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Better Software East 2011
Thursday Concurrent Sessions
See Sessions From:
Wednesday
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Thursday
BT1
Projects & Teams
Transform Your Innovation Thinking
Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
Innovation is a word tossed around frequently in organizations today. The standard clichés are “Do more with less” and “Be creative.” Companies want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, implement, prioritize, and track their innovation efforts. Using the Innovation to Types- model, Jennifer Bonine will help you transform your thinking regarding innovation and understand if your team and company goals match their innovation efforts. Learn how to classify your activities as “core” (to the business) or “context” (essential, but non-revenue generating). Once you understand how your innovation activities are related to revenue generating activities, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core or context activities. Take away tools including an Innovation to Types model for classifying innovation, a Core and Context model to classify your activities, and a way to map your innovation initiatives to different contexts.
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Jennifer Bonine
BT2
Design & Code
Avoiding Over-design and Under-design
Cory Foy, Net Objectives
The question of how much—or how little—design to do up-front on a project often leads to a conundrum. Too much design often results in overkill engineering that results in extra complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that result in extra complexity and wasted effort. So, how can you determine the right balance for a given application or system? Alan Shalloway offers a proven approach to determine how much design work to do before beginning the code-build steps in a project. Alan has learned that the trick is to discover and ponder what you don’t know, how it may affect you, and then how to isolate these risks in your code in the simplest way possible. In this interactive session, Alan demonstrates the essence of emergent design—starting with a simple design and letting it evolve as the requirements evolve—and then shows how to refactor your design to ultimately produce the best design available.
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Cory Foy
BT3
Development
Using Technical Debt to Predict Product Value
Emad Georgy, Experian
Overly complex code? Duplicate code? Inherent coupling? Been there, done that. Beyond these specific code issues, you may believe that something is inherently wrong with your project—increased pressure, decreased velocity, those broken functions that just never get fixed. Although there are no magic bullets to fix these problems, Emad Georgy shares how he has applied a novel, technical debt model as a predictor of overall product value. Emad has used this model at strategic and business levels to bring focus to the issue of technical debt and to obtain resources and prioritization to address debt. You also can use the technical debt model to identify anti-patterns—architecture, process, and project perspectives—in your organization. With real-world examples and experiences he’s had using this predictor, Emad shares the impact he’s had on business stakeholders and explores how technical debt plays a role in corporate contexts—from strategic planning to portfolio product management and even potential acquisition evaluations.
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Emad Georgy
BT4
Testing
Risk Analysis for Test Managers
Julie Gardiner, Sage
Risks are endemic in every step of every software project. A well-established key to project success is to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate these risks. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality where test managers and testers can significantly influence the project outcome. Julie Gardiner demonstrates how to evaluate and mitigate product risk from a testing perspective. She describes different approaches to risk management, the benefits of each, and how to use them. With an understanding and appreciation for product risk analysis, the test manager and team can then assess which testing approaches and techniques they should apply to reduce these risks. Julie demonstrates an easy way to report on progress to business management and stakeholders using product risk as its basis. Knowing how to evaluate and report based on risk helps demonstrate to others that you are doing the right testing in the time available to achieve the highest business value.
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Julie Gardiner
BT5
Projects & Teams
More Accurate Estimating: You Can Do It
Paul Pagel, 8th Light
At its core, estimating is a personal process. When estimating a task, your brain combines past experiences, confidence, and intuition to create a best guess. Paul Pagel explores estimating techniques that can turn your guesses into more accurate estimates on which you and your organization can rely. Join Paul and dive into estimating techniques you can use to go beyond gut instinct: PERT calculations, range estimates, normalized team estimates, and risk-based assessment estimation techniques. Before creating an estimate, you first should determine how accurate an estimate you need and what’s possible. Do you need estimates that are 50–75% correct, or is the project one that needs a higher accuracy? Paul shows how to determine the right level of confidence for your project and how to create estimates at that confidence level. He illustrates each of these estimating techniques through real-world examples. Then you’ll practice each technique—as individuals and in groups—learning how and when to apply it. Leave with an increased ability to make more accurate estimates.
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Paul Pagel
BT6
Design & Code
Writing High Quality Code
David Bernstein, Techniques of Design
Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software—free from defects and easy to maintain—are reflections of the code’s internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don’t pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and your peers to take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly. Create software that not only provides value now but also is easy to change and extend so it can continue to deliver value far into the future.
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David Bernstein
BT7
Security
Building Secure Applications
Thomas Stiehm, Coveros, Inc.
