Better Software East 2017 - Requirements & User Stories
Sunday, November 5
Certified Scrum Product Owner
Monday, November 6
Requirements Engineering for Developers and Testers—and Everyone
Developers, testers, and other stakeholders often participate in requirement reviews, scanning documents for ambiguity and testability, and then using these requirements as the basis of their activities. In an agile environment, many contribute to the development of user stories and acceptance criteria. Erik van Veenendaal believes that unfortunately many of these participants have little knowledge or skill in real requirements engineering. What level of quality and detail is realistic to expect for requirements and user stories? What does testability really mean? How can developers and...
Docker Jumpstart: Concepts, Features, and Real-World Examples
Docker, a mechanism for low-overhead virtualization, is emerging as a key aspect of DevOps architecture. Interest in Docker—with its lightweight, portable, “build once, configure once, and run anywhere” containers—is growing. If you want to jumpstart your Docker skills, join Aater Suleman to gain first-hand knowledge to help your organization streamline workflows, speed up product releases, and reduce hardware investments. He discusses the basics of Docker: concepts, terminology, commands, must-know features, and real-world examples of Docker projects. Aater presents and demonstrates best...
Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions
You attend the two-day Scrum certification courses, pass your exam, and return to your team as a newly minted ScrumMaster—ready to take on the world. Then reality sets in. Your organization doesn’t understand the changes they are being asked to make, the developers have not bought in to agile practices, and your product owner has not been seen for days. Now what? Ryan Ripley addresses the most often asked—but seldom discussed—questions that ScrumMasters face during their projects. These questions range from What is management’s role on a scrum project? to How do we manage dependencies...
Lean Usability Testing
PreviewIt is curious that, while at least 40 percent of developed software code is directly or indirectly related to the user-interface, we still only dedicate a small percentage of our test effort to usability testing. Unfortunately, those testing for usability often lack the knowledge, skill, or time for this type of testing. In the agile era, everything needs to be result-focused, low on documentation, and highly efficient, which minimizes the focus on usability testing even more. To address this problem, Erik van Veenendaal presents a hands-on tutorial that introduces you to a number...
Tuesday, November 7
Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes
Improving business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team is a noble undertaking. However, poor productivity, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are still commonplace. And at the root of most of these problems? James Waletzky says it is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. To go about fixing the problems, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on the methodology of Human Performance Improvement (...
What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile
PreviewMaybe you are curious about SAFe—what it’s all about and why you might adopt it. Perhaps your organization is heading toward—or in the middle of—a SAFe transformation and you have questions. If so, join Francie Van Wirkus and Claudia Marquette as they discuss SAFe. Learn to use a proven inquiry strategy, designed to help you and your stakeholders have productive discussions about your work, its current state and its ideal state, and your customers. When you better understand the flow of your work, and you understand all of the customers who derive value from it, you can make...
Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies
Tim Lister, along with five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild, have compiled project patterns from their combined 150 years of consulting, and have described them in their Jolt Award winning book, Adrenalin Junkies and Template Zombies: Understanding Patterns of Project Behavior. We all talk about best practices but only a tiny minority of organizations actually practice them all. Not to worry, think of “best practices” for human health. We know all about them, but very few of us actually practice them all. Maybe if someone did arduously practice all health practices, they...
The Lost Art of Live Communication
Have you ever been in the same room with co-workers and sent them a Slack or text message instead of having a live conversation? Many people are starting to prefer virtual or instant chat messaging to live conversations, but live communication can get better results at work. As technology professionals, we often focus more on technical skills and ignore the important communication skills. Join Jennifer Bonine to see how to make the most of—and get the best results from—your live conversations. Jennifer shares a toolkit to help you assess your core communication competencies and see how you...
Leading Your Agile Transformation: A Workshop
In the past decade agile development has become mainstream in software development and now is spreading beyond software to other domains. It is important for leaders and managers to understand how to build, develop, and lead agile teams—not just for the organization but for their own careers. Ray Arell introduces a cohesive set of methods, practices, and principles to maximize business results from agile and lean development, while also cultivating a workplace where people thrive. The workshop topics are highly dynamic and customizable, and more than 80 percent of the discussion will be...
Wednesday, November 8
Rightsizing User Stories
PreviewUser stories and their big brothers, epics, are an excellent way to describe requirements for a software system. They act as stakes in the ground to keep track of what the system needs to do, the type of user most interested in each feature, and the reason the requirement provides value. As projects reach a certain size, stories often become too large for a team to complete within a single sprint. The solution? Split them into smaller stories, each of which can be completed within the duration of one sprint. Dave Todaro describes proven techniques to split epics and stories, making...
Leverage Streaming Data in a Microservices Ecosystem
Imagine a world where operational data is continuously flowing from applications and devices at an extremely high rate. Now imagine services intercepting this data and analyzing it real time. Sounds futuristic? It's not—it's here today. Mark Richards describes what streaming architecture is all about—what it is, when to use it, and how to implement it in a microservices ecosystem. Mark describes the overall ecosystem for streaming architecture—including a brief discussion about the differences in Apache Spark, Flink, and Hadoop—and then explains how Apache Kafka works. Using live coding...
Balance Discovery and Delivery with Dual-Track Agile
PreviewDo your product teams frequently struggle to have groomed and well-defined stories ready for the developers? Do you find yourselves frequently in “feed the beast” mode to keep your development teams busy? Do your product teams have problems gaining shared understanding across product management, interaction designers, developers, and QA? If so, your product teams manifest the symptoms of single-track agile—and this session is for you. Sean McKeever explains the key steps in establishing dual-track agile methodologies at your organization, presents his experiences, and provides...
Fail Smart, Not Just Fast: Use Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)
PreviewYou’re a professional project manager or ScrumMaster. Your software development projects never fail because you follow all the best practices. Right? We all know better. Unfortunately, many projects fail, and they fail due to issues outside the team's control. The reality is that we need to reconsider what failure looks like and plan for it when it happens. Rob Keefer introduces a tool—Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA)—that has been used in engineering disciplines for many years and successfully applied to software development project management. FMEA shines a light on the...
Thursday, November 9
To Estimate or Not to Estimate, is that the Question?
Wondering what NoEstimates means in practice, or why you would want to move toward NoEstimates? Perhaps you’ve heard the buzz or read Vasco Duarte’s book. Maybe you simply want to understand how you can spend less time estimating and more time delivering working software—all while providing your customers with some understanding of predictability. If so, Matthew Phillip will help you understand through lessons learned with NoEstimates what and to what degree different factors influence delivery time. Join Matthew to learn how to move from upfront intuition-based estimates to create a data-...
Turn the Lights On: A Power Utility Company's Agile Transformation
Why would a century-old utility with no direct competitors take on the challenge of transforming its entire IT application organization to an agile methodology? In an increasingly interconnected world, the expectations of customers continue to evolve. From smart meters to smart phones, IoT is creating a crisis point for industries not accustomed to rapid change. Glen Morris explains that pizzas can be tracked by the minute and packages at every stop, and customers now expect this same customer service model should exist for all industries—including power. Glen examines how to create...
Putting the “Story” Back into the User Story
If you're using user stories for your agile requirements, you're not alone. They seem to have become the ubiquitous vehicle for communicating customer requirements to agile teams. And they work incredibly well in this regard. However, many teams are experiencing problems with them. Bob Galen does not believe it’s the story’s fault. Bob says we often forget the “conversation” part of the story—and more importantly, the storytelling part. When Kent Beck first described the idea of the user story, his original intent was to initiate or inspire a story-level conversation between a stakeholder...