Better Software East 2017 Software Tester Sessions | TechWell

Conference archive

Better Software East 2017 - Software Tester

Sunday, November 5

Roland Cuellar
LitheSpeed

Leading SAFe–SAFe Agilist Certification Training

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Gain the knowledge necessary to lead an enterprise agile transformation by leveraging the Scaled Agile Framework, and its underlying principles of lean thinking, and product development flow. This two-day course meets the education prerequisite for the Leading SAFe—Scaled Agilist Certification exam.
Dawn Haynes
PerfTestPlus, Inc.

Software Tester Certification—Foundation Level

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 5:30pm

Accredited training for the ISTQB® Certified Tester—Foundation Level (CTFL) certification. Find out what it takes to be a successful software tester and learn about the relationship of testing to development, test levels, black-box methods, white-box testing, exploratory testing, and more.

Bob Payne
LitheSpeed

Certified ScrumMaster Training

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
This two-day Certified ScrumMaster® Training prepares you both to gain your ScrumMaster certification, and more importantly, to utilize it in complex situations and projects. Upon completion, you'll be eligible to take an exam allowing you to become a Certified ScrumMaster® (CSM).
Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.

Agile Tester Certification

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm
Learn the role of the tester in an agile team and explore agile testing processes in an interactive workshop. Successful attendees earn the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Testing (ICP-TST) designation. This course is also accredited for the ISTQB® Foundation Level Agile Extension exam.
Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com

Agile Test Automation—ICAgile

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:00pm

Explore the many ways automation supports agile testing in this two-day course with real-world, vendor-neutral examples of agile test automation approaches and tools. In addition, successful attendees are awarded the ICAgile Certified Professional in Agile Test Automation (ICP-ATA).

Brian Hicks
Coveros

Fundamentals of DevOps Certification—ICAgile *SOLD OUT*

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Sunday, November 5, 2017 - 8:30am to Monday, November 6, 2017 - 5:30pm

This two-day course will teach you how to avoid the common mistakes of DevOps implementations and to leverage DevOps best practices. Upon completion attendees will be certified by the International Consortium for Agile and awarded the ICAgile Professional (ICP-FDO) designation.

Monday, November 6

Erik van Veenendaal
Improve IT Services BV (Bonaire)
MD

Requirements Engineering for Developers and Testers—and Everyone

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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...

Wilson Mar
JetBloom
MA

Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Skill with Git and GitHub is now a common requirement for jobs because Git is entrenched in the majority of development and operations organizations. Git gives testers unprecedented visibility into the inner workings of software and configuration code. But Git's intricate commands can be confusing. GitHub collaboration and code review capabilities are revolutionary. New rules are needed to avoid frustration. In this hands-on tutorial, Wilson Mar presents material available nowhere else to clarify the structure of tools, repositories, and GUI programs used by the pros. The culmination of...

Wayne Ariola
Tricentis
Alexander Mohr
Tricentis
MC

Service Virtualization for Faster Development and Testing

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

An agile development mantra—Test early and test continuously—is rapidly becoming the mantra for DevOps as the business demands frequent releases of compelling functionality. As testers, our efforts to “shift left” and support continuous integration with automated (and manual) tests are disrupted by a number of factors. Access to constrained system components is one of the greatest challenges. Research has found that an application under test interacts on average with more than fifty separate components—less than half of which are reliably available when testing. So, how can we ensure that...

Larry Maccherone
Independent Consultant
ME

Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than allowing metrics to become a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MF

Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Lean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
MI

Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven Development

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
MH

Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Many teams have a relatively easy time adopting the tactical aspects of agile methodologies. Usually a few classes, some tools introduction, and a bit of practice lead teams toward a fairly efficient and effective agile adoption. However, these teams often get “stuck” and begin to regress or simply start going through the motions—neither maximizing their agile performance nor delivering as much value as they could. Borrowing from his experience and lean software development methods, Bob Galen examines essential patterns—the thinking models of mature agile teams—so you can model...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
MK

Scrum: Answering the Tough Questions

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Erik van Veenendaal
Improve IT Services BV (Bonaire)
ML

Lean Usability Testing

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

It 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...

