Certified ScrumMaster Training (CSM) + PMI-ACP℠ (3-days)David Bulkin
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days)Dale Perry
Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-days)Jeff Payne
Agile Tester Certification - ICAgile (2-days)Rob Sabourin
Product Owner Certification (2-days)Arlen Bankston
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days)Dawn Haynes
Fundamentals of Agile Certification (2-days)Jeff PayneAgile Tester Certification - ICAgile (2-days)Rob SabourinProduct Owner Certification (2-days)Arlen Bankston
You deal with software requirements all the time. Whether you are a developer in an agile environment, an analyst who identifies and documents requirements for plan-driven development, a software designer who studies requirements as the basis for agile development, 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 develop and interpret software requirements.
Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find their paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail.
On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall verification process―finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace a “test last” mentality with “specification by example.” Practice “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification and guide development with concrete examples written in the language of your business.
Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that.
Given the choice between providing an estimate or getting a root canal, most people would choose the dentist―not because they enjoy pain, but because the pain of the drill is short lived and the pain of a poor estimate may last for months. Payson Hall believes there is a science to estimation that is learnable and that much of the pain can be avoided with a repeatable process. In this experiential workshop, Payson shares a way to estimate just about ANYTHING and demonstrates it with numerous examples.
Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous builds to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production. Classic CM—identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore.
We know that teams and individuals who take ownership of their work outperform—often by 50 percent—those who don’t. And in agile, team ownership is a key principle. However, leaders often struggle with letting their teams own their work. Leaders are afraid that if they trust, their teams will fail. So leaders must create a culture of trust and help their teams take ownership. But what if the team builds the wrong product? Teams must align with the strategy and purpose of the business as well as with value to the customer. Finally, the organization must deal honestly with ambiguity.
Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and, instead, focus only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing.
If you are an experienced developer who hasn't had a chance to look at the new Swift Programming Language, this workshop is for you! Begin the day with a look at functions in Swift—standalone functions that are not part of a class or other Swift type. Examples will range from helloWorld() to functions that generate other functions and functions that take other functions as parameters. You will be introduced to functions with no parameters, one or more parameters, parameters with default values, and variadic parameters.
This Tutorial has been cancelled.
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is quickly being adopted by many large organizations that have had some success with agile at the team level but have not been able to scale up to large projects. Al Shalloway describes what SAFe is, discusses when and how to implement it, and provides a few extensions to SAFe. Al begins with a high-level, executive’s guide to SAFe that you can share with your organization’s leaders.
Every large software project is unique—each with its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns, and succumb to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented—or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—only make things worse.
The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders.
Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.
Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond some of the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations.
Today, many organizations are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a “mobile first” or “mobile only” strategy. Because of the special characteristics of the mobile platform and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) take on an increased emphasis. With SaaS-based business models, where users can switch applications in a heartbeat and pay by the month, user experience becomes paramount. Currently, there are no formal models describing user experience.
Ken Pugh takes you beyond thinking of design patterns as “solutions to a problem in a context.” Patterns are really about handling variations in your problem domain while keeping code from becoming complex and difficult to maintain as the system evolves. Ken begins by describing the classic use of patterns. He shows how design patterns implement good coding practices and then explains key design patterns including Strategy, Bridge, Adapter, Façade, and Abstract Factory.
Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back.
Continuous integration and continuous testing are two vital agile feedback loops that lead to a continuous deployment environment. Continuous integration monitors your source code―recompiling after every change, running smaller tests, and notifying the developer if anything goes wrong. Continuous testing (and potentially continuous deployment) monitors integration builds, installs the product in a staging environment, and runs integration tests, again looking for problems.
DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enable the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations.
Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it.
Transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.
Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could.
For a project manager, successfully transitioning from traditional project management to a more agile approach can be difficult due to the staggering learning curve. Using a combination of case studies, exercises, and best practices identified in the PMBOK® Guide, Ken Whitaker gets you up to speed on the essential fundamentals you need to effectively facilitate and lead Scrum-based agile projects.
Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then?
Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all. Testability is not free; it must be explicitly designed into the system through adequate design for testability.
Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver on these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects.
Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns from their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value.
This tutorial is a hands-on quick start to writing great apps for the iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch and provides you with a solid foundation to get started. If you are an experienced developer who is new to iOS, this is the perfect workshop for you. Begin the day with an introduction to Xcode and Apple's suite of freely-available developer tools. Xcode provides visual tools for providing your apps’ GUI in a storyboard. Learn how to connect the visual elements to code and interact with them using outlets and actions. Xcode 6 introduces new features for easily customizing your storyboard.
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focusing on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you could otherwise get from lean. Al Shalloway describes what lean software development really is and why you should be incorporating it into your development efforts—whether you use Scrum, kanban, or SAFe. Al explains the mindset, principles, and practices of lean.
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement.
One group—customers, users, and business—need a software system to help them work more efficiently or make more money, but they don’t know how to build it. Another group—software developers and testers—know how to build the system, but they don’t know what it is supposed to do. Bridging this gap is where requirements—the work products describing the system accurately and concisely while at the same time not missing important customer and user needs—are essential.
Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating).
The velocity metric is often misunderstood by teams and misused by management, resulting in increased levels of stress for everyone. Management wants velocity to increase while developers want time to craft the software well. The way a team defines velocity—explicitly or implicitly—can affect its ability to meet delivery commitments. Rob Myers explores the use of velocity as a planning tool, its misuse as a productivity metric, and alternative metrics. Learn effective ways to obtain consistent estimates, evaluate related ways to plan iterations and releases, and track progress.
Your organization is doing well with functional, usability, and performance testing. However, you know that software security is a key part of software assurance and compliance strategy for protecting applications and critical data. Left undiscovered, security-related defects can wreak havoc in a system when malicious invaders attack. If you don’t know where to start with security testing and don’t know what you are—or should be—looking for, this tutorial is for you.
Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Paul Reed as he shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations.
If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate.
Non-functional requirements present unique challenges for authors, reviewers, and testers. Non-functional requirements often begin as vague concepts such as “the software must be easy to install” or “the software must be intuitive and respond quickly.” As written, these requirements are not testable. Definitions of easy, intuitive, and quickly are open to interpretation and dependent on the reader’s experiences. In order to be testable, non-functional requirements must be quantifiable and measurable.
The Kanban Racing Challenge is an immersive workshop where you learn the basic practices of a Kanban team by building an obstacle course for radio-controlled cars. This fast-paced, competitive learning environment prepares you to immediately apply Kanban on your own software teams. Your racing team starts with a warm-up lap that explains how your Kanban Storyboard creates a “continuous pull system” and natural self-management.
To successfully lead “the nerd herd,” you’re expected to motivate your team to perform, encourage innovation, and produce software solutions that delight the customer. Prioritizing your time for what’s most important can be quite challenging—especially when you’re swamped with a steady stream of incoming requests, meeting overload, and the ever-present personnel issues. The expectation of even faster product deployment, the evolution of software development to agility, and the establishment of self-directed teams often require even more time devoted to planning.
What we mean by Agile is becoming less and less clear. Rob Myers shares sixteen years of history and observation, noting the amazingly diverse ideologies and practices that people now include under this umbrella term. Agile started with the earliest notions of iterative-and-incremental, inspect-and-adapt principles and practices from Scrum. It now includes the intensive engineering disciplines of XP that have recently branched off into the Software Craftsmanship movement. Along the way, agile grafted in lean principles and saw the flowering of the elegantly simple Kanban approach.
• User opinion can make or break an organization.• Rapid, actionable insight into user experience and app performance can save reputations.• Cloud-based technologies can help deliver highly valued mobile apps.
Ah, the sounds of feathers being ruffled! Tricia Broderick believes that servant leadership is not all that it’s cracked up to be. She wants and expects more from leaders then just being servants who act only when asked. Until now, a common (and easy) coaching style has been to transform managers from command-and-control leaders to serving others. How can anyone argue that the transition is a great step toward becoming an empowering leader?
