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Architecture - Design

Tutorials

MI Building Cross Platform and Mobile Apps with XAML NEW
Mike Benkovich, Imagine Technologies, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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MM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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TK Mobile App Usability and UX for Developers and Testers
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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Concurrent Sessions

BW2 Real-Time Contextual and Social Media Relevance in Mobile
Jason Arbon, appdiff.com
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

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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BW4 Leadership Strategy: Influence and Transformation
George Schlitz, Objective Change
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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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BW5 Designing Apps for Emotional Engagement
Jaimee Newberry, SWINGSET, Inc.
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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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BW6 Privacy, Security, and Trust in the Mobile Age
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 1:30pm

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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BW11 Engineering the Cloud: How We Build Cloud Foundry at Pivotal
Elisabeth Hendrickson, Pivotal
Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

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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BT2 Eight Miles High: Build Cloud-native and Cloud-aware Systems
Chris Haddad, Karux
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 10:00am

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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BT4 The Show Must Go On: Leadership Lessons from the Theater
John Krewson, MasterCard Worldwide
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 11:30am

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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BT8 Soft Skills You Need Are Not Always Taught in Class
Jon Hagar, Independent Consultant
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 1:30pm

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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BT10 Use Design Thinking to Deliver Innovative Products and Services
Garren DiPasquale, Aduro
Thu, 11/12/2015 - 3:00pm

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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