Certified ScrumMaster Training (2-days) Sanjiv Augustine
Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level (3-days) Dawn Haynes
Fundamentals of Agile Certification—ICAgile (2-days) Jeff Payne
Agile Tester Certification (2-days) Rob Sabourin
Product Owner Certification (2-days) Arlen Bankston
Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training (2-days) Bob Payne
The key to helping your teams transform and be successful in an agile world is knowing what skills are needed for you to be effective. Join Jennifer Bonine as she identifies these skills and shares a toolkit for agile leadership. The basic attributes of successful agile leaders are adaptability and the ability to change. At this boot camp explore your level of acceptance of change, how adaptive you are, and strategies to help others adapt to change. Learn your leadership style and identify your potential blind spots. Determine what metrics you should capture and use as you move to agile. Explore these ideas during hands-on activities dealing with how to influence and promote ideas that inspire others to follow and invest in new ideas. Finally, learn how to partner across cross-functional teams and geographies. Leave with ideas of what will work for you and your organization and take away tools you can use to help ensure you are an agile leader that your teams want to follow.
How can you compare the productivity and quality you achieve across the span of your projects—whether agile, waterfall, or outsourced? Join Michael Mah to learn about schedule, quality, and defect metric trends and how these patterns behave on real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to understand your own project trends for productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of software measurement, showing you these metrics in action. With hands-on exercises, learn how to use these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. Leverage these metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
Robust configuration management (CM) practices are critical for creating continuous application build, package and deployment 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 which are the prerequisites for continuous delivery and DevOps. Bob describes current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, container based deployments including Docker, 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.
Transitioning to agile can be difficult—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 transition 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 establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban 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 and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.
You’ve just been selected by your boss for the Product Owner role … or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how it all works … or you’re an experienced Product Owner who is struggling to find balance between your stakeholders, customers, and team … or you’ve just received your CSPO certification but have no experience being a REAL Product Owner. Fear not! Join Product Owner coach and author Bob Galen in this fast-paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and how to deliver high-impact sprint reviews. Bob then raises the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively communicate and negotiate within your organization. Leave this tutorial with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner your boss wants you to be.
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.
To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Mike Sowers as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Mike identifies several metrics paradigms and discusses the pros and cons of each.
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). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.
Lean software development has often been described as “better, faster, cheaper” and focused on “eliminating waste,” but those are misnomers. Going after speed improvement and waste elimination can actually reduce the benefits you might otherwise get from lean. Ken Pugh 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. Ken 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. Employing lean principles, you 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, cross-functional teams, implementing pull, and managing work in process. Ken describes how to use lean—no matter where you are in your development process.
One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may now think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.
In the tradition of James Whittaker’s book series How to Break Software, Jon Hagar applies the testing “attack” concept to the domain of mobile, IoT, and embedded software systems. First, Jon defines the environments of mobile, IoT and embedded software. He then examines the issues of software product failures caused by defects found in these types of software. Next, Jon shares a set of ten attacks against mobile, IoT, and embedded software based on common modes of failure that teams can direct against their software today. Like software design patterns, attacks are test design patterns that must be customized for particular contexts. For specific attacks, Jon explains when and how to conduct the attack, who should conduct the attack, and why the attack works to find bugs. In addition to learning these testing concepts, attendees will get to practice the attack pattern on devices containing mobile, IoT and/or embedded software—so bring your smart phones.
In test automation, we must often use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time with little to no consideration of an overall plan, architecture, or the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test automation journey in large and small enterprises. Discover approaches to ensure that the test tools you currently have and the new test tools you acquire or develop will work well with other testing and application lifecycle software. Explore approaches to drive test automation adoption across multiple project teams and departments, and communicate the real challenges and potential benefits to your stakeholders.
To make it possible for designers and developers to collaborate and build compelling user interfaces using the same assets, Microsoft created the extended application markup language XAML and introduced it in the release of the Windows Presentation Foundation. Based in XML and using language features that enable data binding, templating, styling, and adaptive layouts, it creates the interfaces declaratively and efficiently. XAML has appeared in Silverlight, Windows Phone, and Metro and has now gone cross platform to Android and iOS with Xamarin. Mike Benkovich begins with the basics of XAML—controls and containers, options for layout including canvases, stack panels and grids, and responsive layouts that take advantage of the available screen real estate. Next Mike dives into XAML advanced data binding and converters. Finally, he takes a brief look at Xamarin to show how you can deliver great applications across platforms on almost any device.
