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Better Software East 2011
Monday Tutorials
See Sessions From:
Monday
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Tuesday
MA
Agile Benchmarking and Release Estimation: Building Your Own Metrics Database
Michael Mah, QSM Associates
How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to create measurements of productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action in retrospectives and release estimation and planning. Using hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
To take full advantage of this session, participants need to bring a laptop computer for metrics capture and productivity calculations.
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Michael Mah
MB
Product Discovery with User Story Mapping
Jeff Patton, Jeff Patton & Associates
Exactly how much work should you do up front in an agile project? How long should it take? Who should be involved? On agile projects, these are difficult and often unanswered questions for product owners and those responsible for developing the requirements. In this hands-on tutorial, Jeff Patton offers a comprehensive recipe for the fast-paced and collaborative discovery phase—often called sprint zero—that precedes the first delivery sprint. To guide construction of a story map, practice creating simple personas to describe each user’s expected experience with the product. Working in teams, you’ll identify minimal viable releases prioritized and driven by market outcomes. Learn a new way to quickly sketch user interfaces. Get practical tips on sizing the higher-level stories you’ll certainly encounter in an incremental release plan and leave with the essential workflow and practices you’ll need to plan your next product discovery phase.
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Jeff Patton
MC
Project Assessments: Knowing Where You Stand
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
It has been compared to jumping onto a moving train—the project has left the station and now you must determine its health and assess where it has been, where it is, and where it is going. Whether you are a project manager, a sponsor evaluating the contents of your portfolio, an auditor, or a consultant just trying to help, you often must assess the situation quickly and identify and prioritize areas requiring further analysis. Payson Hall helps you build and reinforce your project assessment skills and provides helpful task lists and checklists to support your assessment efforts. Take away an introduction to the project management principles that guide an assessment; a model to help establish a context for the review based upon project size, complexity, business risk, and the maturity level of the organization; and practical techniques to get up to speed quickly. Learn what work products to ask for to facilitate orientation and maximize review efficiency, gain an approach to critically review project work products, and obtain and work with checklists and questionnaires that facilitate quick orientation and identification of areas needing further analysis.
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Payson Hall
MD
Going Back to the Well: Principles of Software Design
Chuck Allison, Utah Valley University
Software development is a creative activity. Developing great software requires harnessing that creativity for profitable and productive ends. While the complexity inherent in software makes that challenging, adhering to sound software design principles—modularity, proven patterns, clean code, and more—is key. Chuck Allison describes and demonstrates good software design principles, discovered through hard-won expertise which, when combined with common sense and a bit of luck, balances the forces at play on all levels of application design. Chuck shares timely and timeless advice: Don't repeat yourself, Make interfaces easy to use and difficult to misuse, Program to an abstraction, Separate things that change from things that don't, Favor composition over inheritance, Don't talk to strangers, and more. Join Chuck as he illustrates these enduring principles using modern programming languages and real-world contexts.
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Chuck Allison
ME
Tuning and Improving Your Agility
David Hussman, DevJam
Are you using agile practices and still struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others to sustain and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his personal coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, road mapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings. David divides the journey to deliver value into four essential areas: growing community and vision; planning releases and iterative delivery; delivering value; and continuous learning and improvement. For each area, David offers tools for evaluating the value you are getting for each agile ceremony you are using. If your stand up meetings lack energy or your planning meetings aren’t doing it, this session is for you. Standing and meeting are easy—getting the most value out of them is hard.
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David Hussman
MF
From Zero to Hero: Getting Started with Kanban
Chris Shinkle, Software Engineering Professionals
Kanban is a proven tool for scheduling production—telling you what to produce, how much to produce, and when to produce it. It does this by visualizing workflow and limiting work in progress (WIP). More and more people are turning to Kanban to manage their software development projects. Whether you are a project manager, product owner, or consultant, you will benefit from better visualizing the actual state of your project and making better scheduling decisions. Join Chris Shinkle for this interactive tutorial on Kanban in which he demonstrates the process he uses with clients to design and implement a Kanban system. Chris discusses how to visualize your workflow, set WIP limits, identify classes of service, recognize areas for improvement, kick off a Kanban team, and more. The information Chris presents isn’t just theory but practical knowledge based on real world experiences in successful iterations with multiple clients spanning multiple industries.
