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Preconference In-Depth Tutorials

Each selection runs a full day and includes lunch.
Tutorials are interactive and hands-on. Class sizes are limited, and seating is first-come, first-served.

 Tutorials for Monday, September 27, 8:30-5:00
ABecoming a More Agile Software Manager
Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates, Inc.

More and more software development teams are including agile processes and philosophies in their projects as a way to increase customer satisfaction, improve quality, and, sometimes, speed up delivery. However, becoming more agile doesn't mean that project management goes away. As a manager, your role will change and some of your attitudes may need to change, too. In this interactive session, Esther Derby explores with you the differences between managing agile and traditional teams, the new skills you'll need, and ways you'll work differently with the people who report to you as well as other stakeholders and contributors. Learn how to make projects progress more visible while uncovering and containing risks and issues that emerge during the project. Take away new insights for managing project boundaries, maintaining customer and sponsor involvement throughout the project, courting project champions, getting the right resources in place, and evaluating the performance of your agile project team.

 
About the Instructor
Esther Derby has more than 20 years of experience in software development, including roles as an application developer, systems manager, and project manager. Currently, she’s a consultant, writer, and facilitator who works with individuals and teams to plan projects and increase team capability. She’s also a frequent speaker and technical editor for Better Software magazine.


B12 Steps to a Successful Metrics Program
Linda Westfall, The Westfall Team

Linda Westfall offers a practical process for establishing and tailoring a software metrics program focusing on business goals and information needs. It’s a practical, systematic, start-to-finish method of selecting, designing, and implementing software metrics; it even outlines a ''cookbook method'' you can use to simplify the journey from conceptual software metrics to delivered information. Linda Westfall walks you through the many areas of selected metrics, including: definitions, models, counting criteria, benchmarking, objectives, reporting mechanisms, and additional qualifiers.

 
About the Instructor
Linda Westfall is the President of the Westfall Team, which provides software metrics and software quality engineering consulting and training services. Prior to starting her own business, Linda was senior manager of quality metrics and analysis at DSC Communications, where her team designed and implemented a corporatewide metrics program. She has more than 20 years of experience in real-time software engineering, quality, and metrics and is also an ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer.


COutsourcing: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Ed Weller, Software Technology Transition

Although outsourcing is this year’s buzzword in IT, some organizations have been doing software development outsourcing in one guise or another for decades. If your organization is new to outsourcing or looking to do it better, you need to understand both the strategic and the tactical issues involved. Based on his many years of experience in subcontracting and outsourcing, Ed Weller explores these issues with you and provides guidance on how to navigate through the complexities of outsourcing. Learn how outsourcing will affect your company overtly as well as behind the scenes and how to identify, evaluate, and select outsourcing providers. Find out which project management tools you’ll need and innovative ways to manage your outsourcing contracts while building successful working relationships with your vendors.

 
About the Instructor
Ed Weller has over 35 years experience in software and systems development, including many projects that have used subcontracting and outsourcing as a necessary means to complete projects. He has worked with companies on both sides of this topic and brings an insight to this issue that will enable attendees to better understand how to effectively outsource to their long-term advantage.


DBusiness Realities of Software Architecture
Luke Hohmann, Independent Consultant

Most books and lectures on software architecture focus on technical concerns and such topics as scalability, reliability, security, usability, robustness, and maintainability. Unfortunately, few talks focus on the critical business issues of software architecture — technology licensing, portability, deployment models, billing models, and product release cycle planning, to name just a few. In this session, Luke Hohmann offers technical managers, senior developers, development leads, and architects the critical business factors to help them create and sustain profitable software architectures along with happy teams and business managers. Ignore these issues and you risk ending up with money losing dogs in your application portfolio. In this tutorial, you’ll take away a suite of tools to evaluate the business issues associated with software architecture and learn the practical architecture designs to meet your product management needs.

