Agile Dev West 2016 - Quality Assurance
Monday, June 6
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...
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused 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. Ken Pugh 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. Ken explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
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...
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...
Three Things You MUST Know to Transform into an Agile Enterprise
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...
Integrate Regulatory Auditing with Agile
When attempting to audit agile in regulated enterprises, auditors all too often hear “We are agile, so we have no evidence for you to examine.” For a profession rooted in plan-driven methodologies—from validating software development to documenting audit work papers—agile presents a unique conundrum for auditors. Join Chong Ee as he explores ways for agile teams to develop and sustain an open dialogue with auditors on internal controls. From updating age-old mindsets such as segregated development and testing phases to employing the agile artifacts of user stories and burndown charts,...
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...