Conference archive

Agile Dev West 2016 - Product Owner

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’...

ME

Leading Change—Even If You’re Not in Charge

Monday, June 6, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Tuesday, June 7

Tricia Broderick
Agile For All
TE

Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning

Sold Out!
Tuesday, June 7, 2016 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Linda Rising
Independent Consultant
TN

Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas

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

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

Linda Rising
Independent Consultant
K2

The Power of an Agile Mindset

Wednesday, June 8, 2016 - 10:00am to 11:00am

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...

Mike Cottmeyer
LeadingAgile, LLC
AW1

Three Things You MUST Know to Transform into an Agile Enterprise

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

The farther we go down the path of scaled agile transformation, the more we learn that adding process and complexity can only take us so far. At some point, size and complexity are going limit our ability to be truly agile, and we must move toward greater organizational simplicity. The challenge is that large organizations are often complex and usually anything but simple. Most agile transformations start by either ignoring the complexity inherent in the system or by wrapping complexity in planning constructs that may help in the short run but ultimately doom your business agility. Mike...

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...

Jason Arbon
Appdiff.com
BW2

Mobile App Testing: Planning, Priorities, Execution, and Reporting

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

When testers transition from web to mobile testing, they often miss the most important issues. The biggest challenge in mobile testing is knowing the mobile-specific issues—knowing what to test, in which order, and how. Jason Arbon shares his learnings from manual and automated testing of thousands of apps, and tips from working with top app teams. How do you balance functional with performance testing? Which, if any, tests should you automate? Should tests be executed on real devices or emulators? How do you best leverage your on-site, vendors, beta testers, and app store feedback? What...

Adrian Thibodeau
Standard & Poors Rating Services
Chintan Pandya
Standard & Poors Rating Services
BW3

End-to-End Quality Approach: 14 Levels of Testing

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

In 2015, the Standard & Poor’s Ratings IT team set out an ambitious objective—to tighten the process and controls around the quality of code deployed to production. Based on internal cost of quality assessments, and supporting agile and waterfall internal engineering processes, distinct testing levels were identified to help push quality left and root out the underlying causes of defects as early as possible. The ‘14 Levels of Testing’ were defined to collaboratively span organizational functions, establish quality expectations, and help track towards the goal of eliminating defects....

Jonah Stiennon
Sauce Labs
DW1

DevOps Is More than Just Dev and Ops: Don’t Forget Testing

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

What exactly is DevOps? It’s not just Dev, and it’s not just Ops. In fact, successful DevOps implementations meld development and operations activities with agile practices and a strong dose of automated testing. Organizations cannot afford to wait for a manual testing process to do the job. Developers need fast feedback loops, and managers need agile organizations. Join Jonah Stiennon as he discusses the importance of agile and testing in DevOps. Jonah introduces practical ways engineering departments can shorten the iteration cycle between Dev and Test. Automating the repetitive parts of...

Jon Stahl
LeanDog
AW5

The Lean Executive Agility Framework

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

In today’s business environment, organizations cannot afford to resist change and move slowly. They have to move quickly, adapt frequently, and turn on a dime when conditions demand it. This is not always easy to do. Organizations of all shapes and sizes can become rooted in habits and processes that get in the way of efficiency and productivity. Adopting lean and agile practices is a great way to break free from those impediments. However, if leaders want their teams to be transparent and agile, the leaders must first embrace those practices themselves and lead by example. Based on his...

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...

Rick_Faulise
tap | QA
BW5

Mobile Untethered: Lessons Learned without the Wires

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

Are you looking for insight into real-life companies and how “going mobile” has changed the roles for developers and testers in their organizations? Jennifer Bonine and Rick Faulise share strategies that have worked—and not worked—for organizations. What do you, as a developer or tester, need to think about when you move into mobile web and mobile apps? It is important to understand the changes required in your skillset and to keep up to date on what organizations are looking for in their resources as they embark on their mobile strategies. Jennifer and Rick explore the state of mobile...

Gavin Gray
Oomf, Inc.
BW8

Borrowing Best-of-Breed Software Delivery Techniques for the Internet of Things

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

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...

Thursday, June 9

Sven Peters
Atlassian
K3

How to Do Kick-Ass Software Development

Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 8:30am to 9:45am

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...

Neal Herman
BD Biosciences
AT2

Implementing Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment

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

Developing medical devices that are subject to FDA approval has traditionally followed the waterfall methodology, largely due to the structure of the regulations that govern development practices. But we know from myriad case studies in different industries that agile methodologies are far superior in providing the highest value to customers in the shortest time to market. Neal Herman shares how one developer of complex medical devices embraced agile software development practices and proved that it could not only develop software faster with higher quality but also meet all regulatory...

Woody Zuill
Independent Consultant
AT4

Continuous Discovery: The Path to Learning and Growing

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

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...

Linda Rising
Independent Consultant
BT1

Experiments: The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful

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

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...

Lorraine Aguilar
Working Harmony, Inc.
BT8

A Simple Tool for Speaking Honestly and Constructively

Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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....

Dan Rawsthorne
3Back, LLC
AT15

Scaling Scrum with Scrum™ (SSwS): A Universal Framework

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

Scrum is a simple framework allowing a single team, working from a single backlog, to maximize the value it delivers to its stakeholders. Unfortunately, your organization probably has more than one team and more than one backlog—but you still need to maximize the value to your stakeholders. You need Scrum, but how do you scale it for your organization? Dan Rawsthorne proposes Scale Scrum with Scrum™; tie your organization’s development scrum teams together with Leadership Teams and Coordination Teams. These are scrum teams that assure that each development team has a backlog, that the...

BT11

Create Brainstorming Commandos for Creative Problem Solving

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

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...

Steve Winter
Guerrilla QA
K4

Internet of Things and the Wisdom of Mobile

Thursday, June 9, 2016 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

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...