Better Software East 2016 - Leadership Summit Sessions
Friday, November 18
On Leading Leaders: A Transition Journey
Coaching individuals is one of the greatest challenges—and rewards—we leaders face. When even a single person is guided to reach new skill levels, agile teams can experience powerful beneficial change. For instance, helping a developer gain better understanding of testing practices can improve downstream quality and flow of work. Likewise, leaders need to practice continuous improvement as much as they encourage it within teams. What if you as a leader can improve your skills by coaching leadership itself? With leadership styles as varied as the people leading,...
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...
Leaders at All Levels
Traditional definitions of leadership emphasize position, formal authority and power, vision, and heroics. These definitions might have been sufficient in another time. However, organizations that need to respond to a fast-changing environment and desire continuous improvement require a different kind of leadership and a different kind of leader. Join Esther Derby to explore a new definition of leadership—the ability to enhance the environment, so that everyone is empowered to contribute creatively to solving the problems.
Six Things to Avoid in Software Testing on Agile Projects
With the emphasis on cross-functional teams, are testers still valuable on agile teams? The answer: Absolutely! Testing helps consider the full spectrum of quality attributes by bringing a unique perspective of evaluating various user interactions with the application. Insufficient testing may allow severe defects to pass into production, causing financial loss or even bankruptcy. Knowing how to leverage testing to gain the greatest rewards can be tricky as there are many things you can do that appear to be equally important—and likewise many things to avoid. For...