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Concurrent Sessions

Sessions are offered on Wednesday and Thursday at the conference and do not require a pre-selection. Build your own custom learning schedule by choosing from track sessions from both Better Software Conference West and Agile Development Conference West.

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Concurrent Sessions
BW1 Seven Deadly Habits of Highly Ineffective Software Managers
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, poor management of planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits—along with ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits include mishandling employee incentives; making key decisions by consensus; ignoring proven processes; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified—but liked by everyone. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these habits—or better yet, for avoiding them altogether. As a bonus, every delegate receives a copy of Ken’s full-color Seven Deadly Habits comic.

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Learn more about Ken Whitaker.
BW2 Forward Thinking for Tomorrow's Projects: Requirements for Business Analytics
Joy Beatty, Seilevel
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

Normal people don't look at data sets just for fun; they analyze them to make business decisions. More and more often, business analysts and product managers find themselves on strategic projects that require turning large, and often highly complex, data sets into meaningful information from which conclusive decisions and actions can be derived. Analysis of big data is a reality today in most IT organizations and will grow in significance as businesses look to gain a better understanding for capturing, structuring, and learning from their data. Joy Beatty offers advice on tackling requirements for business analytics projects. She outlines how to elicit strategic analytics decisions to help prioritize requirements work, and how to prepare for the future of big data by specifying data needs. Explore examples of questions analysts can use to engage businesses to think outside the box about their requirements and consider new possibilities from analytics projects.

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Learn more about Joy Beatty.
BW3 This Is Not Your Father's Career: Advice for the Modern Information Worker
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

In an era where college drop-outs run successful companies and creative entrepreneurs out-earn corporate vice presidents, working smart is clearly the new working hard. James Whittaker turns on their head the career rules that guided past generations and provides a new career manual for working smarter that speaks to the need for creativity, innovation, and insight. James teaches a set of skills designed for the modern era of working for companies, big or small. Learn how to avoid a one-sided relationship with your employer and ensure your passion is working for—and not against—you. Discover how to manage your technical skills and professional relationships for maximum effect. James introduces common career hazards and how to identify and avoid them. Think more creatively and examine how to adopt specific career management strategies designed to supercharge your success. The modern age requires more modern ways to succeed. James has them for you.

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Learn more about James Whittaker.
BW4 Automate Your Mobile Development Ecosystem
Josh Anderson, StepLeader, Inc.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

Mobile is hard. Mobile at scale is even harder. And automation is your only option for success as you scale. However, many organizations haven’t yet started automating their mobile development efforts. Understanding how to automate your mobile ecosystem puts you ahead of your competition. How do you actually automate the building, testing, and deploying of hundreds of mobile apps across multiple operating systems and multiple app stores? Josh Anderson explains that when compared to the tools supporting the development and deployment of web applications, mobile is in its infancy. This means that you must get comfortable with alpha versions of open source projects, constantly changing APIs, and some good old-fashioned engineering duct tape. Josh takes you through the challenges his company encountered along the path to effective automation and shares the challenges that remain. Take back home with you the lessons Josh and his team learned and effectively pave your path to mobile automation.

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Learn more about Josh Anderson.
BW5 You’re Not as Smart as You Think: Improve Your Decision-Making Skills
Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques, Inc.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

We all think of ourselves as pretty smart. After all, we sent a man to the moon and can instantly send a message across the world. Unfortunately, we suffer from a nasty little thing known as the Overconfidence Effect, a bias that applies to almost everything we do, including judging our own intelligence. Overconfidence is one of the dozens of documented biases and shortcomings in human judgment and decision making. Brandon Carlson covers biases from the Availability heuristic, which causes us to associate an event's probability with its memorability, to the Affect heuristic, where a positive experience compels us to believe that the decision was good—regardless of the overall outcome. Brandon explains that understanding and planning for these biases can help reduce the impact they have on our daily decisions. We still may not be as smart as we think, but at least we have the tools to compensate.

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Learn more about Brandon Carlson.
BW6 Nonfunctional Requirements: Forgotten, Neglected, and Misunderstood
Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Implementing nonfunctional requirements is essential to build the right product. Yet teams often struggle with when and how to discover, specify, and test these requirements. Many teams neglect nonfunctional requirements up front, considering them less important or unrelated to user requirements; other teams specify them incompletely or with untestable and non-measurable attributes. Ellen Gottesdiener introduces three types of nonfunctional requirements: interfaces; attributes including performance, usability, security, and robustness; and the environment for the product’s design and implementation. Ellen helps you explore ways to visualize interfaces and value their options, examine techniques to specify quality attributes and their acceptance criteria, and consider environmental requirements. Leave with a better understanding of how these dimensions intertwine with functional requirements, and the challenges of incorporating nonfunctional requirements in your product backlog. Join Ellen in a fast-paced survey of key practices designed to help you discover and define holistic nonfunctional requirements for your agile project.

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Learn more about Ellen Gottesdiener.
BW7 Collaboration and Communication through Improvisation
Kupe Kupersmith, B2T Training
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

To accomplish anything, you need the help of others. Successful teams are composed of members who are continually improving how they interact and communicate. Collaboration, creativity, and results grow out of an environment that is honest, positive, and affirming. Improvisation is about creating a positive environment where actors take an idea and then collaborate to co-create another great idea. In today’s world, a superstar does not sit in his office and emerge with a great idea. Great ideas evolve through group interaction. Experienced improvisational actor Kupe Kupersmith shares key improvisation techniques, including “Yes, and…” and “Answer Man” that help you become a more attentive, adaptive, and open-minded team member. The lessons learned help you stay in the present, temporarily suspend judgment, think on your feet, keep conversations moving forward, and listen generously―skills that build positive, trust-based, results-oriented teams. Adopt the improv mindset, and be more confident in collaboration, decision making, and negotiation.

