Agile Dev West 2016 - Test Automation Engineer
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...
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...
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...
What DevOps Means for Testers: Tips for Getting Testers Involved
DevOps is more than a buzzword or passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly delivering 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. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...
Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development
Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways that test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection, appropriate automation design, and team collaboration can be combined...
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
DevOps and the Culture of High-Performing Software Organizations
The DevOps movement emphasizes the importance of culture in creating high-performing teams. However, often perceived to be subjective and intractable, culture is often neglected in favor of more concrete drivers such as tools and processes. And this is a major failure mode in organizations attempting to achieve substantially improved performance through implementing agile and DevOps. Jez Humble takes a practical, data-driven approach to culture, illustrated with examples from large, successful enterprises. Learn how to measure culture and examine what a generative, high-performance culture...
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...
DevOps Is More than Just Dev and Ops: Don’t Forget Testing
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...
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...
Implementing Agile in an FDA Regulated Environment
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...
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...