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| Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives |
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As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more companies are discovering that simply breaking down projects into small iterations is not sufficient. Agile methods require changes in management, analysis, architecture, design, testing, and quality assurance, as well as project management. Team-focused agile methods prove to be insufficient for many organizations when attempting to spread agile beyond a few pilot projects. Given the substantial adjustments required, where can you look for guidance in this transition? Alan Shalloway explains how lean-thinking can take agile beyond the team and into the enterprise. By examining the entire value stream, from concept to cash, Alan shares proven techniques to eliminate waste, shorten time to market, raise the quality of your product, and lower overall development costs. These lean principles help agile teams perform better as well as enabling agility to spread more easily. Discover how these lean principles are the foundation of most agile methods.
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| Learn more about Alan Shalloway |
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Leaders today are faced with an incredible challenge—delivering the right results to changing marketplaces, doing more with limited resources, improving processes to reduce costs, opening new markets, and keeping the company from falling into chaos. Amazingly though, the solutions to many of these challenges are already held within your organization and team. How do you unleash the talent within and foster the flow of innovative ideas? In this hands-on and highly interactive session, Pollyanna Pixton introduces the principles of collaboration and the tools you need to create collaborative cultures in your team and organization. Combining principles with practice, learn how to use a proven collaboration process to generate new ideas and embrace change, identify barriers to innovation and agility, and discover novel ways to implement solutions. Practice these techniques and tools to become a more collaborative leader while learning the process for leading upwards and outwards.
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| Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton |
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| Payson Hall, Catalysis Group |
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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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| Learn more about Payson Hall |
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| Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence & Development, Inc. |
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In this highly interactive session, Andy Kaufman helps you wrestle with real-world leadership issues we all face—influencing without authority, motivating your team, and dealing with conflict. Explore the difference between leadership and management—and why it matters—and gets a clear picture of a leader’s responsibilities, including the balance between short-term and long-term focus and the need to deliver results while developing organizational capability. Discuss the importance of developing the leadership skills of your team members, including practical ways to do so even with a limited training budget. Andy delves into the importance of one-on-one relationships and delivers proven insights on managing upward, dealing with peers, and developing stronger bonds both inside and outside your organization. Accelerate your ability to influence your organization, your projects, and your career to become the leader your team needs and demands. Walk away with practical tools to help you lead your team, including a template for formalizing a team charter and a reproducible survey to solicit leadership feedback from bosses, peers, stakeholders, and team members.
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| Learn more about Andy Kaufman |
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| Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc. |
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Successfully delivering software projects continues to be a struggle for many organizations. Studies continue to show that nearly 25 percent of large-scale software projects are never delivered and that a majority of the projects that are delivered do not meet time, budget, or quality objectives. Jeffery Payne lays out the most common causes of software project failure and explains what you can do, first to identify and, then to mitigate these risks as early as possible in the software lifecycle. Join Jeffery to examine the sometimes fatal risks associated with complex software projects—immature technologies, tool introduction, poor testing practices, ambiguous requirements artifacts, inadequate project staff, and failed project management. In a case study of a real-world project, practice risk identification and mitigation techniques and reinforce your new skills in group activities. Leave with a structured and proven framework for performing project risk analysis that ties risks to specific business consequences.
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| Learn more about Jeffery Payne |
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| Ken Collier, KWC Technologies |
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Agilists criticize the “big up front design” (BUFD) nature of plan-driven development because uncertainty early in a project makes BUFD too costly and too risky. Unfortunately, some agile teams have adopted “no up front design,” leading to poor quality and high technical debt. Experienced agile developers know that what is needed is “sufficient up front design” (SUFD)—enough to galvanize the development team around a shared understanding of the problem domain, technical architecture, expected user experience, and data needs. Fortunately, agile development doesn’t require a whole new set of modeling techniques. Instead, it requires a new way of applying good modeling methods like UML and ER Modeling in an incremental, iterative, and evolutionary manner. Ken Collier introduces an agile software modeling process that strikes the right SUFD and just-in-time design balance to make your agile development project flow more smoothly. Join Ken to learn a blend of domain modeling, usability modeling, data modeling, and architectural design in the context of an agile project management framework. Learn to limit your technical debt, increase design quality, and deliver a better product.
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| Learn more about Ken Collier |
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Agile methods bring wonderful dynamics to software projects—focus on the team, quality-driven development, business value connected by customer engagement, and embracing change—that lead toward vastly improved project performance. However, most agile projects are developed within a wider enterprise or larger-scale context that may still be waterfall-bound. For the product to be released successfully, you must deal with many competing demands. Bob Galen shares his enterprise or “large-scale extensions” for agile releases including methods for integrating agile teams within a more traditional PMO structure. He discusses iteration models for extending agile testing across the enterprise in regulated and other heavyweight testing environments. See examples of “agile release train” planning dynamics when integrating releases across multiple agile teams. Learn how to develop iteration release criteria and metrics that drive improved quality and cross-team visibility. Take away new tools and techniques to make agility work at scale and ensure that your agile products release successfully.
