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Better Software East 2011
Wednesday Concurrent Sessions
See Sessions From:
Wednesday
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Thursday
BW1
Projects & Teams
Seven Deadly Habits of Ineffective Software Managers
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs, LLC
As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, ineffective management practices when dealing with planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting as a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are: mishandling employee incentives; attempting to make key decisions by consensus; ignoring processes and releasing too early; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified—but whom everyone likes. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, you’ll take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these software management habits—or better yet, avoiding them altogether. As a bonus, every attendee will receive a copy of Ken’s full-color “7 Deadly Habits” commix.
Learn more about
Ken Whitaker
BW2
Business Analysis & Requirements
Beyond Business Analysis: Becoming a Trusted Business Advisor
Kent McDonald, Knowledge Bridge Partners
Stand in a room full of business analysts and you are bound to hear the phrase “gather and document requirements” way too often. Many of today’s business analysts have an image problem, resulting from their limited—often self-imposed—role on projects. However, business analysts have the opportunity to move beyond an analyzing and documenting role to become a trusted advisor to the business. Kent McDonald describes techniques and tools you can use to become a leader in the quest for creating business value and improving organizational performance. In other words, you can transition from gathering requirements to becoming an advisor who offers solutions to business problems. Join Kent and learn to think more like a business owner, help improve decision making in your organization, and much more. Leave with a new set of goals and approaches in your toolkit to start down the path of trusted advisor status.
Learn more about
Kent McDonald
BW3
Cloud Computing
Cloud-enabled Development: Putting the Agile into the Infrastructure
Brian White, Skytap
As software development teams seek greater efficiency and effectiveness, they often find that they are held back by old IT architecture for development and test. They wrestle with low-powered servers, difficult-to-scale static environments, and a slow IT provisioning and change processes. Today, software leaders at Calypso, Centric Group, Serena Software, and others have radically changed the way they build, test, and deploy software—almost exclusively using cloud computing to power their development processes. Some teams report benefits of 75% faster development cycles with 70% lower operating costs. Brian White describes the techniques and practices employed and success factors you can follow to achieve similar results. Brian provides specifics on which application workloads are ideal for the cloud model and how the use of cloud computing supports Agile development practices.
Learn more about
Brian White
BW4
Going Mobile
Eight Limitations of Mobile Platforms
Jacob Stevens, Quardev, Inc.
Soon mobile devices will be able to do most everything, right? Although it’s fun to talk about how much mobile devices can or will do soon, limitations and constraints remain now and will for a long time. With the lower-tier market offering scaled-down devices, even the latest generation mobile devices have hardware, network, and operating system constraints. These limitations will seriously affect the architecture, design, and testing decisions for your mobile development projects. Jacob Stevens offers a primer on the unique dynamics and constraints of these lucrative platforms. Learn about the implications of mobile platform constraints that impact development and, ultimately, your customers’ experience. Discover potential failure points hidden in hardware specifications and explore the trade-offs necessary for mobile success. If you are well-versed in software development and new to the mobile platform, this session is for you.
Learn more about
Jacob Stevens
BW5
Projects & Teams
When to Ship: Determining Application Readiness
Peter Varhol, Seapine Software
When do you ship an application and expose it to your customers and users? The answer seems simple—you ship it when it’s ready. However, there are many possible definitions of “ready.” According to Peter Varhol, customers, users, and development teams must all agree on what this term means—before work begins on the project. Otherwise, you may be tempted to deploy an application before its product goals are met. Peter Varhol presents different approaches to determining when an application has the required quality to be ready to ship. He describes how to determine and track quality measures, so that the team actively works toward getting the application ready to deploy and knows what needs to be done to ensure fitness for deployment. Learn what factors on which to base your ready-to-ship decision so that the project team and the business will know whether to continue working or declare, “Ready.”
Learn more about
Peter Varhol
BW6
Business Analysis & Requirements
Nonfunctional Requirements: Forgotten, Neglected, Misunderstood
Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Nonfunctional requirements—interfaces, design and implementation constraints, and quality attributes such as performance, usability, robustness, and more—are essential to build the right product, right. Yet analysts, developers, and business customers often struggle with when and how to define and document these requirements. Unfortunately, some teams either completely neglect nonfunctional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements, or they specify them incompletely or with untestable and unmeasurable attributes. Ellen Gottesdiener explains the types of nonfunctional requirements and how they are intertwined with functional requirements. Learn practical ways to visualize interfaces and prioritize their options while exploring techniques to specify quality attributes and their acceptance criteria. Join Ellen in a fast-paced survey of key practices to help you elicit, analyze, and specify nonfunctional requirements. By acknowledging the equal importance and value of nonfunctional requirements, your team will determine and specify requirements that fully define your product’s needs.