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Chris Shinkle
MG
Dynamics of the Agile Center of Excellence
Bob Galen, iContact
In software testing there is the notion of a “Center of Excellence” (COE) as an organization where techniques, expertise, strategies, tooling, and guidance are collocated to increase an organization’s testing capabilities. The variety of methodologies and organizational challenges associated with truly sustainable agile adoption lend themselves to this same model. Organizations are beginning to establish Agile COEs as a means of guiding their agile adoption. Join Bob Galen as he explores the nuances and dynamics of the Agile COE. Bob discusses the contexts in which a COE can be helpful and defines critical factors for adoption. Explore key focus areas for the COE including: continuous integration, agile tool sets, distributed team support, integration with PMO and governance, team training and certification, establishing standards, organizational coaching, implications of large-scale agile, and strategies for guiding effective adoption. Bob concludes by discussing how to establish an agile services portfolio and effective SLAs that empower COE-services delivery.
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Bob Galen
MH
Test Management: Being Relevant and Making a Difference
Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants
As the manager of testing, do you sometimes feel you’re a lone voice for getting sufficient test resources on projects? Julie Gardiner provides a framework of "quick-wins" for test managers and team leaders who need to show the value of good testing on their projects. First, Julie shares examples of clear and concise testing policy statements—agreed to and sanctioned by senior management—which provide a foundation for testing goals and objectives. Then, Julie explores seven powerful monitoring and predicting techniques that enable you to provide timely, relevant information so that stakeholders can make the best decisions. Learn about three objective measures that demonstrate the concrete value of testing—even though testing does not produce a production product. Take away a set of spreadsheets, sample documents, and utilities to support your activities as managers of test. Develop a new appreciation for the relevance of testing today, and the difference it can make on your development projects.
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Julie Gardiner
MJ
Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Free. Is anything free these days? Based on Pollyanna Pixton’s experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, she shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is to shares ways to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back. Third is empowering teams to make decisions by helping them understand and internalize the project and product’s purpose and value. Number four—you can only fix processes, not people. Invest your energy toward the correct target. Idea five is to match people’s roles to their passions. Her sixth free tip is that integrity matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.
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Pollyanna Pixton
MK
Agile Project Design: Building Strong Backlogs
David Hussman, DevJam
Lasting agility includes meaningful project design. David Hussman shares techniques he uses to fill product backlogs with the right stuff. He explains story mapping, pragmatic personas, and sketching in ways that smoke out user needs, the source of real product value. David shows how to find the people with the right skills and get them aligned through collaborative chartering. From there, he moves on to pragmatic personas as tools that launch rich discussions about your target market and their needs. Using chartering and personas, David teaches story mapping as a tool to visualize the user experience and discover real needs and delivery options. David explains each practice as part of an example product and then helps you try them on your product. He explores additional practices including architectural spikes and concludes by showing how story maps improve planning and delivery for processes like Scrum or Kanban.
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David Hussman
ML
What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
3
Ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and provides techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”
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Jennifer Bonine
MM
Evaluating the Quality of Requirements
Donald (Mark) Haynes, Modis Consulting
Would you tell your publisher to stop editing in the middle of your manuscript and publish your novel now? Of course not! Then, why would you tell your QA/test team to stop identifying problems with requirements documentation? All deliverables—and especially requirements—should undergo a rigorous assessment based on their quality attributes and measurable evaluation criteria. Mark Haynes describes quality models and attributes he has used to evaluate requirements documents. He shows how you can detect imprecision—that will haunt you later—and remove it with a set of formal criteria and informal heuristics. Discover how you can use quality attributes, even subjective ones, to conduct a quality dialogue within the development team. Mark shares examples of poorly written requirements for you to evaluate and try your hand at improving. Leave with a better understanding of the process Mark has used to ensure quality requirements—a key for successful systems development.
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Donald (Mark) Haynes
MN
Resistance as a Resource
Dale Emery, DHE
As a member of an agile team, you are an agent of change—creative, intelligent, and insightful. You have great ideas about how to improve your products, your team, and even your organization. You make your proposal. On your right you hear, "But we tried that before, and it didn't work" and on your left, "But we've never done that before." And from the back of the room, a rising chorus of "But Alistair Beck Martin says that's not Agile!" You're getting resistance. So, what do you do? Dale Emery explores an approach that works: Treat resistance with empathy and curiosity. Whatever else it may be, resistance is information—information about others’ values and beliefs, about the organization, about the change you are proposing, and about yourself as a change agent. Dale explores how to turn resistance from a frustration into a resource, how to interpret people's responses as valuable information, and how to translate that information into effective action to improve yourself, your team, and your products.
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Dale Emery
MO
Essential Test-driven Development
Rob Myers, The Agile Institute
Test Driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the unit is complete and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates the basic and essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring code, and using mock/fake objects in development. During this hands-on session, you’ll use exercises to practice the techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of test-driven development.
Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and be familiar with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Delegates should bring a laptop installed with their favorite programming language and IDE—and come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java and NUnit for any .NET language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install (and verify) your chosen xUnit framework prior to the tutorial.
Learn more about
Rob Myers
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