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Better Software East Concurrent Sessions

Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule, by choosing from track sessions Agile Development Conference East, Better Software Conference East & DevOps Conference East.

                           

Concurrent Sessions
BW1 Passion: What Software Teams and Executives Can Learn from Eco-Pirates
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

On the Animal Planet TV series Whale Wars, a fleet of boats off the coast of Japan ambush migrating dolphins at sea and drive them into a cove, where they’re captured for the theme park industry or killed for food. Their story is featured in the Oscar-winning documentary, The Cove. Having traveled with Sea Shepherd, a marine wildlife conservation organization fighting against this practice, Michael Mah says that agile teams can learn a lot from the passion and self-organizing attributes of environmental activists/eco-pirates. He explores how wildlife conservation teams channel a powerful sense of purpose, practice leadership, use social media, create transparency, build trust, and use metrics and data to command the world’s attention. Hear Michael’s take on what passionate teams muster to move the needle toward a tipping point, and lessons that your software teams can learn from activist teams in the global environmental conservation movement.

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Learn more about Michael Mah.
BW2 Real-Time Contextual and Social Media Relevance in Mobile
Jason Arbon, appdiff.com
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Personalized mobile user experience is a hot topic today because a smarter app will delight users, keep them coming back, and make your business stand out above the crowd. The extreme version of personalization is real-time contextual and social relevance. According to Jason Arbon, the contextual brain for your app is only a few API calls away. Based on lessons learned working on search relevance and personalization at Google, Bing, and a stealth mobile app startup, Jason describes the value, performance, limitations, and data-privacy of local and web services available today. He demonstrates practical examples of leveraging APIs such as Foursquare, Yelp, Google Places, Facebook, Twitter, and Location APIs (latlong + velocity). Then, Jason describes available natural language processing APIs such as NSLinguisticTagger and illustrates ways to use in-app usage data to improve an application’s contextual experience. Take away ideas to make your users happier—and you and your app look smarter.

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Learn more about Jason Arbon.
BW3 Building and Testing Security-Critical Software Using Agile
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm


1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jeffery Payne.
BW4 Leadership Strategy: Influence and Transformation
George Schlitz, Objective Change
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Many companies strive to transform—to be more lean, more agile, more innovative, more resilient. Introducing these changes can be radical. Success requires mastery of not just the new approaches but also problem analysis, conflict management, strategy, and influence. With myriad practices to choose from, it is vital to have a core set of practices to rely on—practices that can be used every day to lead your organization through the challenges. George Schlitz shares his leadership journey, based on numerous transformation efforts. Evaluate common scenarios that leaders encounter—dealing with conflicting goals or opinions, trying to achieve buy-in for a change, not knowing where to start a big improvement effort, and dealing with stakeholders and their varying degrees of support and resistance. For each scenario, George introduces a technique for success. Practiced regularly, these techniques help ensure that leaders can quickly defuse conflict, facilitate decisions in complexity, understand influence, and adopt strategy continuously.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about George Schlitz.
BW5 Designing Apps for Emotional Engagement
Jaimee Newberry, SWINGSET, Inc.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

Do the products you’re creating engage users on an emotional level? Do you deliberately design in the personality and tone of your product? Are you thinking comprehensively about every touch point your product has with a user? Jaimee Newberry has been helping Fortune 500 companies and startups with their digital products for more than seventeen years. Through years of refinement, Jaimee has learned how to create products that engage and empathize with users. Her abilities evoke client responses such as “You’ve earned our trust,” “You understand who we are,” and “Thank you. We love you!” It is through these experiences that Jaimee shares key considerations when creating winning mobile products—whether concept, startup, corporation, or enterprise apps—that connect emotionally with users and make them want to come back. Jaimee explores her proven app design and personality thinking, on-boarding dos and don’ts, and copywriting tips to help you develop and deliver products that are more fun, emotionally engage your users, and delight the business.