A great deal of confusion surrounds the concepts of release automation, continuous integration (CI), continuous delivery, and continuous deployment. How these concepts work progressively to achieve high-quality software delivery is generating a lot of discussion and controversy. Jennifer Bonine defines the methodology options, processes, and tools associated with release automation, as well as the differences between its maturity levels. Understand the benefits of more frequent, smaller releases, and the exponential risk generated by large, infrequent releases. Hear highlights of industry case studies that demonstrate the substantial speed, quality, and ROI gains of improving your release automation process. Acquire the insight and motivation needed to take the next step—from wherever your organization is now—toward full release automation. Learn to build your continuous deployment strategy, and discover ways to incorporate mobile and device testing into your plan. Start building out a roadmap using a case study and understand your options for building a continuous deployment pipeline.
Join Agile Manifesto author Andy Hunt and Jared Richardson to learn about GROWS™, a modern development approach that’s built around the Dreyfus Model of Skills Acquisition and deliberate experimentation to guide project decisions. Incorporating existing practices, it's a methodology designed to improve both initial adoption and on-going evolution of your team and organization. Andy and Jared describe GROWS in detail, diving into specific steps and practices for managers and executives. Learn techniques to share the company's vision effectively, and simple tools for managing progress without micromanaging. Know when a project is doing well—and when it's in trouble. Discover how to keep your team on track with the “3 Rs”—building on a Rhythm (their iteration cadence), building the Right thing (from the vision), and working the Right way (with craftsmanship and technical practices). Come, learn, and participate as Andy and Jared provide an understanding of the GROWS Method and how it can move your company forward.
It used to be that your work and the results spoke for themselves. No longer is that the case. Today you need to be more collaborative and a better communicator and facilitator so that you drive results from a team perspective. One of the most effective communication paradigms is the “Story.” You can tell stories that drive specific action. You can tell stories that communicate general product requirements or customer needs. You can tell stories that inspire teams and drive results. Or you can try to write everything down and hope for the best.
DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables 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.
Identifying, documenting, and communicating requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are How do we discover the real requirements?, How do we document requirements?, and How do user stories, use cases, and epics fit into requirements? Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions. Practice specifying and evaluating traditional requirements and user stories while learning how to gather information through varied elicitation techniques. Explore the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Learn a rule set for determining how much documentation you need for “good enough” requirements. Explore requirements review techniques—walkthroughs and inspections—to determine what will work best for you. Create a set of Golden Rules for requirements engineering that your project can use.
More and more large organizations are adopting agile methods. As they do, many are not focused on what level of process will help and are adding more process than needed. David Hussman describes the use of agile methods on large programs and small teams in large organizations including Disney, Target, Siemens, and others. David uses real-world experiences to teach concrete ideas of when scale is needed or not, as well as how to spread lasting agility that is based on concrete measures of success. Be warned—you will be participating. So come prepared with one or more situations where you would like to see agile methods spread throughout your organization or scaled to address the production challenges of a large system or process. Working in pairs and small groups, learn how to apply less process with more value, being mindful that large groups working on a single effort need disciplined practices to synchronize, validate, and promote real and lasting agility. Please come with your questions, experiences, and skepticism (the latter is always welcome).
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues—or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development problems, and (non)agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Jeffery shares practical tips and techniques to identify early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and offers suggestions for getting your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve both the business and the stakeholders.
Anyone who has ever attempted to estimate software testing effort realizes just how difficult the task can be. The number of factors that can affect the estimate is virtually unlimited. Rob Sabourin says that the key to good estimates is to understand the primary variables, compare them to known standards, and normalize the estimates based on their differences. This is easy to say but difficult to accomplish because estimates are frequently required even when very little is known about the project and what is known is constantly changing. Throw in a healthy dose of politics and a bit of wishful thinking, and estimation can become a nightmare. Rob provides a foundation for anyone who must estimate software testing work effort. Learn about the test team’s and tester’s roles in estimation and measurement, and how to estimate in the face of uncertainty. Analysts, developers, leads, test managers, testers, and QA personnel can all benefit from this tutorial.
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 on 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 assessment guides you through the rest of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.
Many organizations use the terms quality assurance and software testing interchangeably to describe their testing activities. But true quality assurance is much, much more than testing alone. Quality assurance encompasses a planned set of tasks, activities, and actions used to provide management with information about the quality of software so appropriate business decisions can be made. Jeffery Payne discusses the differences between software testing and quality assurance, examining the typical activities performed during a true quality assurance program. Topics discussed include evaluating software processes, validating software artifacts (requirements, designs, etc.), presenting a quality case to management, and how to start implementing a true quality assurance program. Leave with a working knowledge of quality assurance and a framework for incrementally improving your overall software quality assurance program.
