Better Software East 2017 - Tutorials
Full- and half-day tutorials are consistently the most popular and highly rated part of the conference. Tutorials allow you to take a deeper dive into a specific topic so that you can learn to make improvements to everyday processes in the areas that matter most to you.
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...
Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers
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...
Service Virtualization for Faster Development and Testing
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...
Lean/Agile Data-Driven Decisions Demystified
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...
Lean Software Development: Principles and Practices
PreviewLean 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...
Leading Successful Organizational Change Efforts
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization, and it doesn’t get the support you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for organizational change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for...
Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven Development
PreviewDefining, 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...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Teams
PreviewMany 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...
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...
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...
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 (...
Advanced Test Automation in Agile Development
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,...
Plan, Architect, and Implement Test Automation within the Lifecycle
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...
Stop Talking about DevOps: Start Applying Continuous Delivery Practices
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...
The Architecture of Microservices
Sold Out!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...
What DevOps Means for Testers
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...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
Preview Sold Out!Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team’s performance, accountability, and engagement....
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...
Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Agile initiatives always begin with high expectations—accelerate delivery, meet customer needs, and improve software quality. The truth is that many agile projects do not deliver on some or all of these expectations. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne discusses the most common causes of agile project failure and how you can avoid these issues or mitigate their damaging effects. Poor project management, ineffective requirements development, failed communications, software development...
Rethinking Your Retrospectives
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...
The Tester’s (New) Role in Agile Development
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...
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...