 
 

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Learn more about Jaimee Newberry.
BW6 Privacy, Security, and Trust in the Mobile Age
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

As mobile technologies penetrate our lives, the rate at which we generate and access data accelerates. Our mobile phones now have more memory than we thought we needed—and somehow we fill it up—and are repositories of important and private data. A recent study revealed that, due to concerns about personal information, more than half of mobile application users have uninstalled or decided not to install an application. So what does this mean for us? It means that no matter how great or how slick our app is, unless we give users the sense of security and privacy they want and deserve, we will fail to gain their trust. And because users are now more vocal than ever, trust is becoming a new currency that will drive end user uptake. Join Phil Lew to discover how we can foster trust in our apps. In this thought-provoking session, Phil reveals key elements and characteristics to enable us to design and evaluate a mobile application that generates end user trust.

 
 

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Philip Lew.
BW7 Visualization to Improve Value Delivery
Michael Harris, David Consulting Group
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Small organizations usually lack the time and money to make mistakes in what they work on next, so prioritizing by business value is a survival skill. In large organizations, work is organized into projects to which resources are assigned to maximize their utilization. Lean product development flow theory suggests that this strategy of assigning resources to projects and optimizing their utilization is a poorer—and sometimes catastrophic—strategy for delivering economic value. Instead, the flow of work through small teams of expert resources is preferred. Mike Harris gives an overview of the key elements of flow theory and shares five simple but essential metrics—value visualization—for defining and tracking business value. These metrics optimize the flow of economic value and bring economic value metrics into tactical decision making in the software development process. Mike explains how these metrics require more involvement from the business and represent more accountability for the business and IT.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Michael Harris.
BW8 Observation: The Key to a Great User Experience
Geri Winters, Wyyzzk, Inc.
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Observation is an important research technique when we are designing solutions to delight users. Some kinds of information that may make the difference between an acceptable solution and a delightful one can only be obtained by observing users in their native environment. Observing users is much more than simply sitting and watching them work. We observe with a purpose in mind and use all our senses—not just sight—when doing an observation. Geri Winters describes several different observation techniques including observing the environment, silent observation of someone performing a task, cognitive walkthrough with a user, and observing while doing. After explaining when and why you might use each technique, she leads you through a series of exercises designed to practice the techniques. Geri uses stories from real projects to illustrate the importance of observation in the user’s native environment and provides references to resources for further study.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Geri Winters.
BW9 Testing Is the Profession I Chose
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 2:45pm - 3:45pm

Never underestimate the power of sharing the testing team’s achievements, lessons learned, challenges faced, roadblocks encountered, and the enriching solutions found. Jyothi Rangaiah says as testers we must be ready to nurture the needs of testing and testers in the organizations we serve. Only people, learning every day and questioning the norm, can and will move testing forward. Getting into this learning mode requires awareness of the need to improve. Jyothi discusses the importance of sharing the testing team’s everyday challenges and achievements with all involved.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jyothi Rangaiah.
BW10 Lean Entrepreneurship for Software Professionals
Thomas Vaniotis, Liquidnet
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Software teams are faced with the prospect of building a product, only to have unexpected shifts in customer demand, changes in the competitive landscape, or swings in the economic climate undermine their plans and turn their product into expensive waste. What is an entrepreneurially-minded software developer, designer, or tester to do? Thomas Vaniotis guides you toward a shift in thinking that is manifest in the Lean Startup and Lean UX movement. Learn to value information that comes from quickly exposing an idea to market pressures rather than considering the delivery of a particular feature as the goal. Identify wasteful activities in your product cycle and re-invest that energy by innovating around the build-measure-learn loop that drives value. Lean thinking and using meaningful production data to drive decisions will assist you—whether a tester, developer, product manager, or designer—in operating under the uncertain conditions of modern markets, regardless of your company’s age or size.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Thomas Vaniotis.
BW11 Engineering the Cloud: How We Build Cloud Foundry at Pivotal
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Cloud Foundry is an open source Platform as a Service (PaaS). The people working on it come from a variety of companies including Pivotal. Cloud Foundry is an example of applying Extreme Programming at scale. In this case study, Elisabeth Hendrickson describes how the engineering teams working on Cloud Foundry build the cloud, and why the process works so well. The engineers work from a prioritized backlog managed by a Product Manager. When coding, they pair, test drive, and continuously integrate. All twenty-eight teams across six locations are responsible for their quality, their builds, and their tests. The code base involves more than a hundred repositories, thousands of files, and in excess of a million lines of code. No separate QA department and no independent testers, but explorers—not as many as you might imagine—are integrated with the teams. Join Elisabeth to see why the process works to deliver a high quality product.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Elisabeth Hendrickson.
BW12 Exploratory Testing: Make It Part of Your Test Strategy
Kevin Dunne, QA Symphony
Wednesday, November 11, 2015 - 4:15pm - 5:15pm

