Better Software East 2016 - Product Owner
Monday, November 14
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model, that helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map...
IoT Testing Workshop
No longer a futuristic concept, the Internet of Things (IoT) has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. With the proliferation of connected devices, appliances, cars, and even clothes, the stage is set. IoT apps are here to stay. Jennifer Bonine says our testing, product management, and development teams need to be addressing how to develop and test in this new world of IoT. Testers accustomed to traditional platforms are now asked to test on newer devices and more advanced platforms, some never tested on...
Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning
Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an...
Tuesday, November 15
How to Make Better Choices for You, Your Team, and Your Projects
As leaders of teams and projects, we regularly face choices and decisions that have downstream consequences. Do you want to be able to make better decisions in your personal or professional life? Do you want to help your team members make better choices when it comes to decisions on their projects? Or are you simply curious about how and why people make certain choices? In this highly interactive tutorial, Andy Kaufman shares why the familiar pros-and-cons approach seems to make sense—but is profoundly flawed. He discusses how our biases influence the options we...
Wednesday, November 16
Lead Teams that Deliver the Goods
In software development—and in many life activities—success often depends on how well we collaborate with our team and our stakeholders. Yet getting a group of people to truly work in partnership—let alone self-organize—is a daunting challenge. And we’re often left with lingering tensions, anxieties, and sub-par performance because teams are made up of people with varying degrees of knowledge, skill, and commitment. Although we need our team focused on delivering a great outcome, sometimes egos, personalities, and agendas get in the way. Andy Kaufman asks you to...
Building Product Development Communities: From Startups to the Enterprise
When we want to produce more product with the same number of staff, we normally think about adding more process. David Hussman believes we don’t necessarily need to do that. Instead of talking about scaling agile, David focuses on scaling product learning—while avoiding process inflation along the way. Topics he addresses are: moving from Scrum teams to product team to focus on product success, mapping teams to product(s), interconnecting product discovery and product delivery techniques, and the challenges associated with cross team dependencies and constraints...
The Business of Agile: Better, Faster, Cheaper
Ryan Ripley relates that during his last agile transformation project, a key stakeholder asked, “Why are we adopting agile?” Ryan talked about increasing quality, delivering software sooner, and fostering a more collaborative relationship with business partners. After a few moments, the stakeholder raised his hand and said, “I get all that. But how is all of this agile stuff any better, faster, or cheaper than what we do today?” Ryan says that leaders must answer the better, faster, cheaper question if they want their agile transformation and associated projects...
In Their Shoes: Understanding Your Mobile Users’ Point of View
A team’s ability to manage change and match shifting business goals is a major component of successful mobile agile development. To help an organization rise above its competition, especially in today’s digital economy, teams must get apps to market fast—and also delight users. User experiences—and the feedback provided to the world via social media and the app store—pave the way toward a brand’s success or failure. So it’s critical that organizations understand the all-important mobile user point-of-view (POV). Steve Moses describes how to leverage the right mix...
A New Approach to Software Safety, Risk, and Vulnerability Analysis
Software has found its way into almost every part of our lives. Increased automation in the cars we drive can lead to failures which could result in physical injury, unacceptable risk, or cyber security vulnerabilities. In order to prevent accidents, identification of hazards, risks, and security vulnerabilities is required during development. The problem is the traditional hazard analysis techniques—failure effects and modes analysis, fault tree analysis, and root cause analysis—were developed for simplistic hardware controllers and are based on single point...
Fear and Loathing in Systems Administration
Harold “Waldo” Grunenwald hears it all the time—DevOps doesn't work. Sometimes it's from people whose “DevOps transformation” consisted of a team rename or from operations people who scoff at the idea of letting development teams deploy to production frequently. Waldo demonstrates why placing the blame on DevOps practices and tooling is missing the point. He offers practical solutions to the problems of historically poor relations between operations and development teams, describes why delegating authority is the path to freedom, and shows why cross-functional...
Agile Requirements—From Breadth to Depth
Requirements elicitation and documentation can be frustrating in an agile process. Some interpret the Agile Manifesto statement “working software over comprehensive documentation” to mean that no requirements documentation is warranted because the code documents the requirements. Others are concerned that if details of requirements are not treated equal to code, they are lost for future program modifications. Ken Pugh does not find this an either-or situation and describes ways to create requirements that are a balance between these two extremes. He shows how to...
