Agile Dev West 2017 - Business User
Monday, June 5
Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers
PreviewGit clients and the GitHub cloud have achieved an enviable adoption rate. Major corporations as well as open source projects now host their code on GitHub. Developers, DevOps, and non-technical writers alike now use Git to work with text files in a way that enables them to go back to specific versions at any point in time. Websites at GitHub.io are proliferating. Job interviewers look to GitHub to gauge each individual's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Join Wilson Mar in this hands-on tutorial to become immediately productive with these vital tools. Wilson has...
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the 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 and user...
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...
Tuesday, June 6
Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX): Keep Your Users Coming Back
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...
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...
Wednesday, June 7
Storytelling Techniques for Better Requirements
Do you struggle with making your ideas clear and understandable to others? Does it annoy you to sit in requirements sessions for hours only to leave with more questions than answers? As human beings, we’re made for storytelling. It is a natural form of communication. So, Jeff Howey suggests that we use some of the same techniques we use talking to friends and family when trying to share our complex ideas and define software requirements. Whether you are a product owner or a traditional business analyst trying to make your approach to requirements more lean and nimble, join Jeff to explore...
Shave Mobile Development Time and Cost with Xamarin
By shaving time and cost to build and maintain your app by half, Xamarin—a free, open source framework offered by Microsoft—can revolutionize your mobile application development. Most app development approaches result in building the app twice—once for iOS and once for Android—or producing a sluggish app that has an inconsistent HTML-driven user interface. Xamarin lets you write C# code that’s compiled for each operating system to leverage each platform’s native UI, API access, and performance. Create an app that feels and performs like it was custom-built for that device, while sharing 90...
Thursday, June 8
Big Data: The Magic to Attain New Heights
There is magic in Big Data. There are also goblins, fairies, and rainbow-colored unicorns. The problem is to take all that data and turn it into magical insights that help make your software products better and help the business grow. Ken Johnston has been employing data for decision-making for years in service operations, cloud development, A/B testing, and recently with business intelligence. Ken shares examples of building big data infrastructures, using telemetry to predict and react to service outages, deploying A/B experiments to drive post sales monetization, mining text data for...
Your Resume is Now What You Do on GitHub
Increasingly, recruiters are looking at GitHub accounts to identify candidates who demonstrate a proven history of work over several years with specific technologies. Rather than looking at your résumé, employers prefer looking at your GitHub account because it’s verifiable. Anyone can analyze your GitHub history to see what you have been working on, when, with whom, and with what technologies. They can see how “technical” you are by what type of files you changed. Wilson Mar helps you create your own GitHub account, your personal website available from anywhere in the world, with keywords...