Developers often have the unfortunate distinction of not thoroughly testing their code. It’s not that developers do not understand how to test well; it’s just that often they have not had an opportunity to understand how the product works. Kevin Dunne maintains that implementing a team-wide exploratory testing initiative can help build the collaboration and knowledge sharing needed to elevate all team members to the level of product master. Exploratory testing can be performed by anyone, but the real challenge is making sure that the process is properly managed, documented, and optimized. Kevin describes the tools necessary to drive a deeper understanding of software quality and to implement an effective and impactful exploratory testing practice. Creating better software is not just about writing code more accurately and efficiently; it is about delivering value to the end user. Well-executed exploratory testing helps unlock this capability across the entire development team.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Kevin Dunne.
BT1 Impersonal Leadership Is Dead: Be Courageous and Connect
Christopher Logan, RoZetta Technology
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Your people make your company worth working for and can propel it to greatness. Do you know the people you work with—their learning styles, what makes them extraordinary, their real motivation? The answers are critical to everyone’s success, making the difference between an alliance of good workers and an exceptional team of great people. Learn how to shift your leadership focus to a true personal connection and gain insight into the people with whom you work. Christopher Logan shares simple but effective methods for true connection, helping co-workers shine in mutually beneficial ways, letting them open up about what they want and encouraging them to be their best. Learn what questions to ask, how to find common ground, broach tough subjects, give room for growth, and get what you both need. Discover how your company culture can become the envy of your industry and how much you can benefit personally from having great people around you.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Christopher Logan.
BT2 Eight Miles High: Build Cloud-native and Cloud-aware Systems
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

Achieve development agility, improve run-time application resiliency, and deliver highly-responsive applications by adopting cloud-native design patterns and building cloud-aware applications. Forklifting applications into the cloud is relatively fast, but the simple path into the cloud does not create better software. End-users may still complain about your development velocity, operations may still struggle to maintain uptime guarantees, and development iterations may continue at a glacial pace. By iteratively applying cloud-native design patterns and re-architecting applications, teams reduce technical debt, deploy with confidence, and build highly scalable solutions. Cloud-aware applications embrace microservices, actor model interactions, map-reduce processing, shared-nothing architecture, and the thirteen dwarf patterns. Learn about cloud-native design practices and frameworks that help you optimize scalability, foster anti-fragility, and decompose application monoliths into cloud-native microservices. Chris describes how Akka, Hadoop, Apache Stratos, Hysterix, and other open source projects make cloud-native design and implementation an approachable proposition.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Chris Haddad.
BT3 Test Data Management: A Healthcare Industry Case Study
Jatinder Singh, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
Shaheer Mohammed, Harvard Pilgrim Health Care
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 10:00am - 11:00am

As IT systems increase in both scale and complexity, delivering quality applications becomes more challenging. In addition to creating and executing test scenarios, testers need to create and maintain the test data that enables test execution. Test data management (TDM) creates and processes data in test environments using business knowledge and technology. Test data is created based on requirements provided from consumers. With TDM in your software delivery process, teams dependent on data can focus on creating and executing test scenarios instead of having to provision the data to run these tests. Shaheer Mohammed and Jatinder Singh present a case study that recaps the successful creation of a TDM team. They review what worked well, share lessons learned along the way, touch on the challenges of managing protected data in the health-care industry, and discuss innovative tools and processes that enabled their success.

