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Better Software Conference & EXPO 2006 Tutorials
Go To: Monday | Tuesday
Tutorials for Tuesday, June 27, 2006
8:30 AM — 5:30 PM | |
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Just Enough Metrics: Instant-On Methods for Benchmarking, Quality, and More
Michael Mah, QSM Associates
If you have a deadline, how do you know whether it�s doable? If you are implementing new methods like agile/XP development, how do you know if your productivity has improved? If you�re faced with fuzzy and ill-defined requirements, how do you know where to draw the line on project scope? Michael Mah will help you solve these quandaries. You�ll learn how to �snapshot� your most important software projects to identify productivity patterns�whether outsourced or developed in-house, agile or waterfall, traditional or New Age. Agile measurement isn�t just an oxymoron�learn how to use lighter, �just enough� methods to get meaningful information on time-to-market, quality, and productivity. Discover how to �cut to the chase� on deriving understandings about project behavior. Michael covers topics such as: Before/After Productivity Measurement and Baselining, Deadline Driven Estimation, Risk Analysis, Defect and Reliability Forecasting, and Software Project �Laws of Physics.�
Michael Mah is a contributing author of IT Measurement, Advice from the Experts and the upcoming book, Optimal Friction, People Dynamics at Work in the Information Age. Michael also publishes his writings on-line through the Cutter Consortium. His areas of expertise include organizational development, IT negotiation, software project estimation, productivity benchmarking, outsourcing, risk management, and project "runaway prevention." Michael has been a keynote and featured speaker for the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Process Group Conference, the Better Software Conference & EXPO, the Cutter Summit series, and numerous Project Management Institute and SEI SPIN chapter meetings. |
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Use Cases for Agile and Traditional Development
Alistair Cockburn, Humans and Technology
Use cases have shown their value for both agile and traditional development projects. These benefits include improving communications, showing organizational workflow for a proposed system, understanding requirements in context, verifying requirements completeness, and providing a look-ahead mechanism for tough scheduling issues. Of course, these benefits are derived only from well-written use cases�those that do not exceed two pages in length and avoid discussing user interface details�not the bloated twenty-five page variants that have given use cases a bad name around the world. Alistair Cockburn helps you write short, simple, and effective use cases in their best form and teaches you how use cases fit with agile development. You will see that it is easier for agile groups to learn to write short, simple, and effective use cases than it is for classically trained analysts and that short and simple use cases are the best way to write use cases on traditional projects.
An internationally noted methodologist and project manager, Alistair Cockburn specializes in the human and communications aspects of software development. Founder of Humans and Technology, he is one of the original authors of the Agile Manifesto and more recently the Agile Project Management�s Declaration of Interdependence. His book, Writing Effective Use Cases, has been the gold standard on the subject since its publication in 2000. Many of his papers and talks can be found at http://Alistair.Cockburn.us. |
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Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of Great Management
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc., and Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates, Inc.
Great management happens one interaction at a time. Many of those interactions happen behind closed doors�in one-to-one meetings. So if great management happens in private, how do people learn how to be great managers? Great managers consistently apply a handful of simple�but not necessarily easy�practices. In this interactive session, Johanna Rothman and Esther Derby explore how managers can create an environment for success, keep progress visible, and coach for improved performance. Johanna and Esther will reveal management practices they and their clients have found useful and explain how to perform them. Bring your management issues and be prepared to practice techniques to solve them. Learn how to conduct an effective one-on-one meeting to learn status, develop capability, and uncover obstacles; when and how to coach; and how to provide feedback.
Johanna Rothman consults on managing high-technology product development. She uses pragmatic techniques for managing people, projects, and risk to create successful teams and projects. Johanna is the author of the highly acclaimed Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets & Science of Hiring Technical People and is a regular columnist on StickyMinds.com.