Introduction to the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe)
The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) is one of the fastest growing frameworks for large teams doing agile—now second only to Scrum. Scrum helps small collocated teams develop solutions in an agile fashion, and up until now, most teams have had to scale agile for multiple teams and program management on their own. Anthony Crain introduces SAFe, which has quickly become the most popular technique used by very large agile organizations. SAFe targets groups of 50 or more people—and even thousands—on one or several related projects. Anthony assumes you know agile, the...
Agile Snafus: When Good Teams Go Bad
Agile done well can lead to great successes—rapid delivery of business and user value, high product quality, fast time to market, and engineering productivity. Agile done poorly leads to skepticism of the methodologies, distrust of the principles, and failure to deliver—in essence, a snafu [sna-foo]: a badly confused or ridiculous muddled situation. James Waletzky has gathered a set of snafus (anti-patterns) that pose challenges for organizations adopting agile. Set yourself up for success by understanding where teams go wrong with agile, complete with tips on...
Evangelize for Your Project, Team, or Cause—No Matter What Role You Play
Whether you’re a developer, tester, ScrumMaster, CTO, or CEO, you know you have to listen to the needs of your customers and team; accept the fact that they are going to change their minds; and respond, adapt, tap dance, iterate, raise your voice, stand up, and delight your audience in order to ship out the best software of your entire life. Can I get a witness?! Jonathan Silva shares evangelizing strategies that can help you inspire at any level—whether a Fortune 500 company or a startup software company. These approaches include developing your point of view,...
Transform Organizational Culture for DevOps Success
An organization’s ability to adopt a DevOps approach for software delivery often hinges on a cultural transformation that may be more difficult than technology issues. The keys to success are change supported from the top down, combined with people on the front line who are willing to experiment, fail fast, continuously learn, and openly collaborate in a blameless and fun working environment. When done right, the result is a renewed level of trust between the people involved and the organization they work for. Join Al Wagner as he shares how teams can increase...
Step-by-Step Guide to Leading a Large-Scale Agile Transformation
A few years ago everyone wanted to know how to convince their executives to go agile. Today, executives are asking their teams how they'll make the transformation. We have made significant progress changing the hearts and minds of senior leadership, but executives now demand a greater level of assurance that the plan is actually going to work. Executives are tired of being told to trust the team and that everything will be okay. Executives want to know how agile is going to help make things better. Mike Cottmeyer begins by discussing the elements of an agile...
Your Agile Team Needs a Therapist
Imagine you’re on an agile development team—and something feels weird. People disagree constantly, and when they finally do agree, no one commits to deliver the solution. Vocal team members dominate the conversation. You don’t trust your teammates. They don’t trust you. This isn’t a team. It’s just a group of people. Does this sound familiar? Because people are people—not interchangeable robots—building high-performing, self-organizing teams takes specific skills and a lot of work. In his experience working with agile teams, Robb Pieper has often taken on the...
Avoid Critical Mobile UX Mistakes
With SaaS-based business models, where users pay by the month and can switch applications in a heartbeat, great user experience (UX) becomes paramount. Mobile intensifies this as users can quickly and easily try another app. You’ve got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value from it. So, how do you do that? Not with a beautiful UX or “wow factor” but with a UX that works for and speaks to the user, understanding what they want when they want it. Phil Lew outlines key principles for the design and evaluation of usability...
Thursday, November 17
Solve Everyday IT Problems with DevOps
Some believe that DevOps is only applicable to Internet-based companies with a desire to disrupt existing businesses. On the contrary, DevOps practices can dramatically reduce many everyday IT problems—defects, incidents, waste, bottlenecks, downtime, and infrastructure fragility. Sherry Chang dives into these problem areas and outlines the DevOps tools, practices, culture, and other artifacts necessary to eradicate them. She shares practical tips and hard-learned lessons from Intel IT to arm you with the knowledge and tools you need for DevOps adoption. You and...
Managing Agile Software Projects under Uncertainty
In chasing velocity, we often ignore or don’t understand the uncertainties and associated risks in our processes and their results. Agile is designed to handle uncertainty in requirements as new features are requested and priorities shift. But shouldn’t we also be thinking about and mitigating the uncertainties that are unique or even introduced by using agile? Phil Lew suggests that our problem is that we sometimes carry assumptions which either cause us to spend too much effort on things we can’t control or give us unfounded comfort and reassurance. If we can’t...