 
 

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jatinder Singh and Shaheer Mohammed.
BT4 The Show Must Go On: Leadership Lessons from the Theater
John Krewson, MasterCard Worldwide
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

When creating a play or movie, what are the first three rules of directing? Casting, casting, and casting. How does Saturday Night Live produce sketch after sketch of comedy? By iterating. John Krewson finds that the principles of leadership and management in the worlds of theatre, TV, and film offer a number of lessons in the management of teams, talent, products, and change. These lessons are invaluable to those who are leading high performing software development teams or managing a software product. John takes you through the journey of creating and delivering theatrical and film productions, then shows how you can use practices like the rehearsal process and the development of a comedy revue to improve the software delivery process. He dives into specific approaches and methods used by performers and directors to harness creativity, develop shared understanding, empower and motivate teams, and manage focus. John shares multiple interactive demonstrations that further illustrate the application of these principles.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about John Krewson.
BT5 Performance Testing Cloud-Based Systems
Edwin Chan, Deloitte Inc.
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

As cloud computing becomes of strategic importance in the enterprise, part of the solution is no longer on-premise but in the cloud, adding a layer of complexity. Edwin Chan demystifies performance testing of cloud systems and applications by addressing the following key questions: Is performance testing of cloud systems fundamentally different from testing on-premises applications? What are the best practices for performance testing of both cloud and on-premises systems? Performance testing of cloud systems is essentially the same as that of its on-premises counterpart with the exception of the key consideration of network latency. After clearing common misconceptions, Edwin shares the hot topic best practices—adopting an agile/lean methodology, conducting early performance testing, and automating the injection of test data. Discuss the challenges the testing team faces in these days of disruptive and fast-paced technology changes. Take back and apply some of the best practices that fit your organization’s need.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Edwin Chan.
BT6 Detection Theory Applied to Finding and Fixing Defects
Ru Cindrea, Altom Consulting
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 11:30am - 12:30pm

Detection theory says: When trying to detect a certain event, a person can correctly report that it happened, miss it, report a false alarm, or correctly report that nothing happened. Under conditions of uncertainty, the decision to report an event is strongly influenced by how likely it is that the event could happen or what the consequences of the event might be. Using real life examples, Ru Cindrea shows how this theory can be applied not only to finding defects but also to fixing them. The decision to fix a defect is also made under conditions of uncertainty and, although testers are not the ones making such decisions, testers may influence how decisions are made. Ru discusses how we testers, in addition to finding the right balance between misses and false alarms when hunting for defects, must use our credibility to provide the right information to stakeholders making decisions about fixing defects.

 
 

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Ru Cindrea.
BT7 Requirements Are Simply Requirements—or Maybe Not
Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

When talking about requirements, people 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 on many projects. Robin Goldsmith analyzes several often conflicting and not-so-shared-as-presumed interpretations of what requirements are, reveals likely implications, and challenges not-so-wise conventional wisdom. Robin describes a more appropriate model of REAL business requirements whats that provide value when combined with product/system/software hows. He introduces the powerful Problem Pyramid™ systematic disciplined guide to help you more reliably get requirements right. With this structure you can more easily see where user stories do—or do not—fit, identify pitfalls of the “as a <role>” format, and reconcile some of the conflicts between user stories, features, use cases, and requirements.