Esther Derby is one of the rare breeds of consultants who blend technical and managerial issues with the people-side issues. Project retrospectives and project assessments are two of Esther's key practices that serve as tools to start a team's transformation. Recognized as one of the world's leaders in retrospective facilitation, Esther often receives requests to work with struggling teams. Esther is one of the founders of the Amplify Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference. |
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Agile Estimating and Planning
Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software
Planning is important, even for projects using agile processes. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided, and too many organizations view plans as something they force their development teams to follow. Learn how to break that cycle by practicing skills that will help create really useful plans that lead to reliable decision-making. Mike Cohn arms you with techniques for estimating in �story points� and �ideal� days. Play the popular game �Planning Poker� as you find out when and how to re-estimate as well as how to measure and even forecast your team�s velocity (or rate of progress). Leave this class knowing how to reliably estimate on agile projects and how to create plans from those estimates. This class is equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.
Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training company. Mike specializes in helping companies adopt and improve their use of agile processes and techniques to build high performance development organizations. He is the author of User Stories Applied: For Agile Software Development, Agile Estimating and Planning and books on Java and C++ programming. Mike has been a technology executive in companies from startups to Fortune 40 and has written articles for various industry publications. A frequent speaker at industry conferences, Mike is a founding member and serves on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance. |
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Establishing a CMMI�-Compliant Measurement Program
Steven Lett, The David Consulting Group
Organizations using the SEI Capability Maturity Model� Integrated (CMMI�) as a framework for their process improvement programs often struggle to establish and maintain a measurement program that is both compliant with CMMI� and effective and efficient. Steven Lett provides a facilitated training and coaching experience for those involved with establishing and maintaining their organization's measurement program. This is an opportunity to learn how to satisfy the CMMI� requirements for measurement in the various Level 2 and Level 3 Process Areas. This interactive tutorial is designed to identify and meet specific measurement needs and to provide you with the techniques necessary to identify the right measures for your organization. Whether you are just getting started or are already working to put a measurement program in place, this session is right for you.
Steven Lett has thirty years of software engineering experience as an engineer, project manager, software process improvement leader, and consultant. He has played significant leadership roles in helping organizations achieve Software Engineering Institute (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM� and CMMI�) Levels 2, 3, 4 and 5. His experience spans both DoD and IT software development. Specific experience relative to this presentation includes playing a lead role in establishing a measurement program at an SEI Level 5 Lockheed Martin site, both as an SEPG member and, subsequently, as a project manager. Steven has worked as a consultant with a number of clients in establishing CMM� and CMMI� compliant measurement programs. |
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FIT for Requirements Collaboration
James Shore, Titanium I.T.
Do you work in an environment with complicated business rules? Do your applications often have defects resulting from poor communication of requirements? FIT�the Framework for Integrated Test�is a free, open source tool designed to help you. Despite the name, FIT is more than just a testing tool. Used well, FIT enables new, robust forms of communication about requirements and software behavior. It helps business experts to provide developers precise examples of how the software should behave, allows developers to seamlessly share information about the current functionality of the software, and provides testers with a platform for exploring and validating requirements. FIT does all this while fading into the background, requiring little effort for the tool itself. Join James Shore as he explores the possibilities that FIT brings to your organization for increased collaboration between business experts, testers, and programmers. Learn how to use FIT to bind together the cycle of requirements analysis, programming, and testing.
An award-winning leader in the agile community, James Shore writes, speaks, and coaches on cutting-edge agile practices. One of the earliest agile coaches, he is a pioneer in the field with a broad and deep base of experience that has given him an intimate understanding of how agile practices affect a wide variety of organizations. James maintains an active leadership role in FIT as the project coordinator and member of the FIT Board. In 2005, the Agile Alliance presented James its most significant award, the Gordon Pask Award for Contributions to Agile Practice. |
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Project Assessments: Knowing Where You Stand
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group
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/reviewer, 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 check lists to support your assessment efforts. Take away an orientation to the project management principles that guide an assessment; a model to help establish a context for the review based upon project size, complexity, and business risk, and the maturity level of the organization; and practical techniques to quickly get up to speed. Learn what work products to ask for to facilitate orientation and maximize review efficiency, gain an approach to critically reviewing project work products, and obtain and work with checklists and questionnaires that facilitate quick orientation and identification of areas needing further analysis.