Many people talk about requirements. They use identical terms and think they have a common understanding. Yet, one says user stories are requirements; another claims user stories must be combined with requirements; and yet another has a different approach. These “experts” seem unaware of the critical inconsistencies of their positions. No wonder getting requirements right remains a major challenge for many projects.
The exploding apps economy has increased the businesses’ need to have a strong mobile app presence. This has spurred a dramatic upward shift in mobile app development. Traditionally, testing has been done in the lab, replicating user environments and usage scenarios. However, that approach can be insufficient. Complementing in-the-lab manual and automated testing with testing in real user environments is a critical new component of mobile app development.
In an era where college dropouts run successful companies and creative entrepreneurs out-earn corporate vice presidents, working smart is clearly the new working hard. James Whittaker turns on their head the career rules that guided past generations and provides a new career manual for working smarter that speaks to the need for creativity, innovation, and insight. James teaches a set of skills designed for the modern era of working for companies, both big and small.
• Learn how big companies select test tools• Discover how it fits together in an agile environment• See examples with desktop browsers, iOS, and Android native apps
Letting good estimates made by smart people be overwhelmed by the strong desires of powerful people is a cardinal sin of project management. Accurate estimates are the foundation of all critical project decisions regarding staffing, functionality, delivery date, and budget. How do we properly estimate in a world where tradition declares that the deadline is set before the requirements are even known? Tim Lister offers practical advice on dealing with this thorny issue.
One key to specifying effective functional requirements is minimizing misinterpretation and ambiguity. By employing a consistent syntax in your requirements, you can improve readability and help ensure that everyone on the team understands exactly what to develop. John Terzakis provides examples of typical requirements and explains how to improve them using the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS). EARS provides a simple yet powerful method of capturing the nuances of functional requirements. John explains that you need to identify two distinct types of requirements.
Most of us take language for granted. We use words without thinking about how they may affect others and then are surprised at the reaction we get. Learn the importance of language in building and maintaining high performing agile teams. Become more aware of the words you choose and the impact of those words on your listeners. Doc List presents a series of exercises in a game show format. Participants attempt to identify loaded words in seemingly simple statements and questions. Some of the exercises are written; others are acted out in role play.
Mobile application development is now a mission-critical component of many IT organizations. Due to the security threats associated with mobile devices, it is critical that mobile applications are built to be secure from the ground up. However, many application developers and testers do not understand how to build and test secure mobile applications. Jeff Payne discusses the risks associated with mobile platforms/applications and describes best practices for ensuring mobile applications are secure.
Issue tracking is more than tracking bugs in code. It helps software teams collaborate and build software better. Join a seasoned developer and agile ScrumMaster and learn the top five practices to unlocking the power of issue tracking.
You get paid for doing that? Is it possible to both work and have fun in a large corporate setting? Can joy be made part of the workplace? For the past few years Ryan Kleps and his colleagues have been conducting an informal social experiment using gamification (before they knew it had a name) in their corporate training modules to encourage participation, engagement, and enjoyment.
For better or for worse, like it or not, mobile wearables are already changing our lives. Combined with social media, mobile wearable devices form a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate? The challenge for developing applications is correctly incorporating context to add value your users hadn’t considered while being sensitive to their privacy.
Implementing non-functional requirements is essential to build the right product. Yet teams often struggle with when and how to discover, specify, and test these requirements. Many teams neglect non-functional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements; other teams specify them incompletely or with untestable and non-measurable attributes.
Building the right personal brand is one of the most critical success factors in today’s workplace. Organizations develop a brand and image, but not many individuals think about their brand on sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and other social media outlets. Every person with career aspirations should be actively shaping their brand. As we interact with people, we want to influence them to support our efforts—approving projects, budgets, and funding; supporting our next career move; or recommending us for that promotion or raise we want.
• Learn how a private mobile device cloud can help you securely manage the Big Four.• Gain instant, remote access to real mobile devices for manual and automated mobile testing.• Deliver higher quality mobile apps every time without the risks of using devices in the public cloud.
Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development―concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste.
