Agile Dev West 2016 - Business User
Monday, June 6
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
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’...
A/B Testing: Improvements through Continuous Experimentation
“The goal of a lean startup is to learn what is valuable to a customer” (Eric Ries, The Lean Startup). Do you know what is valuable to your customers? Can you measure which improvements result in more engagement, more sales, or more long-term use of your product? A/B testing―or experimentation―is one way for software teams to learn more about how customers use software, and which changes drive customer engagement and satisfaction. In this fun and interactive tutorial, Alan Page begins with the basics of experimentation, including everything you need to build a minimal...
Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in Charge
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your...
Avoid Critical UX Mistakes to Delight Your Users
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 do that? With a UX that...
Tuesday, June 7
Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning
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 agile environment, learning...
Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas
We attend conferences, read books and articles, and discover new ideas we want to bring into our organizations—but we often struggle when trying to implement those changes. Unfortunately, those introducing change are not always welcomed with open arms. Linda Rising offers proven change management strategies to help you become a more successful agent of change in your organization. Learn how to plant effective seeds of change, and what forces in your organization drive or block change. These approaches, strategies, and patterns are useful in many different settings—not only to change your...
Wednesday, June 8
The Power of an Agile Mindset
Linda Rising, co-author of Fearless Change and the recently published More Fearless Change, has wondered for some time whether much of Agile's success has been the result of the placebo effect—that is, good things happened because we believed they would. The placebo effect is a startling reminder of the power our minds have over our perceived reality. Now cognitive scientists tell us that this is only a small part of what our minds can do. Research has identified what she likes to call “an agile mindset”—an attitude that equates failure and problems with opportunities for...
Determining Business Value in Agile Development
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...
Blending Product Discovery and Product Delivery
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...
From Unclear and Unrealistic Requirements to Achievable User Stories
"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...
Borrowing Best-of-Breed Software Delivery Techniques for the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the landscape of the traditional consumer electronics market. More and more electronic devices—from lightbulbs to thermostats to wrist watches—are now capable of being monitored and controlled from anywhere in the world. The increasing market demand for cloud-connected IoT devices is encouraging cohesion within traditionally disparate cloud- and hardware-oriented engineering organizations. While cloud-oriented organizations are well-suited to rapidly or even continuously delivering cloud-based software, hardware-oriented organizations historically...
The Challenges of Testing a Wearable Banking Application
In many ways, the rapidly evolving mobile banking application industry is challenging for testers. Adding a wearable device brings new challenges, new user behaviors, and untested devices. To ensure a well-tested product, what changes and adaptations do you need to make to your test approach? Carl Johnson shares his hands-on experiences going from testing a mobile banking application to testing a wearable “watch-bank,” an application that makes it possible for customers to see balances and transactions on their smartwatches. Carl presents examples of his learnings—tools that could help you...
Thursday, June 9
How to Do Kick-Ass Software Development
Software development is hard― keeping developers, testers, designers, product managers and other stakeholders in sync and working on the right things at the right time. Building the systems that customers care about and delivering high-quality code fast are challenges every development team faces. Just being agile isn’t enough; we need to actively think about how we can improve software development processes and techniques. Sven details Atlassian’s coding practices and team dynamics, which include: collaborating fast to develop ideas, helping QA with testing, avoiding meetings to get...
Continuous Discovery: The Path to Learning and Growing
Software development is a process of continuous discovery. When writing software, we create ideas, we try them in code, we learn what works and what doesn’t—and that steers us to a better solution. And sometimes we do this all day long! Woody Zuill says that this same process of continuous discovery works for making improvements for our teams, and in our workplaces and organizations. With continuous discovery we do numerous micro experiments that guide us along the path to a better future. If we follow the values and principles expressed in the Agile Manifesto, which provides us a powerful...
Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful
Through the years, Linda Rising has given presentations about the use of stories instead of science in the industry, so in this session she has decided to be more helpful and talk about experiments. There's an increasing emphasis on experiments as a part of being more innovative but sometimes Linda says we need a nudge and some examples to help us get going. No, this is not too rigorous! Rather than talking about statistics, she is going to explore cheap, easy experiments—what to do, what to be aware of, and our own cognitive biases, including the confirmation bias that does its best to...
A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively
Are you on a team where people avoid conflict or shy away from saying anything that might sound critical? Reluctance to speak up can block important challenges from being identified, and deny your team and organization the opportunity to learn and improve. According to Lorraine Aguilar, this avoidance is most evident in peer-to-peer communications. Lorraine designed a tool for agile coaches, facilitators, and team leaders who want to make it easy and safe for people to speak authentically during retrospectives and other opportunities for performance feedback and continuous improvement....
Create Brainstorming Commandos for Creative Problem Solving
Agile teams are solving real-world complex problems every day. These problems require creative problem solving by team members. In its truest sense, brainstorming is intended to be a practical approach to this task. Brainstorming entails “using the brain to storm a creative problem and to do so in commando fashion, with each 'stormer' audaciously attacking the same objective.” In this highly practical workshop, Pradeepa Narayanaswamy introduces you to a variety of brainstorming games that get the creative juices flowing to yield better collaboration and ideas among team members. Delegates...
Internet of Things and the Wisdom of Mobile
The Internet of Things—what many are calling the Fourth Industrial Revolution—is shaping up to be a game-changing marvel as great as the Internet itself. With more than 10 billion connected devices and thousands more coming online by the minute, we are undoubtedly more connected than ever before. From your dishwasher to your toothbrush to your dog’s collar, electronic devices everywhere are connected. This phenomenon is drastically increasing demands on APIs, data, security, and software quality, pushing every industry sector to step up its game to stay relevant in the new era of...