Agile + DevOps East 2018 - Requirements & User Stories
Monday, November 5
Getting Started with Acceptance Test-Driven / Behavior-Driven Development
We’ve all been there. We work incredibly hard to develop a feature and design tests based on written requirements. We build a detailed test plan that aligns the tests with the software and the documented business needs. And when we put the tests to the software, it all falls apart because the requirements were changed without informing everyone. Mary Thorn says help is at hand. Enter behavior-driven development (BDD) and Acceptance Test Driven Development(ATDD) practices that help facilitate better communication. Mary explores the nuances of BDD and ATTDD and shows you how to implement BDD...
Getting your User Stories Right-sized and Actionable
NewGetting user stories the right size and actionable has been a challenge ever since agile has been in existence. Join V. Lee Henson for this highly interactive workshop in creating an innovative product or service. Participants will take it from ideation all the way to right-sized backlog items. Beyond knowing what to build, presenting the items in such a way that they do not lose context is also a challenge. Explore user story mapping techniques and acceptance criteria to help make each user story actionable.
Coaching Workshop: Taking Your Scrum to the Next Level
Are you struggling to achieve results from your agile and Scrum teams? Are you having trouble with user story writing or with effective estimation and forecasting? Are your sprint reviews and retrospectives low focus and low energy? What about gaining traction on the organization-side of things? Do your leaders actually understand the underlying principles? Are they measuring things properly? And what about Scrum at Scale—how’s that going? If you have questions, any questions, about how to improve specific practices or generally how to improve your agile journey, then this tutorial is for...
Tuesday, November 6
Advanced Backlog Refinement and Estimation Techniques
One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...
Wednesday, November 7
Continuous Testing Is Not Test Automation
The DevOps movement is front and center across enterprises. Companies with mature systems are breaking down siloed IT departments and federating them into product development teams and departments. Testing and its practices are at the heart of these changes, so companies are turning to continuous testing with the hopes that they can automate their way through the testing bottleneck by focusing on automating regression tests. But this strategy is failing. Adam Auerbach will explain why he thinks that is, what true continuous testing looks like, and how continuous testing should be...
Thursday, November 8
I Got a Fever, and the Only Prescription Is More Feedback
The Second City, an improvisational comedy club that launched the careers of comedians such as Chris Farley, Tina Fey, and Steve Carell, has delivered a successful product to audiences nightly for almost sixty years. How do they do it? By recognizing the power of feedback. Brian Eno, a pioneer in the music industry who produced albums for U2 and Coldplay, relies on a feedback generation system to ensure the best performances of the bands he works with. Likewise, the lean startup movement has uncovered a similar pattern of organizations that thrive on experimentation and learning. John...
What’s Really Going On with Your Team? An Observational Skills Workshop
When it comes to our day-to-day work interactions, there are many factors that pass us by simply because we’re not used to paying attention to them. The best way to become more observant is through deliberate practice, so join Julie Wyman for a brief introduction to themes and different aspects of interactions to start observing, followed by small group exercises to practice observing and to help understand what it feels like to be observed. The exercises will be followed by a debrief and full group discussion about how to observe thoughtfully and share feedback in a neutral, nonjudgmental...
How Design Thinking and Agile Can Be Friends
Agile methodologies do not traditionally allot space, time, or processes for user experience design. Some teams try to accommodate design via separate design sprints that are somewhat coupled to the team's backlog, but these are typically performed two or three sprints ahead. Increasingly, designers are demanding that teams do big, upfront design phases outside of a team's backlog, followed by agile development sprints to implement the design. As markets mature and competition increases, more and more companies must become design-focused or even design-led. Ian and Mary will show you why...
Scaling the Product in an Agile World
In agile, most companies and teams associate “product” with the product owner role. While the product owner role is very important, how does this scale? How do you coordinate priorities across product owners, groups, and product lines? The product owner responsibilities are well-defined for how they interact with their team, but what about other product-related activities? Todd Olson will explore scaling the notion of product in agile organizations. He’ll look at the role beyond the product owner with a renewed focus on the profession of product management, which is often de-emphasized or...
User Stories Are like Onions: Let's Peel Away the Layers
In the world of agile product development, user stories are like onions ... and no, that doesn’t mean they stink or they make you cry (although they have been known to do both). Writing user stories is still one of the hardest crafts in agile product development today. We all know that a good user story can be the difference between a low-performing Scrum team and a high-performing one. Katrina Thacker will introduce the "onion pattern" as a paradigm for creating great user stories, and she will lead you through a series of hands-on exercises to practice applying the pattern. In this...