Privacy and data security are hot topics among US state and federal regulators as well as plaintiffs’ lawyers. Companies experiencing data breaches have been fined millions of dollars, paid out millions in settlements, and spent just as much on breach remediation efforts. In the past several years, data breaches have occurred in the hospitality, software, retail, and healthcare industries. Join Tatiana Melnik to see how stakeholders can minimize data breach risks, and privacy and security concerns by integrating the Privacy by Design Model into the software development lifecycle.
There are no “facts” about the future. Everything we think we know about tomorrow is based on what we think we know about the world today and our assumptions of where that will likely lead. Through a process of trial and error successful project managers, software developers, testers, and analysts usually develop a heightened sense of assumption recognition. But they often don’t think consciously about the assumptions they, their colleagues, business partners, and customers are making.
Normal people don't look at data sets just for fun; they analyze them to make business decisions. More and more often, business analysts and product managers find themselves on strategic projects that require turning large—and often highly complex—data sets into meaningful information from which conclusive decisions and actions can be derived. In most IT organizations today, analysis of big data is a reality and will grow in significance as businesses look to better understand capturing, structuring, and learning from their data.
The agile revolution began more than a dozen years ago. It was started by a small band of rebels who had radical ideas, shared a common vision, and wanted to change the world by challenging the status quo. Where is that agile revolution today? Has it continued the vision of its founders? Has it stayed true to its original values and principles as set forth in its manifesto or has it been watered down to make it more palatable to the masses? Cheezy Morgan ponders the answers to these and related questions.
• Discover why the Scaled Agile Framework®, although designed for the enterprise, is not right for all organizations.• Learn how Intel, a global organization, used SAFe to scale its agile implementation for success. See how Valpak, a smaller company, benefited from implementing SAFe.• Find out more about SAFe and whether it would be effective for your organization.
As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—along with ways to avoid them.
Software design is about change. A good design facilitates adding features—and adding new developers to the team. Yet any change to the code impacts design and could damage existing functionality. Without design idioms and practices, the code can degrade into a "big ball of spaghetti” and a maintenance nightmare. Your team must know which decisions to make early in design and which to defer. Rob Myers reviews “families” of design attributes and practices, showing the common principles within each.
You can't read a technology article these days without some mention of "the cloud." Many have labeled it the next sea-change in the industry; others point out that the model has been around for ages. Regardless of its origins, the cloud certainly does change things. But the bigger question is: Does it really change things for you? The only way to answer that question is to understand the possibilities the cloud provides.
How can testers contribute more to the success of their project and their company? How can they focus on asking the right questions, improving test planning and design, and finding defects so the business releases a quality product―even though there’s always one more fire to extinguish or one more request to fulfill? There aren’t enough hours in the day to do it all. Join Al Wagner as he reveals recent survey results showing where testers actually spend their time and where testers think their time would be better spent.
With a fragile test suite, the Continuous Testing that's vital to agile just isn't feasible. If you truly want to automate the execution of a broad test suite—embracing unit, component, integration, functional, performance, and security testing—during continuous integration, come discover the tips to ensure your test suite is up to the task.
As managers, we tend to focus on improving our processes. But have you considered that good people—not processes—are really the foundation of high-quality software? Competent and skilled people—combined with good process—can consistently produce higher-quality software. When we look for a spouse, we go out on a date, then another, and another as part of an information gathering process. We collect several months or even years of information to make this critical decision. So, why do we often make long-term employment decisions with a few brief interviews?
The original IEEE 829 Test Documentation standard is thirty years old this year. Boris Beizer’s first book on software testing, Software Testing Techniques, also passed thirty. Testing Computer Software, the best-selling book on software testing, is more than twenty five. During the past three decades, hardware platforms have evolved from mainframes to minis to desktops to laptops to smartphones to tablets. Development paradigms have shifted from waterfall to agile. Consumers expect more functionality, demand higher quality, and are less loyal to brands.
Although organizations spend a lot of time and money creating their applications, unfortunately they may not test them with a production-level user load. This often results in the application failing in production. The hardware cost to simulate thousands of concurrent users makes the organization think twice, so it tests with limited concurrent user volumes based on the available hardware.
The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging conundrum. Too much design often results in excess complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in a poor architecture or insufficient system structures which require expensive rework and hurt more in the long run. So, how can we know the right balance of upfront design work and emerging design approaches? Al Shalloway shows how to use design patterns—coupled with agile’s attitude of “don’t build what you don’t need”—to guide your design efforts.