MJ

Docker Jumpstart: Concepts, Features, and Real-World Examples

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Monday, November 6, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Tuesday, November 7

James Waletzky
Crosslake
TD

Thinking Inside the Box: Root Cause Analysis with the Six Boxes

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

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 (...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
TF

Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Agile teams are charged with delivering potentially shippable software at the end of each iteration. In fact, some high-performing agile teams with advanced automation can ship working software every day. They achieve regression confidence with extensive automated test suites and other advanced practices. Rob Sabourin shares automation techniques to improve story and feature testing, exploratory testing, and regression testing. Explore ways to fully integrate testing into agile delivery teams by combining test-driven development (TDD) techniques, precise test and tool selection,...

Mike_Sowers
TechWell Corp.
TH

Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

In test automation, we often must use several tools that have been developed or acquired over time—with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture and without considering the need for integration. As a result, productivity suffers and frustrations increase. Join Mike Sowers as he shares experiences from multiple organizations in creating an integrated test automation plan and developing a test automation architecture. Mike discusses both the good (engaging the technical architecture team) and the bad (too much isolation between test automators and test designers) on his test...

Max Griffiths
ThoughtWorks
Elise McCallum
ThoughtWorks
TA

Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

DevOps. You think you need it because the market is telling you so, but the market is confused (and self-perpetuating). Agile, continuous delivery, and DevOps all promise the same dream—improved time to market through incremental delivery of quality software. So where should you focus? Max Griffiths begins by distinguishing DevOps from the other approaches and, rather than wrangling new words for old problems, helps refocus how to measure success. How long does it take you to commit and deliver code? Max shows how you can measure this through Value Stream Mapping, a crucial tool used to...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
TB

The Architecture of Microservices

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 4:30pm

Microservices—one of the latest software architecture styles—promises to deliver benefits such as fast and easy deployment, ease of testing, fine-grained scalability, architectural modularity, and high overall agility. Unfortunately, these benefits are coupled with a lot of complexity. In this product-agnostic architecture tutorial, Mark Richards provides you with an understanding of the microservices architecture style and what hybrids and alternatives exist. This helps you make the right architecture and design decisions for your organization. Mark discusses the core concepts of the...

Jeffery Payne
Coveros, Inc.
TE

What DevOps Means for Testers

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

DevOps is more than a buzzword or a passing fad. It's a radically new approach to rapidly deliver high-quality software applications. However, many organizations don’t fully grasp the magnitude of this change or what it means for everyone involved in the software development lifecycle. Jeffery Payne says that DevOps—when done right—drives higher quality and efficiency into software development, software testing, and application management activities. It empowers teams to remove impediments to quality and productivity throughout the entire software lifecycle. However, when DevOps is done...

Francie Van Wirkus
Francie Van Wirkus
Claudia Marquette
AB2 Consulting
TG

What You Need to be SAFe: Implementing Enterprise Agile

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 8:30am to 12:00pm

Maybe 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...

Tim Lister
Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
TM

Project Patterns: From Adrenaline Junkies to Template Zombies

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

TN

The Lost Art of Live Communication

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
TJ

Rethinking Your Retrospectives

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

The retrospective is the most important ceremony that an agile team performs. Continuous improvement ideas, team health concerns, organizational impediments, and shared wins are brought to light and explored during a retrospective. This is the heart of agile. If you aren’t doing retrospectives, you’re missing an incredible opportunity to collaborate and improve as a team. Learn how to get started with retrospectives and take away solid action items to get this important tool implemented on your team. For those already using retrospectives—but still unsure how to get the most out of them—we...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
TK

The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

Avoiding siloed development is a tricky business. It’s so easy for agile teams to fall into the rut in which testers only do traditional testing activities, and programmers strictly do their time-worn coding activities. Rob Sabourin shares a number of examples of how testing skills can be applied to a wide variety of activities in an agile project. Testers are among the most skilled team members in story grooming, elicitation, and exploration. Risk analysis in self-organized agile teams empowers testers to drive design decisions. A tester’s affinity analysis skills help clear the way for...

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
TL

Leading Your Agile Transformation: A Workshop

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Tuesday, November 7, 2017 - 1:00pm to 4:30pm

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

Stephen Frein
Comcast
K1

Intelligent Software Development, Courtesy of Intelligent Software

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

The machine learning age is well underway. Today’s software can see novel patterns that humans are unable to see and improve task performance based on experience. Learning algorithms are widely used for varied purposes, including loan approval, intrusion detection, fraud prevention, risk analysis, and online sales optimization. Yet, like the proverbial cobbler who left his children shoeless, software practitioners have been slow to apply the benefits of machine learning to their own work. Join Stephen Frein for a tour of the current machine learning landscape and its most popular...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
K2

You Might Be an Agile Leader If...