Stop Saying No … Start Saying Throwdown
Have you ever been on a team and said, “We should try [insert crazy idea here]” only to immediately hear “No!” from a team member, manager, or coach? Talk about stifling innovation. To prevent this, Anthony Crain says that their teams are adopting a new philosophy. Stop saying No … start saying Throwdown! Using this idea, they can distinguish between a favorite way and a better way. “My story writing technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “My estimation technique is better than yours.” Oh yeah? Prove it! “SAFe is better than traditional...
Scaling Agile: Remembering Tolstoy’s Unhappy Family Analogy
While Agile has become mainstream at the team level with much research and practical experience, scaling agile to the enterprise is a topic of increasing interest and practice—with some successes and some spectacular failures. As Tolstoy wrote, “Happy families are all alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Mariya Breyter shares anti-patterns for scaling agile that you need to recognize quickly and change right away. Most agile scaling frameworks address agile processes and organizational structures. However, Mariya thinks it is time to look at...
Experience Agile Emergence through Sketch Comedy
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Most people read this principle from the Agile Manifesto and focus on the self-organization element. What about the concept of emergence? Exactly how do requirements and designs emerge? And how do self-organizing teams enable emergence? Get a hands-on lesson on emergence and self-organization using an unlikely source of inspiration: sketch comedy. John Krewson leads courageous delegates to envision, write, rehearse, and perform an episode of The Waterfall Comedy Hour....
Teach by Doing: Conversation-Driven Development with ChatOps
Despite the proliferation of tools and processes aimed at lowering barriers and reducing friction across teams, do you still find yourself struggling to make sense of the information hairball, constantly asking—How's the deployment going? Who's responding to that incident? Is staging green? It’s time to STOP! Raj Indugula and Robert Brown introduce the essential concepts and benefits of ChatOps, discuss the anatomy of a chat application/robot, and demonstrate how to leverage ChatOps to help team culture through automation and sharing. ChatOps can improve your...
The Agile Product Owner: Beyond the Books and Classrooms
As organizations embark on agile transformation, many traditional project managers or business and technical leads are thrown into the Product Owner role after reading a book or two and, perhaps a few days of CSPO training. In the midst of changing environments, conflicting mindsets, and other change-related issues, they are expected to start operating within a Scrum team. Alicia Cyrus compares the responsibilities of product ownership and traditional project management—similar roles, same goal of achieving working software (or services) and productive teams, but...
Take Control! Managing Your Time and Commitments
One of the most consistent concerns expressed by project teams everywhere is: We don’t have enough time! The stress of having too much to do and not enough time to do it is overwhelming. In this interactive session, Andy Kaufman shares practical lessons to help you get a better handle on what it takes to more successfully manage your time and commitments. Topics include understanding the importance of taking care of yourself (including getting more sleep and exercise), factors that drive procrastination (with approaches to overcome them and help you manage your...
The Lean Agile Portfolio
Agile practices continue to improve as organizations move forward with adoption and adaption. However, as they move forward, they often run into daunting challenges—coordinating projects with highly complex requirements and interdependencies; navigating highly political environments; and finding ways to fund, report, and integrate agile project work into existing organizational processes. Jamie Mades has found that the Lean Agile Portfolio bridges these gaps, applying lean product development flow principles to identify high-value initiatives and speed completion...
Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explores how agile is being used well beyond traditional software development in the Internet of Things. First, Don dives into how agile is being used today in a wide range of development environments. He discusses cloud-based software-as-a-service, large complex mission critical systems, and both mobile software and hardware. Next, he reviews the IoT, describes how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and shares how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Don...
Don't Ask "Can You Hear Me Now?" Start Listening Instead
Most of us believe we are good listeners. However, we often overestimate this skill and are hard-wired to short change it by making assumptions, providing answers, and jumping in when we think we know what people are trying to say. In doing so, we rob ourselves of the chance to encourage growth, build trust and respect, and promote ownership. Listening is about more than hearing the words; it is about tone, body language, and so much more. But wait … listening well can be learned, so join Judith Mills to understand and practice this underutilized skill....
Friday, November 18
Games for Learning about Conflict Resolution
Scaling agile across the enterprise can create challenging organizational conflicts as groups accustomed to working in their own silos struggle to collaborate effectively and identify their shared interests. Join Ellen Grove to learn useful models for considering conflict supported by games teams can use to develop and practice conflict resolution skills. The models address underlying drivers of conflict, modes for responding to conflict, ways to assess conflict severity to determine appropriate interventions, and patterns of principled negotiation. The games...