• To achieve more efficient release cycles, teams need to improve agility across development, testing, and security.• Teams can shorten security phases by addressing security during development. Automating common security assessments enables developers to easily find, understand, and remediate security problems.• Teams can shorten QA phases by focusing testing on functionality added, modified, or impacted since the last release. This helps both developers and testers ensure that they are testing the right functionality and not wasting resources.
Most organizations struggle with the processes that define what software they should develop, when to do it, and how it will evolve over time—all parts of the product management role and activities. Because repeatable processes have not been established and organizations cope with conflicting priorities, teams stress needlessly over day-to-day decisions. Product management requires a fundamental company-wide understanding of its goals and opportunities coupled with the discipline to optimize development and maintenance efforts.
“We could not test this because…” Every technology professional has experienced issues during system testing when unit testing was overlooked or cut short. Every project team has hit roadblocks during system testing when dependent systems or complicated data have been unavailable. Service virtualization is a tool that eliminates the waiting and the excuses, making thorough and complete unit and system testing realistic. Done well, service virtualization improves defect detection and resolution in every phase of a project—driving down cost while improving quality.
Defects occurring throughout the development of a software project penalize the project. The effort spent remediating these defects robs the project team of valuable time, resources, and money that could otherwise be used for further innovation and delivering the highest possible quality product to wow the customer. The occurrence of a large percentage of these defects can be avoided with preventive defect removal strategies. Scott Aziz describes various methods for removing defects during the early design and development phases―long before testing.
Mobile web testing is still a widely unexplored territory—with no standardized tools or testing processes—where testers often struggle due to lack of guidance and resources. With mobile devices, tools, operating systems, and web technologies rapidly evolving, testers must adapt their thinking in this quickly changing domain. Raj Subramanian is a tester who went through this experience, trying out different testing approaches including paired exploratory testing, blink tests, and tools to get quick feedback on the web pages.
Drop everything! We need to regression test the newest browser version. Apple just released a new device and iOS. We need to test our site on IE11 with Windows 8.1. Sound familiar? The number of technologies our software products must be compatible with has grown exponentially, and the market is adopting new technologies with ever-increasing speed. So, how do we manage the diversity of technology with which our software products must be compatible? Katy Douglass shares Nationwide Financial’s story of transforming their reactive processes into proactive processes that anticipate change.
It’s been said: If you can’t measure it, you can’t improve it. For most agile teams burndown charts and some type of velocity measurement are all they are doing. However, with just a few more metrics, you can gain substantial insight into how teams are performing and identify improvement opportunities. Andrew Graves explores seven key metrics―Effort by Class of Service, Accuracy of Estimation, Cost per Point, and four others―to measure how your team is doing and make adjustments in real time. Andrew illustrates how to use these metrics to communicate progress to stakeholders.
Allstate Insurance had a problem. While thoroughly testing each of their more than thirty business systems, they were still failing to provide good service to their clients, agents, and internal customers. The reason was simple. Implementing end-to-end business processes requires more than just running data through a set of separate systems.
The Internet of Things and always connected devices are generating exabytes of user data and device telemetry. Organizations worldwide are leveraging this data for new products and new business insights, but this data is also fundamentally changing how organizations drive, assess, and improve product quality. Testers have traditionally relied on test results, but, with additional data sources now available to testers, the testers’ ability to process these is expanding like never before.
In an industry that continues to rapidly evolve, the pressure to increase our mastery can be overwhelming. Whether browsing the web or your organization's technical library, it's discouraging to realize that many of the skills you’ve mastered are now obsolete, replaced by new, important ones that you know little about. Is there a way to change discouragement into excitement? Early in her career, Tricia Broderick was terrified to take chances for fear of failing.
At the Agile Leadership Summit Kick-Off Reception, join fellow Summit attendees for complimentary food and beverages as you brainstorm agile leadership issues that will become the basis for the Summit's interactive sessions on Friday.
Additional registration for the Agile Leadership Summit is required to attend this event.