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

In case you haven’t heard, the leadership landscape has been changing—and continues to change—to keep up with the accelerating pace of business. And agile development has been an incubator of new leadership approaches. It has introduced or fostered many innovative concepts: servant leadership, self-directed teams, empowerment, emotional intelligence, employee engagement, trust, self-selection, open spaces—and even Lean Coffee “meetings.” Channeling comedian Jeff Foxworthy, Bob Galen shares patterns and anti-patterns that surround the leadership shift to more agile tactics and the...

BW1

Keep Engagement High in Difficult Projects

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Aggressive timelines, scope creep, changing requirements, development delays, and the imperative to finish on the imposed timeline … how can you keep your team motivated and engaged when everything seems to go wrong? Larissa Rosochansky describes the major factors of team dissatisfaction, shares techniques to uncover hidden issues, identifies the most common traps project managers fall into, and offers general tips to avoid them. Now that you understand what could be impacting your team’s performance, Larissa guides you on how to minimize the dissatisfaction and keep the team...

Anthony Crain
Blue Agility, LLC
BW2

Measure Anything: The Quality, Productivity, Predictability, and Engagement Model

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Measuring software development is difficult. Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of complex initiatives (such as adopting agile) is even more difficult. One department at IBM struggled to reduce a list of 150 metrics down to a top twenty to use in consulting engagements. Through the years, nearly every one of Anthony Crain’s clients has asked him for help in proving that their teams were “getting better” at development. Nearly all of their measures were “adoption” measures showing how teams were doing agile. However, none of the metrics was focused on whether the development was...

Tom Chavez
Splunk
BW3

Machine Data Is EVERYWHERE: Use It for Testing

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

As more applications are hosted on servers, they produce immense quantities of logging data. Quality engineers should verify that apps are producing log data that is existent, correct, consumable, and complete. Otherwise, apps in production are not easily monitored, have issues that are difficult to detect, and cannot be corrected quickly. Tom Chavez presents the four steps that quality engineers should include in every test plan for apps that produce log output or other machine data. First, test that the data is being created. Second, ensure that the entries are correctly formatted and...

Patrick Turner
Small Footprint
DW2

Your DevOps Goal: A Culture Shift, Not Just a Toolset Implementation

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Becoming a DevOps shop isn’t just about hiring DevOps engineers and implementing a new toolset. It’s about changing the culture of your organization. Patrick Turner believes that your focus for DevOps should be to bring a cultural shift throughout the organization—up to the business team and down to product delivery. Focusing on the culture shift of DevOps creates faster innovation. And all of this enables transparency in this process for those who have not had visibility in the past and encourages transparency for those who have worked behind the curtain of complexity that has...

Catherine Louis
CLL-Group.com
BW4

The Five Common Unconscious Biases Affecting Your Team

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Mark Richards
Independent Consultant
BW5

Leverage Streaming Data in a Microservices Ecosystem

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

Niranjalee Rajaratne
Third Bridge
BW6

A Holistic Approach to Software Quality: Yes, You Can!

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

As software organizations grow, maintaining quality is vital. As digital transformation gains strength in the industry, both clients and IT demand increased delivery speed. Thus, traditional test methods are being challenged, and a paradigm shift is required that emphasizes testing and recognizes the need for expanded skill sets to meet this demand. However, quality is not all about testing. Niranjalee Rajaratne believes it is important to create a culture that supports a quality organization and understands the value it brings. She describes why we must choose and encourage processes that...

Linda Cook
Project Cooks
AW5

Why Won’t They Pair?

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do your developers and testers pair—and do it in the best ways? If you can answer yes, then you are among the fortunate ones who have a trusting environment where people have confidence in their work. Unfortunately, a large number of development shops don’t practice pairing in any form. Pair programing was documented in Kent Beck’s book eXtreme Programming Explained, published in 1999. So why is it that eighteen years later many developers and testers do not practice this simple yet effective programming technique? Linda Cook addresses many reasons that people don’t pair. Drawing on...

