Agile Development Practices East

AW1

Sean Buck

George Schlitz

Becoming Agile
Zero to Agile in Three+ Years: It's a Marathon

Sean Buck, The Capital Group Companies, Inc. George Schlitz, BigVisible Solutions Agile transformations for large organizations can have mixed results—and often fail miserably if the goal is to become an “agile organization.” Sean Buck shares the story of The Capital Group Companies, a 7,000 person organization, which took a value-based approach to adoption. Rather than attempting a big bang implementation, Sean’s company and its agile transformation team planned for the long “run”—a marathon. Sean explains why organizations which proceed too quickly or take a tools-focused approach usually see their teams slip back to the old ways after initially impressive results. George Schlitz, who participated throughout their transformation, shares specific approaches and tools you should consider for your organization’s adoption plans. He describes the staged model they employed for organizational transformation and how their strategies changed during each stage. Take back new strategies for making necessary cultural changes and a valuable tool to identify champions and resisters—and how to deal with both. Learn more about Sean Buck, George Schlitz

AW2

Ken Pugh

Agile Requirements
INVEST: Agile Requirements that Tell a Story

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives Unlike traditional requirements—formal specification documents produced mostly up front—agile requirements are elicited and recorded in smaller units—called stories or user stories that are generated quickly with a just-in-time approach. Through the INVEST approach—Independent, Negotiable, Valuable, Estimable, Small, and Testable—Ken Pugh shows agile teams how to produce stories that offer the most value with the least effort. He explains the relationship between stories and traditional requirements models, such as use cases and state-event-response tables, and describes how to develop more details for stories only on an as-needed basis. Ken demonstrates ways to break large stories down into smaller, easier-to-estimate ones that address the needs of business analysts and developers. Learn how to replace detailed requirements with high-level stories and acceptance tests that explicitly confirm that the system does what the customer expects. Take back a practical approach for managing stories and keeping track of deferred stories that will be needed for future enhancements. Learn more about Ken Pugh

AW3

Jared Richardson

Agile Development Techniques
Continuous Integration: Sign of a Great Shop

Jared Richardson, RoleModel Software Relentless automation is the sign that your software team has discovered how valuable their time is and how much of their day can be wasted performing trivial tasks. Using Jenkins, an open source tool as an example, Jared Richardson demonstrates how to get started with continuous integration, a powerful automation technique that binds your team together and help ensures that your project runs smoothly and efficiently. The concept is simple—after every code check in, code is compiled and comprehensive automated tests are run. However, like so many great techniques, it’s easy to describe but difficult to master. Jared explains how continuous integration, implemented with the appropriate tools, forces frequent developer integrations, thus eliminating a large amount of uncertainty and project jitter. Learn why continuous integration encourages developers to share code more frequently and produces a culture that demands comprehensive and maintainable automated tests. Learn more about Jared Richardson

AW4

Henrik Andersson

Agile Testing
Test Specialist on Agile Teams: A New Paradigm for Testers

Henrik Andersson, Jayway As a tester on an agile team, are you still creating lots of scripted test cases the old way? Are you still caught in the classic waterfall—always behind—while the rest of the team is doing Scrum and looking forward? Then, change course and work with your team to become a test specialist, coordinating testing rather than only doing testing. Henrik Andersson describes his experiences on a Scrum team and their transition to his test specialist role. To orchestrate such a change, they needed new tools and approaches. So, Henrik gives a short introduction to behavior-driven development. For developing automated unit tests, he describes how their team learned to write tests in English-like Gherkin notation. Then, he demonstrates Developers’ Exploratory Testing, in which the entire team tests together and shares joint responsibility for the quality of the software. Take back a fresh perspective on the skills and tools testers need to become test specialists. Learn more about Henrik Andersson

AW5

David Hussman

Becoming Agile
Designing Agility that Lasts

David Hussman, DevJam Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and complete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban or the ways of the Lean Start Up crowd. Instead of stumbling onto one path or another, come to this session where David Hussman teaches tools for assessing and designing an agile process or set of practices which speaks to your needs and constraints. David covers selecting product planning tools like user stories, iterative delivery tools like kanban boards, tracking tools like burn up and more. If you want to clear the fog surrounding what will really help you, stop in and ask your questions. You will find answers. Learn more about David Hussman

AW6

Rob Sabourin

Agile Requirements
User Stories from MONOPOLY: Complex Rules, Random Events, and Twisted Exceptions

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com Agile developers often face the difficult task of defining user stories from business rules for complex applications—medical, embedded, insurance, banking applications, etc. In his consulting practice, Rob Sabourin helps teams elicit and describe stories for thorny business rules, multi-path conditions, time/event triggered activities, awkward dynamics, special cases, unusual constraints, exceptions, and non-functional characteristics. Using the popular board game MONOPOLY as a metaphor, Rob shows you how to develop user stories that focus development in different business contexts. He models MONOPOLY stories around personas—the little token players move around the board. If you land on Boardwalk’s hotel after rolling a third double, you Go to Jail rent free. Rent is not owed unless requested and is exempt if the landlord procrastinates. Learn how to construct graceful agile stories from even the most complex real-world business rules to ensure you’ll always collect $200 when passing Go and Get Out of Jail free every time. Learn more about Rob Sabourin

AW7

Mik Kersten

Agile Development Techniques
Ten Great Practices Learned from Open Source Projects