A systems engineer and project management consultant, Payson Hall is a founding member of Catalysis Group, Inc. Formally trained as a software engineer and computer scientist, Payson has performed and consulted on a variety of hardware and software systems integration projects in both the public and private sectors throughout North America and Europe during his twenty-five year professional career. He has been a featured speaker on topics of systems integration, project management, and risk management. His rare combination of IT project management experience and communication skills have made Payson a valued member of many project review and project oversight teams. |
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Finding Ambiguities in Requirements
Richard Bender, Bender RBT
In this process-oriented class designed for business analysts, designers, programmers, testers, technical writers, and users, you will learn a powerful, yet practical, method for ensuring that requirements specifications are clear, concise, and unambiguous. Richard Bender explains how to verify that requirements are written at the level of detail required for designers, developers, and testers. Because this level of detail must be discovered one way or another, this process does not add any additional overhead to the process of developing requirements specifications. In this hands-on workshop, learn the ambiguity review process and how to quickly identify ambiguities in specifications in any format. Eliminate unnecessary complexity from your requirements documents to develop and test applications more quickly and more effectively.
Richard Bender has more than thirty-five years of experience in software with a primary focus on quality assurance and testing. He has consulted internationally for large and small corporations, government agencies, and the military. This has involved a wide range of applications including finance, billing, manufacturing, operating systems, data base management systems, communications, medical, command and control, satellite intelligence, transportation, insurance, utilities, sales and distribution, education, prison management, and weather forecasting. Richard teaches a series of courses on the techniques for practical, rigorous requirements-based testing, codebased testing, and writing testable requirements. |
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Risk Management Wargames: A Simulation
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco, authors of Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, have developed an interactive risk-management war game to help managers internalize the skills they need to conduct risk management in the real world. Led by Tim Lister, this workshop exposes you to risk management through the artifice of a simulation-driven war game. And we deal with this by turning the risk levels way up. Instead of working in a staid, risk-free business, the exercise places you on the executive team of a Silicon Valley firm, engaged in a shootout among several companies in their field. Not all will survive. Your executive team will have to make decisions on how to staff projects, adjust salaries, train staff, and how and when to outsource. The simulator will then run and report how your company did based on your calls. Just so you can get into plenty of trouble, we�ll run two rounds of the simulation. Bring your laptop so Tim can load the simulator onto it, and get ready to practice risk management�in a truly risky business.
Tim Lister is a software consultant at Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc., based in the New York office. He divides his time between consulting, teaching, and writing. With his business partner Tom DeMarco, Tim is co-author of the book, Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects which won Software Development magazine�s Jolt Award as General Computing Book of the Year 2003-2004. Tim Lister and Tom DeMarco also co-authored Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. A member of the Cutter IT Trends Council, IEEE, and the ACM, Tim is in his twentieth year as a panelist for the American Arbitration Association, arbitrating disputes involving software. |
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Introduction to Microsoft� Visual Studio� Team System
Chris Menegay, Notion Solutions, Inc.
Microsoft� Visual Studio� Team System is an entirely new series of productive, integrated lifecycle tools that help development teams communicate and collaborate more effectively. It provides tools to support the entire software development team�software architects, developers, testers, and project management. Chris Menegay will help you to understand the challenges software development teams face and how Visual Studio Team System tools support the Software Development Lifecycle. He will demonstrate how you plan and create a team project, setup and modify work items, administer source control, use the design and modeling tools, writer better code by setting up unit tests and analyzing your code, setup an automated build, create and run manual tests, web tests, and load tests. He will also explain the reporting features available that help management have a better insight into the project. This is the perfect tutorial for individuals interested in learning about the features and benefits of Visual Studio Team System.
Chris Menegay is a Principal Consultant for Notion Solutions, Inc. He has been helping clients develop business applications for over ten years. Chris works with customers to help with Team System adoption, deployment, customization and learning. In his role with Notion Solutions, Chris has written Team System training for Microsoft that was used to train customers using the beta versions of Team System. Chris holds his MCSD.NET & MCT certification and is a member of the Microsoft South Central District Developer Guidance Council. Chris is a Team System MVP, a Microsoft Regional Director and a member of the INETA speaker's bureau. |
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