Sean McKeever
Edgenuity
AW6

Balance Discovery and Delivery with Dual-Track Agile

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Do 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...

Greg Law
Undo
DW3

Stop Intermittent Test Failures that Slow the Continuous Delivery Pipeline

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Intermittent failures ruin the whole premise of continuous delivery (CD). In fact, they undermine any software QA process, since they break the fundamental assumption that if your test suite passes, you are good to deploy. Automated testing can run orders of magnitude more tests than manual testing but may result in an ever growing backlog of tests that fail intermittently for reasons that aren’t understood. Whether this is embarrassing, annoying, or scary depends on your sensitivity to risk. No matter the level of your pipeline’s sophistication, you need to reproduce the defect before you...

Amir_Rozenberg
Perfecto Mobile
DW4

Make DevOps Work: Practices to Achieve High Quality Apps

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Amir Rozenberg describes a pragmatic approach to help your team deliver apps to market faster while gaining insight into their behavior in production. He describes how a major bank, health care provider, and telco crossed the bridge from inefficient delivery processes. Now teams leverage Selenium automation tests to deliver quality applications that reduce churn, require less effort to support, and positively impact customer reviews. Amir details practices to accelerate application optimization by introducing production insight in sprint requirements, ensuring monitoring...

Ken Pugh
Ken Pugh, Inc.
BW7

A Lean Tour of Lean Software Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Lean software development has 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...

Damian Synadinos
Ineffable Solutions
BW9

Word Smatter: Exploring Semantics, Testers, and Problems

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

“Testers [do|don’t] (help) [prevent|detect] problems.” Throughout his career, Damian Synadinos has encountered many variations of this phrase, which uses just a few small words to express many big ideas. It is important to understand what each word means individually to better understand the ideas they convey collectively. The study of the meaning in words is semantics. Damian begins with a brief and broad overview of semantics and some related ideas, which set the stage for deep analysis of each individual word and its potential meaning. We consider: Testers—What might this word mean in...

Sheetal Patel
The Vanguard Group
AW9

They Said, We Said: Bridge the Communication Gap with Behavior-Driven Development

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Have you heard that only 36 percent of business features built into software are actually used by end users? And why do we get functionality that fails to work as expected? One of the age-old problems between IT and our clients is that we don’t speak the same language. Sheetal Patel shares her experience of how behavior-driven development (BDD) introduces the bridge of common language that both IT and non-technical, business clients can speak to build the right product. Sheetal explains how collaborating on agile teams with BDD gains a common understanding among developers, testers...

Bill Roberts
Capital One
James La Spada
Capital One
DW5

The Mass Extinction of Manual Processes: A DevOps Success Story

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Large organizations can be filled with manual processes, and many people feel they are stuck with them. Bill Roberts and James La Spada tell the story of how Capital One used DevOps culture and kanban principles to significantly increase the speed of feature delivery—while lowering risk. Their team took the name Meteor, inspired by the big one that took out the dinosaurs, because they wanted to cause the mass extinction of these manual processes. Work at Capital One was previously completed manually, and many inefficiencies were evident. Bill and James helped drive the...

T.j. Randall
XebiaLabs
DW6

My Dad Won’t Buy Me a DevOps

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 2:45pm to 3:45pm

Many IT managers find themselves banging their heads against a wall trying to get upper management to invest in DevOps. Managers see clear opportunities to implement it into their organizations but get a No from senior executives. Many managers are frustrated that, despite all the blustering in their companies about corporate initiatives for transformation, any attempt to implement improvements peters out quickly. T.j. Randall discusses the various stages of the software release pipeline. He offers a detailed demonstration of how to calculate the cost of each stage and suggests...

Bob Galen
Zenergy Technologies
K3

Lightning Strikes the Keynotes

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Wednesday, November 8, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Agile Dev, Better Software, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consist of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote...

Thursday, November 9

Ray Arell
nuAgility, LLC
K4

Change Your Focus: From Speed and Efficiency to High Customer Value

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 8:30am to 9:30am

For decades, product development has been focused largely on the speed and efficiency of delivery. So now we are stuck in the quagmire of talking about the methods and activities of delivery rather than focusing on the true goal—delivering high value to the customer. Ray Arell shares an evolutionary process to refocus both traditional and agile lifecycles. He describes a more dynamic way of defining value and addressing the needs of the customer, the business, and the developers. Ray provides practical examples of how to identify opportunities, expand concepts, and deliver high-value...