 
About the Instructor
Luke Hohmann is an independent consultant committed to coaching his clients to greater levels of performance. Luke is the author of Beyond Software Architecture and Journey of the Software Professional: A Sociology of Software Development and numerous articles on software engineering management. A skilled instructor and speaker, Luke has been invited to many conferences.


EBecoming a Requirements ''Master''
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

In your job assignment, you deal with software requirements all the time. Whether you are a developer in an agile environment, an analyst who gathers and documents requirements for plan-driven development, a software designer who studies requirements as the basis of your work, a tester who employs or often must discover requirements as the foundation of test cases, or a technical user who describes your needs to development, you need the right approaches and skills to truly become a requirements master. Learn how to identify all the important stakeholders and better ways to elicit and capture requirements in different settings: one-on-one encounters, meetings, brainstorming and Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions, buddy checks, inspections, ambiguity reviews, and retrospectives. Find ways to ferret out the big risks, unknowns, and unresolved conflicts that often doom projects from the start. Learn more about and practice the important personal skills a requirements master needs to do a great job: listening, observing, interviewing, deductive and inductive reasoning, writing, speaking, facilitating, sketching, modeling, and resolving conflicts.

 
About the Instructor
Lee Copeland has more than 30 years of experience as an information systems professional. Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses focusing on software development and testing issues based on his extensive experience as an IT professional and a consultant. He is a well-known speaker at software conferences in the United States and abroad and is employed by Software Quality Engineering. Lee is the author of the publication A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design.


FSoftware Security Testing Best Practices
Herbert Thompson, Security Innovation

How do you find security flaws beyond simple ones like buffer overflows? Most of the current software security testing falls into one of two categories: random corruption of files or network protocols and re-executing existing known vulnerabilities against new versions of software. However, to find subtle and innovative flaws before hackers do, you need a more regimented, more creative process. In this session, Herbert Thompson walks you through a well-organized and technically sophisticated approach that has been used successfully to identify and root out harmful security defects in both commercial and internal software applications. Get the basics on how to conduct a security threat assessment of your systems before or after they go live. Learn how to develop a comprehensive security test strategy and build a team with the right mix of skills and experience to execute it. Discover novel yet disciplined approaches for using fault injection to find security vulnerabilities before your software is exposed to your users and the hackers of the world.

 
About the Instructor
Herbert Thompson is director of Security Technology at Security Innovation. He earned his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from the Florida Institute of Technology. Herbert is co-author, with James Whittaker, of How to Break Software Security, and is the author of numerous papers on software security and testing. He has spoken on software security testing throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. At Security Innovation, Herbert directs the Training Division and is principal investigator on grants from the U.S. Department of Defense.


GAccurate Project Estimation Techniques
David Garmus & David Herron, The David Consulting Group

Software managers are frequently challenged to provide accurate software project estimates early in the development lifecycle. Yet most managers are left to make “educated” guesses for how long a project will take and how many people resources will be needed. There is a better way! In this tutorial, David Garmus and David Herron discuss an estimating model based on functional sizing as a key component. By using this model you will be able to accurately estimate a project earlier in the development process. At the heart of the estimating challenge are two issues: 1) the need to understand and express (as early as possible) the software problem domain, and 2) the need to understand our capability to deliver the required software solution within a specified environment. Then, and only then, will we be able to accurately predict the effort and time required to deliver the product.

 
About the Instructors
David Garmus is a Principal in The David Consulting Group. He is an acknowledged authority in the sizing, measurement, and estimation of software application development and maintenance. His engagements typically result in the forecast or evaluation of effort, size, and schedules for development projects or application support. He is recognized as an expert court witness in U.S. Federal Courts on the sizing and valuation of software.

 
David Herron is an acknowledged authority in the use of metrics to monitor the impact of Information Technology (IT) on the business, on the advancement of IT organizations to higher levels on the SEI Capability Maturity Model, and on the governance of outsourcing arrangements. He has more than 25 years experience in managing, developing, and maintaining computer software systems. He is a Principal in The David Consulting Group and serves as a Cutter Consortium Expert Consultant.




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