Product Owner

Tutorials

ME A Product Ownership Practicum for ScrumMasters and Product Owners NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 8:30am

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.

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.

MJ Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

MK Wearables: Navigating the Perfect Storm of Sensors, Big Data, Privacy, and Security

Philip Lew, XBOSoft

Mon, 11/09/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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.

TD The GROWS™ Method: A Modern Software Development Suite NEW

Andy Hunt, Pragmatic Bookshelf

Jared Richardson, Agile Artisans

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 8:30am

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.

TI Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices

David Hussman, DevJam

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

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.

TL Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Principles and Practices NEW

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

TM Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders SOLD OUT

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 11/10/2015 - 1:00pm

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.

Concurrent Sessions

BW1 Passion: What Software Teams and Executives Can Learn from Eco-Pirates

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 11:30am

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.

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.

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.

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.

BW7 Visualization to Improve Value Delivery

Michael Harris, David Consulting Group

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

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.

BW8 Observation: The Key to a Great User Experience

Geri Winters, Wyyzzk, Inc.

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

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.

BW9 Testing Is the Profession I Chose

Jyothi Rangaiah

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 2:45pm

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.

BW10 Lean Entrepreneurship for Software Professionals

Thomas Vaniotis, Liquidnet

Wed, 11/11/2015 - 4:15pm

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.