Faye Thompson
CareWorks Tech
BT2

It's All in Your Head: Use Neuroscience to Improve Performance

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

We humans process millions of bits of information each day. In order to handle that data load, our brains have developed shortcuts to take advantage of patterns, shared knowledge, and experience. Unfortunately, sometimes those shortcuts lead us astray, causing us to draw inaccurate conclusions. Faye Thompson says these shortcuts are amplified when we bring together a team of people, all trying to work together. Understanding how and why our brains take shortcuts to process all the incoming data can help us recognize when it's happening, take measures to correct our course, and even use...

Rob_Sabourin
AmiBug.com
BT3

Task-Oriented Unit Testing for Agile and Traditional Projects

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Developers are charged with developing software at lightning speed, often using new and unreliable technologies. Rob Sabourin shares a task-oriented method for organizing unit testing to help programmers and other team members get to consistently done working code, testing beyond the code. Rob approaches unit testing from the viewpoint of completing all the technical work required to fulfill a requirement, exercising the entire vertical technology stack and going beyond raw code. Programmers learn when and how unit test design can be implemented blending white box and black box techniques...

Gitte Ottosen
Sogeti Denmark
AT1

We Are Doing Agile But, But, But …

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

“We are doing agile, but the only tests we do in a sprint are unit tests” or “We are doing agile, but we have a hardening phase at the end, which is really more of a system integration test” or “We are doing agile, but testing is done by a separate test team.” Sound familiar? Gitte Ottosen says that these agile transition failures prevent teams from getting the maximum value out of the agile context. Failing to create a mindset and environment where quality is built-in continuously and testing is an integrated part of the development lifecycle are risks not only to quality in classical...

Karen Holliday
Halogen Software
AT2

Awesome Agile and How We Did It: Halogen’s Journey

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many organizations struggle to achieve predictable, high quality software delivery. However, agile software processes are not prescriptive, and we recognize that processes are continuously evolving to improve delivery, consistency, and quality. Karen Holliday describes the challenges that Halogen Software experienced in the past five years as they moved from waterfall delivery to the agile/scrum development model. Karen shares the strategies implemented at Halogen that have led to a string of five on-time quality releases—including two early releases. Learn how to plan in an agile (ALM)...

Heather Fullen
Infinite Energy
AT3

Agile Testing Is All about Risk—Not Bugs and Quality

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Many organizations make huge investments in software testing, and unfortunately they often don’t understand or extract full value from these activities. This can lead to testing being viewed as a mere formality or necessary evil within an organization. Fortunately, we can deliver more value with relatively minor adjustments to our approaches. The transition to agile practices provides a natural opportunity for test specialists and others to put these adjustments into practice. Plan-driven approaches can also be adjusted to increase the value delivered from testing activities....

Korey Earl
ThoughtWorks
DT1

Fundamentals of Docker

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

Docker seems to be taking the IT world by storm. But why all the excitement about yet another virtual machine technology? Because Docker is much more. Korey Earl says that Docker solves many DevOps challenges including process isolation, build once-deploy anywhere, and automated scaling without the resource overhead that comes with virtual machines. Docker can improve resource utilization, infrastructure agility, and the transition from development to operations, allowing IT organizations to support the business rather than holding it back. Join Korey as he reviews the basics of the Docker...

Larry Maccherone
Independent Consultant
DT2

DevSecOps Manifesto and Process Model for Secure Applications

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 10:00am to 11:00am

The bad guys don't break in through the highly secure bank vault door; they attack the crumbly bricks and mortar of the vault walls. The same is true for application security. The vast majority of incidents don't target security features like encryption, authentication, and authorization. Rather, the target is vulnerabilities in the boring, non-secure parts of the code. In many organizations, the security function is still largely thrown-over-the-wall, but things are changing. Larry Maccherone believes we cannot prevent the vast majority of incidents with a bolt-on approach to security. We...

BT4

Use Mind Maps to Increase Team Velocity and Communication

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

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...

Siva Katir
PlayFab, Inc.
BT5

Risk Aware, Not Risk Averse

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Most of us dread failures. But things go wrong. We can become paralyzed by the fear of being the creator of the next outage or critical bug. After a failure, we often hold a postmortem, but this rarely addresses how we can be more proactive in preventing catastrophes. Considering our missteps, failures, and outright crash and burns, we can learn how to ask the right questions at the right time. Siva Katir has thirteen years of experience causing and surviving failures—from the mundane to the maddening. Siva shares the lessons he has learned analyzing his, his co-workers, and his...