 
 

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Learn more about Robin Goldsmith.
BT8 Soft Skills You Need Are Not Always Taught in Class
Jon Hagar, Independent Consultant
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

For years in the software industry, the focus of discussion, programs, and expense has been on career skill development to enhance team performance. To support skill development, a variety of certifications and training opportunities have been created to increase technical knowledge acquisition. Gaining technical knowledge is important, but this knowledge is often secondary to having other skills that are of more value to the organization. Jon Hagar explores these so-called “soft” skills—analysis, rational thought, communication, mentoring, technical debt management, reframing problems, modeling, time management, and social aptitude—and discusses the differences between knowledge from study and practiced skills. Delegates are asked to consider the value and to discuss how to develop and improve such skills. Finally, through an entertaining analogy Jon highlights the differences between skill and knowledge.

 
 

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Jon Hagar.
BT9 Fostering Long-Term Test Automation Success
Carl Nagle, SAS Institute, Inc.
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 1:30pm - 2:30pm

In today’s environment of plummeting software delivery cycle times, test automation becomes a more critical and strategic necessity. How can we possibly keep up with software delivery’s explosive pace while retaining satisfactory test coverage, keeping the reins on costs, and reducing risk? Carl Nagle maintains that the long-term solution is a greater level of “sustainable” test automation. The SAFS method separates test design from test execution with a data-driven/action-based approach that encapsulates volatile application-specific data into readily localizable “maps” for simple maintenance. Test designs (scripts) are completely independent of the ready-to-run SAFS engines that will execute them. And since the test design methodology does not change over long periods of time, testers can focus more on getting robust automation in place quickly, with little attention paid to each new technology, testing tool, or test IDE. Join Carl to learn how test automation thrives when testers and tools are not tied up in application-specific silos.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Carl Nagle.
BT10 Use Design Thinking to Deliver Innovative Products and Services
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Often a project is kicked off with a solution in mind that only serves the business or technology. Additionally, requirements ambiguity leads to products and services that the business didn't ask for, the tech team struggles to deliver, and users don't want. So, how do you move away from poor requirements and work together to build innovative solutions that bring the business technology and design together? Garren DiPasquale explores the history of design thinking principles and methodologies. He explains how to use this information to define requirements and objectives to create a common understanding of what makes your product or service a success. Garren shows not only why we must get the business, technology, and design on the same page, but also how to leverage the process tools from the designers toolbox to implement multi-disciplined product teams, solve problems creatively, and collaborate to produce software that is viable, feasible, and desirable.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Garren DiPasquale.
BT11 You Don't Have All the Answers: So Stop Giving Advice and Start Asking Questions
Judith Mills, Judith Mills LLC
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Many of us are raised to recognize the value of experts. When we work in a technical arena, seeing our own value as experts is re-enforced. We often are rewarded or promoted based on our knowledge. Our tendency is to want to solve problems by giving our colleagues, teams, and mentees sound advice. Judith Mills says this approach is often counterproductive because, in doing this, we take ownership of the problem. Rather than allowing them to solve their own problems, we can thwart their growth and, in the process, become a bottleneck. Learn the benefits and techniques (and when to use them) for transferring responsibility to the person or teams with the problem. Explore how to use questions to empower others to solve their problems by helping them walk through the situation and recognize the major hurdles. Join Judith to discover when we should allow them to work it out and when we should help solve the problem directly.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Judith Mills.
BT12 Agile Automation Strategies and Frameworks
Max Saperstone, Coveros
Thursday, November 12, 2015 - 3:00pm - 4:00pm

Agile practices have done a magnificent job of speeding up the software development process. Unfortunately, simply applying these agile practices to testing isn't enough to keep testers at the same pace. Test automation is necessary to support agile delivery. Max Saperstone presents an overview of testing frameworks, benefits of applying these frameworks in the agile world, implementation strategies, and proven practices. Max discusses multiple framework types—data driven, keyword driven, and action driven—and focuses on their pros and cons to help testers determine which approach can be most beneficial in specific situations. Max covers gaps existing in framework coverage, and discusses how customizing and combining these frameworks help raise quality while reducing test maintenance. Although tool agnostic, Max provides examples from current tooling options. Delegates who are either new to testing automation or looking to optimize their current automation strategy will benefit from the topics Max covers.

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1.00 PMI® PDU
Learn more about Max Saperstone.