Tutorials

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. Join Lee Copeland to learn how to identify all the important stakeholders of a system and better ways to elicit and capture requirements in different settings: one-on-one interviews, meetings, brainstorming and Joint Application Development (JAD) sessions, buddy checks, inspections, ambiguity reviews, and retrospectives. Discover ways to ferret out the big risks, unknowns, and unresolved conflicts that often doom projects from the start.

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. Start by joining a team for a humorous simulation of real-world issues and experience. Learn how specification by example helps build in quality instead of trying to test defects out. Progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with table-based and given-when-then formats. These paper-based simulations give you meaningful practice with specifying concrete examples and will change the way you think about writing tests and collaborating as a team. This is not a “tools” session (no laptops required).

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. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”

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. Bob Aiello presents an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change management and control, release management, and deployment. Bob describes current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, cloud computing, and mobile apps development—and reviews the industry standards and frameworks available in practice today. Take back an integrated approach to establish proper IT governance and compliance using the latest CM practices while offering development teams the most effective CM practices available today.

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. Pollyanna Pixton provides you with the tools to create a culture of trust by dealing with fear of collaboration, helping teams take ownership, aligning with the business by using decision filters based on a business values, and helping teams show real progress while not committing until all risks are within an acceptable range.

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. Jared Richardson explains the ideas and then the tools needed to implement both continuous integration and continuous deployment. Jared demonstrates Jenkins, an open source continuous integration tool, as the center of the process. These powerful concepts ensure issues are detected within minutes of most code changes, and the developer is notified so he can fix the problem and learn from the experience. Even a partial adoption changes the cadence of a development organization and eliminates a great deal of ongoing code maintenance. Learn how to sell the idea and set up the process in your own organization.

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. BAs can leverage traditional tools such as use cases to Generate Flow and feed user stories to fast moving agile teams. However, large backlogs of stories are wasteful, so lean principles are applied to Lean Out the Flow. Finally BAs may need to Bridge the Flow between more traditional elements of the organization and its agile teams. Whether you are a BA new to agile or struggling to find the right fit in your team, join this highly interactive session to “get your flow” going.

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. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation. Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.

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. Philip Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods that you can use as the first step toward improving user experience on the mobile platform. Philip uses examples to illustrate the good, bad, and the ugly of mobile UX to build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.

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. Bob explains how to implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.

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. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step is to establish explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because kanban can easily be expanded to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises. By the end, you will have an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

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. Learn ways to avoid being yet another project failure statistic, how to make better tradeoffs using a simple technique based on a design hierarchy, and adopt innovative ways to better collaborate with product management to focus on what’s really important to the customer. To become an effective leader, discover how to size up and then help your team rise up in their hierarchy of needs while adapting your leadership style to effectively communicate with stakeholders. This workshop is designed to give you practical tools to help you lead and motivate your team to deliver projects on time, every time.

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. Peter Zimmerer describes influencing factors (controllability, visibility, operability, stability, simplicity) and constraints (conflicting nonfunctional requirements, legacy code), and shares his experiences implementing and testing highly-testable software. Peter offers practical guidance on two key actions: (1) designing well-defined control and observation points in the architecture, and (2) specifying testability needs for test automation early. He shares creative and innovative approaches to overcome failures caused by deficiencies in testability. Peter presents a new and comprehensive strategy for testability design that you can implement to gain the benefits in a cost-efficient manner.

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. Its foundations are systems thinking, a relentless focus on time, and an understanding that complex systems require holistic solutions. Lean principles include optimize the whole, eliminate delays, improve collaboration, deliver value quickly, create effective ecosystems for development, push decisions to the people doing the work, and build integrity in. Lean practices include small batches, implementing pull, managing work in process, and cross-functional teams. Al will describe how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.

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. Take a look at just the Swift you need to provide the model and controller layers for your application. Add logic to your app in multiple source files that illustrate how to partition the code into useful objects and functions. Take a close look at view controllers and how they manage the view with which users are interacting. Finish the day with a look at multiple scenes, and learn how to create and configure segues that allow user transition to and from different scenes. At the end of the day, you will be ready to begin work on your own iOS apps.

Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and should have the most recent version of Xcode 6 installed on your Mac.

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. To get the requirements right the first time, you need strategy, tactics, and a practical process for discovering the real requirements—which may not turn out to be what the users think they need. Tim Lister presents a strategy to get accurate and explicit requirements, tactics to efficiently develop these requirements, and a process to keep everything glued together when tackling a large, complex job. Take back an 85-page, annotated requirements specification template to help get your requirements right—the first time

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. Realistic, non-technical group activities help explore and reinforce our analogies. Try out Steve Bockman’s Team Estimation Game and contrast that with Mike Cohn’s Planning Poker. Discuss how to handle vacations, meetings, and sick days. Learn what to do if the obvious answer to "Are we on schedule?" is "No.” Explore the latest trends, including a balanced examination of what it means to deliver value with “no estimates.”

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. Then the race is on as your team competes to build features on your racetrack while you experience Kanban norms like work in process (WIP) limits, service level agreements (SLAs), and expedite requests. Don’t worry, we take breaks to continuously improve, guided by simple metrics such as “lead time.” Whether you’re just exploring agile or you’re already a Kanban leader, this fun and challenging simulation focuses you on how teams can maximize the smooth flow of new features with high quality. No Kanban experience is required, but experts are welcome.

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. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.