Dave Westerveld
Ansys, Inc.
BT6

Automation Anti-Patterns: Deal with Them

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Automation is vital to modern testing. But if you listen to what testers complain about, problems with test automation is a recurring theme. We complain about how hard it is to add, run, or change tests. We grumble about how difficult it is to keep up with developers who keep breaking tests and bemoan the number of bugs missed by our automation. Dave Westerveld digs into some of these frustrations and shares real-life examples of automation anti-patterns. These include test bloat and some of the reasons for it, or what happens if we don't leverage automation in the right places....

Susan Lin
Enable Agile
AT4

Sustaining Agility—After the Consultants Leave

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Organizations transitioning to agile often hire external consultants to help them become more agile. However, what tends to happen six months after the consultants leave is that the organization is often left with more—and different—problems than they had before. Susan Lin says this happens because the organization was not set-up to deal with the new challenges. Susan shares the Help Agility Stay framework and shows how you can help your organization grow and sustain agility by applying the three main principles of the framework—create a shared vision of agility, co-create a...

Todd Jones
Westfield Insurance
AT5

Put Agile to the Test: A Case Study for Test Agility on a Large IT Project

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Agile practices, although applicable to a variety of situations, are most commonly applied to IT projects, generally for software development. Can you apply agile methods to just part of a software implementation project? Todd Jones presents this case study where agile techniques were applied to the testing phase of a multiyear, multimillion-dollar IT program that included replacing a legacy system, new software development, creation of a new enterprise data model and document management solution, and complex financial balancing. After briefly describing the challenges faced by the...

Paul Wynia
Strategic Play USA
AT6

Discover Your Team’s Values with LEGO® Serious Play®

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Creating a cohesive team doesn’t require knowledge of dark arts or forbidden rituals. In fact, under the right circumstances, it can even be fun! Using exercises built around the LEGO® Serious Play® (LSP) methodologies, Paul Wynia explores techniques that ensure full team engagement and collaboration resulting in more meaningful discussions. Working as teams, discover Team Values using a series of individual and collaborative LSP builds. Once the Team Values are defined, use them to guide your team’s behaviors. These are finally turned into the Team Working Agreement, a powerful tool for...

Anders Wallgren
Electric Cloud
DT3

Microservices and Docker at Scale: The PB&J of Modern Systems

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

After predominantly being used in the build/test stage, Docker has matured and is expanding into production deployment. Similarly, microservices are expanding from greenfield web services to use throughout the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolithic systems to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says running microservices-based systems in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—both for build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. This makes Docker and microservices natural companions, forming the foundation for modern...

Matt Wallens
Artifact
BT8

Design by Discovery to Stop Building Bad Software

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

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...

David Dang
Zenergy Technologies
BT9

Mobile Testing: What—and What Not—to Automate

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Organizations are moving rapidly into mobile technology, which has significantly increased the demand for testing of mobile applications. David Dangs says testers naturally are turning to automation to help ease the workload, increase potential test coverage, and improve testing efficiency. But should you try to automate all things mobile? Unfortunately, the answer is not always clear. Mobile has its own set of complications, compounded by a wide variety of devices and OS platforms. Join David to learn what mobile testing activities are ripe for automation—and those items best left...

Dave West
Scrum.org
AT7

Scale: The Most Hyped Term in Agile Development Today

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

Scrum is everywhere. More than 90 percent of agile teams use it. But for many organizations wanting to scale agile, one team using Scrum is not enough. Dave West says the Nexus Framework, created by Ken Schwaber, the co-creator of Scrum, provides an exoskeleton for Scrum. Nexus allows multiple teams to work together to produce an integrated increment regularly. It addresses the key challenges of scaling agile development by adding new yet minimal events, artifacts, and roles to the Scrum framework. Dave discusses Nexus, addresses its boundaries, and explains what else is needed for agile...

