Better Software East 2017 - Business Analyst - Requirements

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 our difficulty 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. By decreasing re-work, ATDD has proven to dramatically...

Are you having a difficult time finding female engineers to join your teams? Are you currently working on a project which seems to be going nowhere? Have you ever engaged in what you thought was customer-driven work only to later discover it was stakeholder-driven? When it comes to designing products or software that people use, or when trying to uncover precisely what’s wrong with our workplace, studying the decisions we make is critical. Surprise! Many of our decisions are not made consciously. Examining five common unconscious biases seen in development, Catherine Louis helps us...

After you hear Stephen Frein's keynote on intelligent software, join him for a hands-on tour of machine learning techniques. Using the free R language and the RStudio IDE, Stephen guides you through a sampling of machine learning techniques and discusses how these techniques can be used for both understanding and prediction. Follow along as he extracts data from online sources and builds machine learning models in real time to predict numeric values, assign classifications, and categorize textual sources of information. Experiment with the demonstrated methods by modifying the code and...

Ever sit in a strategy review session and get little or no participation from others? Or feel like you left a planning session with a different understanding of what was agreed to? If you feel there must be a more effective way to communicate important information around your strategy and plans and you want a better way to document it so your stakeholders will both understand and engage in providing useful feedback, Jennifer Bonine has a solution for you. Join Jennifer as she describes mind mapping tools and techniques and explore how mind maps can help increase team velocity and...

Two common situations lead to bad software—the project team isn’t aligned on the problem or the customer isn’t involved in the design process. Either way, you end up with a product that the business didn’t ask for, the tech team struggles to deliver, and customers don’t want. So, how do you increase confidence in the direction of your product and work together to build innovative solutions that bring the business, technology, and customers together? Garren DiPasquale and Matt Wallens introduce, a process to understand business goals and customer needs. It isn’t about designing screens or...

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...