Many enterprises today 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, although there are currently no formal models describing UX. With SaaS-based business models, where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat, UX becomes paramount. Phil Lew explains the definitions of usability and user experience, describes the connections between them, and explores evaluation methods you can use as the first step toward improving UX on the mobile platform. To build a deeper understanding of how to improve your own app’s UX, Phil gives examples to illustrate the good, the bad, and the ugly of mobile UX. Discover key principles for design and evaluation of usability. Develop a methodology for continuous improvement of your users’ experience.
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and reduce delays in development by decreasing re-work. Through interactive exercises, Ken shows how acceptance tests created during requirement analysis decrease ambiguity, increase scenario coverage, help with effort estimation, and act as a measurement of quality. Join Ken to examine issues with automating acceptance tests including how to create test doubles and when to insert them into the process. Explore the quality of tests and how they relate to the underlying code.
Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways that test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection, appropriate automation design, and team collaboration can be combined to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams. Learn how automation supports and drives agile testing activities, and how test automation is implemented in diverse organizations. Rob illustrates many types of automation with sample test descriptions, source code, and test scripts. See examples of automated tests for TDD, acceptance test-driven development, and behavior driven-development. Leave with a new toolkit of agile automation methods and techniques.
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 tutorial, 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. Investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. Explore the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or failed. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and examine the patterns of the bad.
Nothing interrupts the continuous flow of value like bad surprises that require immediate attention—major defects, service outages, support escalations, and even scrapping capabilities that don’t actually meet business needs. We already know that the sooner we discover a problem, the sooner and more smoothly we can remedy it. Elisabeth Hendrickson says that feedback comes in many forms, only some of which are traditionally considered testing. Continuous integration, acceptance testing, and cohort analysis to validate business hypotheses are all examples of important feedback cycles. Elisabeth examines the many forms of feedback, the questions each can answer, and the risks each can mitigate. She takes a fresh look at the churn and disruption created by having high feedback latency. Elisabeth considers how addressing bugs that are not detracting from business value can distract us from addressing real risks. Along the way, Elisabeth details fundamental principles that you can apply immediately to keep your feedback cycles healthy and happy.
Everywhere we look these days we see the word continuous—continuous delivery, continuous integration, continuous deployment, continuous testing, continuous security, and continuous ______ (fill in the blank). It’s continuous everything! So, what’s happening in our industry? Will a move toward more continuous practices result in better software? Will agile have any long-lasting effect on how software is built, tested, delivered, and maintained? Join Jeffery Payne as he discusses the link between agile and continuous software engineering capabilities. Learn how operating in a continuous manner not only speeds things up but also results in better software quality and security. Discover how the continuous nature of agile is changing our world. Leave with an understanding of what this change means for us as software professionals. Take back knowledge about how we can get more involved in the continuous processes that surround our work.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Agile software development is in a rut. Agile is consistently misapplied, misunderstood, misused, and then, all-too-often abandoned. Worse than that, many popular agile methods are not actually agile. They've remained largely unchanged for more than a decade. And despite preaching inspect and adapt, users adopt and forget, following practices by-the-book and suffering when a practice conflicts with their local context. Join Andy Hunt as he describes the GROWS™ Method—a new approach to software development. The GROWS™ Method is based on four key ideas—the Dreyfus Model of skill acquisition, evidence-based practice, inclusivity, and local customization. The Dreyfus Model speaks to limitations in human cognition and problem solving. Evidence-based practice is a framework for first-class experiments that encourage us to make decisions and answer questions with actual outcomes—not wishful thinking or popular folklore. Inclusivity includes more of the organization than just the developers, and local customization makes adaptation to individual environments a first-class part of the method. It’s now time to grow software development beyond the limitations of agile.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Scrum, XP, and Kanban are familiar agile methods. Now in the second decade of their adoption, agile methods continue to help organizations worldwide respond to change and shorten the time to deliver value. An overwhelming 88 percent of executives cite organizational agility as key to global success. So, in recent years, many have begun scaling their early agile adoptions beyond individual teams to programs, portfolios, and the enterprise. Even though today’s scaling techniques are not yet fully understood, new scaling frameworks continue to emerge. Join Sanjiv Augustine to explore this exciting area and discover approaches to scale agile in a way that makes the best sense for your organization. Learn about scaling frameworks including the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe), Large-Scale Scrum (LeSS), as well as the simple Scrum-of-Scrums meeting. Join Sanjiv to explore how you can develop a straightforward scaling strategy for your organization.
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.