Ryan Ripley
Independent Consultant
AT9

Help! The Scrum Master *is* the Impediment

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

The change in mindset necessary to become a servant leader is incredibly hard for a scrum master who comes from a command and control background. As a newly minted Professional Scrum Master (PSM I), Ryan returned to his team excited and ready to get underway with a scrum adoption, but he had not fully grasped the concept of servant leadership. Instead of being a change agent, he was an impediment. Ryan’s cautionary tale is a common one. Attendees will learn about the difficulties of becoming a scrum master, how scrum team members need to embrace the scrum values to promote healthy team...

Leon Fayer
OmniTI
DT6

A Business-First Approach to DevOps Implementation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 1:30pm to 2:30pm

DevOps is a cultural shift aimed at streamlining intergroup communication and improving operational efficiency for development and operations groups. Over time, inclusion of other IT groups under the DevOps umbrella has become the norm for many organizations. But even broadening the boundaries of DevOps, the conversation has been largely devoid of the business units’ place at the table. A common mistake organizations make while going through the DevOps transformation is drawing a line at the IT boundary. If that occurs, a larger, more inclusive silo within the organization is created,...

Gene Chorba
Ionic Security
BT12

Implement Practical and Proven Encryption Practices

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

From its earliest times, software development has featured commercial and government-grade encryption libraries. Encryption libraries make it possible for organizations to protect data with the highest level of security. Gene Chorba says that despite a big push in the past few years to use encryption to combat security breaches, lack of expertise among developers and overly complex libraries have led to widespread implementation failures in business applications. Although any developers believe they know how to implement crypto, they haven't had any specific training in...

Jeff Dalton
Broadsword Solutions
AT10

Agile Performance Holarchy (APH)—A Model for Scaling Agile Teams

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

A hierarchy is an organizational network that has a top and a bottom, and where position is determined by rank, importance, and value. A holarchy is a network that has no top or bottom and where each person’s value derives from his ability, rather than position. As more companies seek the benefits of agile, leaders need to build and sustain delivery capability while scaling agile without introducing unnecessary process and overhead. The Agile Performance Holarchy (APH) is an empirical model for scaling and sustaining agility while continuing to deliver great products. Jeff Dalton...

Steve Berczuk
Fitbit
AT12

Resolve the Contradiction of Specialists within Agile Teams

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

As teams grow, organizations often draw a distinction between feature teams, which deliver the visible business value to the user, and component teams, which manage shared work. Steve Berczuk says that this distinction can help organizations be more productive and scale effectively, but he recognizes that not all shared work fits into this model. Some work is best handled by “specialists,” that is people with unique skills. Although teams composed entirely of T-shaped people is ideal, certain skills are hard to come by and are used irregularly across an organization. Since these...

Sumit Kumar
Capgemini
DT7

Transform Test Organizations for the New World of DevOps

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

With the recent emergence of DevOps across the industry, testing organizations are being challenged to transform themselves significantly within a short period of time to stay meaningful within their organizations. It’s not easy to plan and approach these changes considering the way testing organizations have remained structured for ages. These challenges start from foundational organizational structures and can cut across leadership influence, competencies, tools strategy, infrastructure, and other dimensions. Sumit Kumar shares his experience assisting various organizations to overcome...

Chris Parlette
ParkMyCLoud
DT8

Eliminate Cloud Waste with a Holistic DevOps Strategy

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 3:00pm to 4:00pm

Chris Parlette maintains that renting infrastructure on demand is the most disruptive trend in IT in decades. In 2016, enterprises spent $23B on public cloud IaaS services. By 2020, that figure is expected to reach $65B. The public cloud is now used like a utility, and like any utility, there is waste. Who's responsible for optimizing the infrastructure and reducing wasted expenses? It’s DevOps. The excess expense, known as cloud waste, comprises several interrelated problems: services running when they don't need to be, improperly sized infrastructure, orphaned resources, and shadow IT....

Jessie Shternshus
The Improv Effect, LLC.
K5

Individuals, Interactions, and Improvisation

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 - 4:15pm to 5:15pm

As agile practitioners, we constantly strive to better ourselves, our team, and our delivery. A great way to achieve this is simply being open to learning new ideas from other disciplines—including improvisation. Jessie Shternshus shares her story of realizing the uncanny similarities between agile team principles and the pillars of improvisation. Effective improvisers give their teammates unconditional support, practice active listening and accept (and build on) each other’s ideas, see and use mistakes as opportunities, learn to embrace the unknown, and always consider who their audience...