Mik Kersten, Tasktop Technologies Open source development combines distributed teams, resource constraints, and an overload of end user input. Despite these challenges, the velocity of many popular open source projects is measurably higher than that of their enterprise counterparts. The time has come to take the lessons learned from open source and adapt them to enterprise agile. Mik Kersten begins with an examination of successful open source projects and their approaches to agile delivery. Then he reviews the overlap of open source approaches and agile methods, identifying ten great practices that agile practitioners can apply to improve their collaboration and productivity. Each practice is grounded in empirical data that Mik collected from public open source websites. To provide an intuitive appreciation for the open style of agile delivery, Mik illustrates with graphics and visual aids how open source collaboration evolves and grows over time. Learn novel strategies for connecting the lean/agile methodologies and open source development for your large-scale enterprise project. Learn more about Mik Kersten

AW8

Griffin Jones

Agile Testing
Surviving an FDA Audit: Heuristics for Exploratory Testing

Griffin Jones, iCardiac Technologies In FDA regulated industries, audits are high-stakes, fact-finding exercises required to verify compliance to regulations and an organization’s internal procedures. Although exploratory testing has emerged as a powerful test approach within regulated industries, an audit is the impact point where exploratory testing and regulatory worlds collide. Griffin Jones describes a heuristic model—Congruence, Honesty, Competence, Appropriate Process Model, Willingness, Control, and Evidence—his team used to survive an audit. You can use this model to prepare for an audit or to baseline your current practices for an improvement program. Griffin highlights the common misconceptions and traps to avoid with exploratory testing in your regulated industry. Avoid mutual misunderstandings that can trigger episodes of incongruous behavior and an unsuccessful audit. Learn how to maintain your composure during a stressful audit and leave with valuable heuristics to help you organize and present your exploratory testing results with confidence. Learn more about Griffin Jones

AW9

Sanjiv Augustine

Becoming Agile
The Agile PMO: From Process Police to Adaptive Governance

Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed, LLC Although success stories from individual agile teams on single projects abound, agile adoptions encounter significant challenges scaling to multiple teams on multiple projects. The Project Management Office (PMO), which often remains poorly defined in agile environments, offers the perfect place to oversee and adapt to govern your agile adoption. Sanjiv Augustine shares success stories from industry-leading organizations that are scaling agile to large projects and across many smaller projects. These organizations have developed PMO managers who bring lean discipline to project prioritization, track and monitor the value delivery across projects, support stable teams for higher productivity, and enable mature process adoption. Rather than focusing more on process compliance than business results, they help teams carefully and adaptively apply metrics, tools, and high-level standardization to their agile teams. Learn how PMOs can lead agile teams by serving them and scale agile adoption across the enterprise. Learn more about Sanjiv Augustine

AW10

Chris Duro

Agile Requirements
Agile Requirements Readiness … and the Role of Testers

Chris Duro, Cognizant Mature agile teams work together to ensure sufficient requirement information is ready when an iteration starts. However, on many teams, developers lack this support and may receive overly detailed—and often ambiguous—requirements that are “thrown over the wall.” Drawing on recent industry research and successes of companies with which he’s worked, Chris Duro shares stories from three companies that evolved an agile adoption requirements readiness assessment framework. They used this framework to quantify the requirements problems, obtain management visibility, and win improvements in their requirements process. Chris answers key questions about the framework: How is readiness defined and measured? What is the tester’s role in agile requirements development? How can agile teams check thousands of requirement document pages automatically? Discover how developers and testers are working together with users and business analysts to improve the quality of requirements. Take back an assessment template to determine if your organization is ready for agile adoption and what to do to get you there. Learn more about Chris Duro

AW11

Tony Young

Agile Development Techniques
Agile Development on Large Legacy Architecture

Tony Young, Integrated Research Twenty years of traditional processes produced valuable applications at Integrated Research (IR). However, making changes to software was slow and often introduced quality problems that took months to resolve. When one of their customers offered a great new opportunity, IR had to move with speed they did not possess and achieve a quality level that their old ways would not permit. Tony Young shares how his organization introduced agile methodologies on that critical project, giving immediate benefits of speed, focus, visibility, and quality. He describes how Scrum and Kanban practices—daily scrums, pair programming, short sprints, test-driven development, backlogs, and continuous integration—were rolled out across several agile teams. Learn how IR got CEO support for agile, convinced developers to adopt agile practices, evaluated their progress with metrics, and maintained a unified system architecture using a Scrum-of-Scrums. If you work on a large product or architecture with decades of history or millions of lines of code, this session is for you. Learn more about Tony Young

AW12

Gil Zilberfeld

Agile Testing
Eight Principles for Better Unit Testing

Gil Zilberfeld, Typemock Unit testing is a core component of agile development methodologies. Teams that perform comprehensive unit testing are perceived to be more reliable, professional, and advanced. Yet, many developers find starting unit testing is difficult. They test the wrong things, often with fragile tests that must be rewritten. Many give up even before realizing the value that unit testing brings. It doesn’t have to be that way! Gil Zilberfeld explains important principles for better unit testing: choosing what to test first, selecting the most appropriate tools, determining what to include in unit tests and what to defer to integration tests, measuring progress, understanding the differences between designing unit tests for new projects vs. legacy code, and more. Learn how to overcome resistance and get the entire team on board. There’s no reason to make the same mistakes others have made. Don’t get stuck with bad tests or the wrong tool. Join Gil and learn how to do unit testing right. Learn more about Gil Zilberfeld