Learn more about
Ellen Gottesdiener
BW7
Cloud Computing
Leaping into “The Cloud”: Rewards, Risks, and Mitigations
Ken Johnston, Microsoft
Seth Eliot, Microsoft
The cloud has rapidly gone from “that thing I should know something about” to the “centerpiece of our corporate IT five-year strategy.” However, cloud computing is still in its infancy. Sure, the marketing materials presented by cloud providers tout huge cost savings and service level improvements—but they gloss over the many risks such as data loss, security leaks, gaps in availability, and application migration costs. Ken Johnston and Seth Eliot share new research on the successful migrations of corporate IT and web-based companies to the cloud. Ken and Seth lay out the risks to consider and explore the rewards the cloud has to offer when companies employ sound architecture and design approaches. Discover the foibles of poor architecture and design, and how to mitigate these challenges through a novel Test Oriented Architecture (TOA) approach. Take back insights from industry leaders—Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook, and Netflix—that have jumped into the cloud so that your organization does not slam to the ground when it takes the leap.
Learn more about
Ken Johnston,
Seth Eliot
BW8
Going Mobile
Mobile Applications Security
Nabil Hannan, Cigital Inc.
Mobile applications enable millions of users to have more fun, be more productive, and interact with their world in more ways than ever before. Mobile architectures run the gamut from simple web-based applications optimized for mobile displays to custom-built handset-specific applications that can interact directly with the mobile operating system. This diversity of architectures presents a huge challenge to ensure that applications meet security requirements, such as confidentiality and integrity. Targeted at beginners in the mobile development space, Scott Matsumoto introduces the basics of mobile applications—deployment, digital rights management, and the cellular network—and then addresses popular security attack vectors that hackers exploit. Scott explores the mobile threat model you must consider when developing mobile business applications. Take back a broad introduction to the mobile space, along with a selection of best-practices and solutions to common mobile application security issues.
Some knowledge of web-based application architectures as well as the associated security challenges is required to get the most out of this presentation.
Learn more about
Nabil Hannan
BW9
Projects & Teams
Managing across the Miles: The Keys to Leading Successful Offshore Test Teams
Gerie Owen, NSTAR, Inc.
Is your company experiencing difficulty and frustration with its offshore project teams? Are your teams not consistently performing well? Are the results not what was expected? Gerie Owen shares her experiences in managing offshore test teams through each phase of the project cycle—from selecting the team and executing the project through presenting and documenting its results. Gerie explains how to assess the team’s knowledge and skill level. Because your offshore team members often are new to you, it is critical to recognize and handle training issues as early as possible. With the challenges of time zones, language, and cultural differences, Gerie addresses the critical issues of providing explicit direction and expressing clear expectations. Learn how to choose the most effective means of communication for the situation, how to motivate team members across the miles, and how to show appreciation in ways that matter to offshore teams.
Learn more about
Gerie Owen
BW10
Business Analysis & Requirements
From Problem to Solution: The Continuum between Requirements and Design
Christopher Brandt, Moneris Solutions
By learning the best mechanics for getting from problem—business needs and requirements—to solution—architecture and design—your team can turbo-charge its development process to generate the most creative and innovative solutions. Christopher Brandt explores how the top architects and design teams challenge apparent constraints, brainstorm solutions with stakeholders, ask the right questions, and ultimately determine the best design approach for the product. Challenging constraints enables the architecture team to identify the “real” problems the system will solve. Brainstorming empowers the entire team to conjure up many possibilities for the design solution. Asking probing questions results in fully understanding the requirements, the challenges, and the value proposition in order to recognize the right solution for the problem at hand. Having the decision-making power allows the project to move forward with confidence. Join Christopher and take back a new understanding of the continuum between requirements and design along with a new set of tools for design creativity and innovation.
Learn more about
Christopher Brandt
BW11
Cloud Computing
Testing in the Cloud: Is It Right for You?
Andrew Pollner, ALP International Corporation
Finally, software testing in the cloud is not just for dreamers anymore! Join Andrew Pollner to explore why and how cloud-based testing is emerging as a viable alternative to replace or complement traditional testing platforms. Implemented properly, cloud testing offers many advantages: shifts the burden of installing, configuring, maintaining, and updating testing tools to a vendor; reduces or eliminates the need to build and maintain servers to support testing functions; expands the reach of testing across geographical locations; offers potentially limitless capacity; and more. However, with all these benefits come new challenges: determining the appropriate cloud test environment, test data security, connectivity to the environment, and others. Andrew provides insights on when cloud testing makes sense, how to best manage this new environment, ways to adapt your testing practices for the cloud, how cloud testing affects your testing ROI, and where a hybrid solution can benefit you.
Learn more about
Andrew Pollner
BW12
Software Quality
A Software Quality Engineering Maturity Model
Gregory Pope, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Ellen Hill, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
You are probably familiar with maturity models for software development such as CMMI. In this thought-provoking session, Default.aspx Pope and Ellen Hill describe a corresponding five-stage maturity model for software quality engineering—not just testing—which addresses the challenges organizations face when attempting to improve the their software’s quality. Default.aspx and Ellen introduce their model for software quality maturity and discuss how you can use this model to baseline your organizations’ current level and map out a path for improvement. You’ll learn how to assess where you are now on the ladder: (1) do nothing, (2) write documents and create forms, (3) measure the process, (4) improve based on metrics, or (5) automate tools and process. Find out how to recognize the signs of each maturity level, where and how to start the quality improvement process, how to get buy-in from developers and management, and the tools to predict and measure software quality.
Learn more about
Gregory Pope,
Ellen Hill
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