the product owner gives you a product backlog with fully groomed user stories prioritized by business value, ready for team discussion and estimation. Instead, you may have the “big picture” product owner who can describe high level requirements but struggles to provide clear direction on specific system behavior, or the “aspiring developer” product owner who is more than happy to give you exact system implementation in intricate technical detail. You may have the “kid in a candy shop” product owner who...

Chris Sims
Agile Learning Labs
AW11

Your User Stories Are Too Big: Yes, They Are!

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

When a user story is too big, it is harder to understand, estimate, and implement successfully. Some teams break the “business story” into “technical stories” but this generally doesn’t help because most or all of the technical stories need to be completed before there is anything meaningful for the stakeholders. There is a better way. Chris Sims teaches four simple yet powerful techniques for breaking big stories into smaller stories that are meaningful to stakeholders and deliver incremental business value. For each of the four techniques, Chris models the technique and then gives...

Thursday, June 9

Cathy Sargent
The Jackson Laboratory
BT2

Use Business Analysts for User Interface Design

Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Have you experienced difficulties eliciting “what would you like the system to do” from customers and SMEs? Have you then delivered the system only to find that the users don’t like it, even though it meets their stated requirements exactly? Cathy Sargent shares a technique for using mockups early in the development process to help overcome the challenges of gathering complete functional and business requirements, and establishing a mutual understanding of what a system should do. Put a visual representation of the application in the hands of your SMEs, testers, trainers, and development...

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT10

Great Business Analysts “Think Like a Freak”

Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

In today's competitive market, employers increasingly depend on business analysts to act as change agents. This puts BAs in the powerful position of influencers—providing the analysis and evidence needed to support an organization’s strategic direction and decision-making. In their book, Think Like a Freak, Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner provide a blueprint for critical thinking, offering to “retrain our brains” toward a new approach to problem-solving. Faye Thompson explores this framework and how the popular economists have used it to analyze complex economic problems. Faye then...