The Internet is full of insecure applications that cost organizations money and time, while damaging their reputations when their systems are compromised. We need to build secure applications as never before, but most developers are not now—and never will be—security specialists. By incorporating security controls into the frameworks used to create applications, Tom Stiehm asserts that any organization can imbue security into its applications. Building security into a framework allows highly specialized security experts to create components that maximize your application security profile while reducing the need for your development teams to have specialized application security knowledge. Learn to pick the right places in your framework to insert security controls and then enforce their use. Join Tom to explore real-world security controls he’s applied to commonly used application frameworks. Find out how to map security vulnerabilities to the security controls that manage those vulnerabilities and where to place those controls in your framework.
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Thomas Stiehm
BT8
Testing
Improving Software Quality through Static Analysis
Michael Portwood, The Nielsen Company
You’ve implemented unit testing, pair programming, and code inspection in your development process, but defects still escape despite your best efforts. Furthermore, you discover latent defects in previously error-free software as you make changes. The problem isn’t your quality efforts—it’s your approach. Michael Portwood shows how practical static code analysis techniques can complement your traditional testing approaches by addressing nagging quality and design defects. He focuses on subtle but common coding issues that lead to defects, code complexity testability issues, and a wide range of architectural issues limiting product lifecycles—issues that are missed by empirical testing. Introducing static analysis into your development process is easy to accomplish. Specific quick start and real world rollout strategies help you and your team identify, isolate, and then remove latent defects before your customer tells you about them. Learn about open source and commercial products supporting static analysis of Java and Microsoft .NET.
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Michael Portwood
BT9
Projects & Teams
Get It All Done: A Story of Personal Productivity
James Martin, RiverGlide
You procrastinate. You worry that you may be making the wrong choice. You spend time on the irrelevant. You don’t select the most important tasks from your many “to do’s.” You can't get things done on time. Join James Martin as he shares his experience with analysis paralysis, procrastination, and failure to deliver what others expect. After a look at why we procrastinate, James turns his attention to his personal story of a “bubble” of super productivity in which he delivered more relevant work in a two-week period than he believed possible. Along with the techniques and tips you would expect from a productivity boosting experience report, James explains the state of mind that will help you distinguish important from trivial tasks, reduce waste in your work, and discover the most important thing to do next. You can get It all done in record time—and with less angst than you ever dreamed possible.
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James Martin
BT10
Design & Code
Performance Engineering for MASSIVE Systems
Mark Lustig, Collaborative Consulting
Dealing with a single system is challenging enough, but the game changes dramatically on a multi-system, distributed platform. MASSIVE platforms can consist of more than fifty distributed systems and components, integrated to process millions of transactions per day—from millions of users—while processing hundreds of terabytes of data. The ramifications of one component or system not scaling to support this load might cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue for a single system disruption. Mark Lustig explains how to integrate performance engineering across the entire development lifecycle. The world of MASSIVE platforms requires a disciplined approach to building, measuring, and ensuring system scalability, performance, and throughput. In this experience-based session, Mark focuses on process enhancements, organizational considerations, development lifecycle integration approaches, and a roadmap for implementing and maturing performance engineering across your development lifecycle. Whether you work on a MASSIVE system or not, you can learn valuable lessons about building systems that scale.
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Mark Lustig
BT11
Metrics
Defect Analysis: The Foundation of Process Improvement
David Oddis, College Board
Do you have a process in place to analyze defects, identify the defect categories and common pitfalls, and correlate the results to recommended corrective actions? Forced to get more done with less, organizations are increasingly finding themselves in need of an effective defect analysis process. David Oddis describes a systematic defect analysis process to optimize your efforts and enable higher quality software development. David’s approach promotes collaboration in the post-deployment retrospectives performed by the development/test teams. Join David as he facilitates an open conversation and provides guidance and tips via a real world walkthrough of the strategy and process he employs to analyze defects. Learn how these findings can lead to opportunities for process improvements in your requirements, design, development, test, and environment domains. Return with a way to succinctly articulate your findings to senior management with data-driven, evidence-based actionable conclusions.
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David Oddis
BT12
Testing
Automation Maturity: Planning Your Next Step in Test Automation
Ayal Cohen, Hewlett-Packard
Do you find your organization not achieving the test automation benefits and ROI you expected? Are you spending too much effort rewriting scripts that don’t hold up over time? Does your test plan look more like “random acts of automation?” Ayal Cohen describes test automation maturity levels and shares key points on how to determine your test organization’s current maturity. Ayal identifies key ideas on how and when to move to the next level. Defining an efficient automation framework coupled with a stepped-up maturity methodology will help you achieve great success with automation. Ultimately, you can increase your test coverage dramatically, shrink your timelines, and better support your company’s business goals. As Ayal explains, it’s an ongoing process of addressing your goals, challenges, and current maturity level, while laying the foundation for future needs as you grow. Don’t expect a magic bullet, but join this session if you need a practical, step-by-step approach for your test automation.
Learn more about
Ayal Cohen
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