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| Learn more about Robert Galen |
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| Frank Cohen, PushToTest |
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Today’s software professionals are challenged to rapidly develop and test rapid rich Internet application RIA/AJAX, REST, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), and Web applications even though schedules are short, budgets are tight, and much of the technology is new to the organization. Frank Cohen describes Open Source Test (OST) tools that are emerging as a more affordable and flexible option to the traditional commercial test tools. Learn how you can leverage an open source software platform to develop products using RIA/AJAX technologies within a service-oriented architecture framework. Discover how to use open-source testing tools—Selenium, soapUI, PushToTest, TestGen4Web, HTMLUnit, and more—for functional testing, load and performance testing, and business service level monitoring with more flexibility than traditional solutions provide.
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| Learn more about Frank Cohen |
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| Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc. |
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To describe their testing activities, many organizations use the terms “quality assurance” and “software testing” interchangeably. As important as testing is, true quality assurance is much more than testing. Quality assurance encompasses a planned set of tasks, activities, and actions used to provide management with information about the quality of software so that appropriate business decisions can be made. Jeffery Payne discusses the differences between software testing and quality assurance and examines the typical activities performed during a true quality assurance program. Learn about evaluating your software processes, validating software artifacts (such as requirements, designs, etc.), presenting a quality case to management, and how to get started implementing a true quality assurance program. One step at a time, you can take incremental steps to broaden your role to include QA functions. Improve the overall quality of your software products by expanding the scope of your testing to include preventive testing and QA.
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| Learn more about Jeffery Payne |
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Test Estimation for Development and Test Managers
| Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants |
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Test estimation is one of the most difficult software development activities to do well. The primary reason is that testing is not an independent activity and is often plagued by upstream destabilizing dependencies. Julie Gardiner describes common problems in test estimation, explains how to overcome them, and reveals six powerful ways to estimate test effort. Some estimation techniques are quick but can be challenged easily; others are more detailed and time consuming to use. The estimation methods are: FIA (Finger in the Air), Formula or Percentage, Historical, Consensus of Experts, Work Breakdown Structures, and Estimation Models. Julie looks at how we can approach the “set-in-stone deadlines” that often are presented to us and effectively communicate estimates for testing to senior management. Through the use of exercises, gain experience using these techniques. Spreadsheets and utilities will be given out during this session to help testers, test managers, and development managers improve their estimation practices.
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant |
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A backlog of user stories is emerging as the most common and useful way to identify and manage scope in an agile project. Yet, it remains one of the most difficult and poorly understood practices in agile development. Jeff Patton goes beyond the simple explanation of user stories to the more detailed practice of building up a backlog from scratch, planning releases, and tactically grooming the backlog as development progresses. Learn to drive story writing from business and user goals and to place user stories into a simple map that shows the place of stories in the context of your entire system. Discover practices to stop your backlog from growing to an unmanageable size and how to sensibly split stories for the next sprint just in time. Leave with a deeper understanding of user stories and the product backlog.
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| Learn more about Jeff Patton |
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| Michael Mah and Anny Randel, QSM Associates, Inc. |
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How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional, more waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah and Anny Randel to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from guesses on a whiteboard to realistic agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael and Anny offer an inside look at agile measurements, showing you these metrics in action. In hands-on exercises, you will 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 at your company. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
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| Learn more about Michael Mah |
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Laptop Required |
To take full advantage of this session, participants need to bring a laptop computer for metrics capture and productivity calculations. |
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| Robert Galen, Independent Consultant |
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Nothing feels worse than when your team works their hearts out on a project only to have it fail to meet the customer’s needs and quality targets at the end of the project. So much focus is typically put on the beginning of a project that we fail to realize how important ending well can be. Bob Galen shares tools and techniques he’s used to successfully deliver on the promises of his projects. There’s no magic involved. Instead, Bob explores how to plan an iterative model for testing in your endgame; create dynamic release criteria and connect them to your requirements and to the reality of the project; manage change control in agile and non-agile environments; handle defects; winnow down change via several code freeze models; and finally, define core metrics for guiding your project toward release. Software endgames also are focused toward your team. Bob wraps-up the session with a set of powerful patterns that help you engage your teams within the endgame scenario.
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| Learn more about Robert Galen |
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| Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild |
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Tim Lister and five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild have compiled project patterns they’ve observed in their combined 150 years of project consulting and summarized them in a new book, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies. Tim has come to believe that project patterns are far stronger and more important than “best practices” will ever be. What are project patterns? They are the habits, decision-making practices, and unstated rules of corporate culture that dominate business life. The key to using project patterns is to identify your organization’s current patterns. If they are positive patterns, how can you replicate them across all projects? If they are negative, how can you break the habits? Tim gets you started by describing common patterns he’s observed at the individual, project, and organizational levels. Then, you’ll break up into groups and discuss patterns you see in your organization and how you might nurture them or squelch them. Finally, you’ll put them all together as a final take-away and go back armed with realistic goals and objectives for improvement in your organization.
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| Learn more about Tim Lister |
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