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Learn more about Kupe Kupersmith.
BW8 The Secrets of Mobile App Testing
Jason Arbon, Applause
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Most app teams aim for 4 stars—not 5. Why? Because delivering and maintaining a high-quality app becomes more challenging every day. Agile engineering and continuous integration put more pressure than ever on testers and quality-focused developers. Add to that the raw complexity of device and platform fragmentation, new sensors, app store processes, star ratings and reviews, increased app competition, mobile automation frameworks that only half work, and users who expect the app to not just work flawlessly, but also to be intuitive and even beautiful and fun. Jason Arbon shares app testing secrets gleaned from thousands of testers on hundreds of the world’s most popular apps, and data analytics on millions of apps and hundreds of millions of reviews. See how the best teams manage their star ratings and app store reviews. Learn what has been tried—and has failed. Get a glimpse of the future of app testing.

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Learn more about Jason Arbon.
BW9 Want Self-Organizing Teams? Just BEGIN Now!
Shawn Button, Leanintuit
Chris Farrell, Rally Software Development
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Organizations now understand that self-organizing teams perform better. Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to find the right balance between control and empowerment that works for your teams in your context. Even after your teams begin to self-organize, you are not finished. You should increase the level of self-organization over time as your teams mature. Shawn Button and Chris Farrell present a concise acronym that can help you empower your teams: BEGIN―Boundaries, Empowerment, Goals, Ingredients, and Nurture. BEGIN can be used as a checklist to ensure that you cover the necessary elements of self-organization, or as an exercise to use with teams and management to establish a self-organization contract. This session is a mix of workshop and lecture. Participate in exercises designed to illuminate the benefits of self-organization, and learn how BEGIN can be used to create and evolve self-organization.

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Learn more about Shawn Button and Chris Farrell.
BW10 Specification by Example: Stop Testing at the End
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Even the fastest agile teams can struggle when we “test at the end.” As automation efforts fall behind, untested features pile up, and so does the pressure to cut corners. By contrast, Specification by Example “tests first” by writing automated specifications for new features using concrete examples in plain language. This collaboration focuses everyone—from analysts and customers through developers and testers—to the same definition of “done.” Join Nate Oster as he explains his skeptical journey from traditional testing to Specification by Example. Nate shares the hard-won wisdom and real-world problems of successful test-driven teams at startups through multinationals. Traditional test scripts obscure the behavior of your product with long procedures and technical details. Instead, we can briefly describe even complex behaviors using specific examples. At each stage of the agile testing journey, Nate illustrates how you can apply these practices right away with your own teams.

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Learn more about Nate Oster.
BW11 Speed-Reading Your Colleagues and Bosses for Understanding
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Effective communication is one of the most critical factors for success in the workplace. For software professionals, it is critical to understand how best to present information to your target audience in a way that they will understand and then take the action you want. Jennifer Bonine presents ideas on mastering politics, reading your colleagues and bosses perspective on how they want to receive information, and techniques to use if you’re not getting the action you want from your interactions. Learn what your preferred communication style is, how to detect others’ preferred styles, and how to get your message across when your style and theirs don’t match. To help you accomplish your communications’ goals at work, Jennifer shares with you a toolkit to improve your communication style, speed-read your colleagues for understanding, and ensure success in your interactions with others.

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine.
BW12 Web Application Security Testing: Kali Linux Is the Way to Go
Gene Gotimer, Coveros, Inc.
Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 3:45pm - 5:00pm

Many free security testing tools are available, but finding ones that meet your needs and work in your environment can involve substantial time and effort. Especially when you are just starting out with security testing, finding reputable tools that do what you need is not easy. And installing them correctly just to evaluate them can be prohibitively time consuming. Kali Linux is a free Linux distribution with hundreds of security testing and auditing tools installed. Gene Gotimer gives an overview of Kali Linux, ways to effectively use it, and a survey of the tools available. Although Kali Linux is primarily intended for professional penetration testers, it provides great convenience and value to developers and software testers who may be getting started in security testing. Gene demonstrates some of the simplest tools to help jumpstart your web application security testing practices.

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Learn more about Gene Gotimer.
BT1 Create Personas to Never Lose Sight of Your Customers
Dan Radigan, Atlassian
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am

Agile enables teams to deliver software with higher consistency and quality. With more frequent release cycles, it's critically important that everyone in your organization focus on the same customers. Creating personas keeps everyone on the product team―product owners, engineers, support, and marketing―focused on delivering for the same key customers. In agile development, the smallest unit of innovation is the user story, and it begins with a customer, represented by a persona. With each completed user story, your organization makes a contribution to that customer. When different teams hold different views of the customer, the user experience suffers. When we deliver different value to different users, it's easy to lose focus. Dan Radigan shares how to define an effective persona and how to get buy-in across the organization. Explore how using personas helps make better products by using consistent customer language across the product team, stakeholders, and customers.

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Learn more about Dan Radigan.
BT2 Avoid Over Design and Under Design
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging conundrum. Too much design often results in excess complexity and wasted effort. Too little design results in a poor architecture or insufficient system structures which require expensive rework and hurt more in the long run. How can we know the right balance of upfront design work and emerging design approaches? Al Shalloway shows how to use design patterns—coupled with agile’s attitude of “don’t build what you don’t need”—to guide your design efforts. The trick is to identify potential design alternatives, analyze how each may affect the system in the future, and then find the simplest approach for isolating those potential effects. Al describes the essence of emergent design—start with a simple design and let it evolve as the requirements evolve—and demonstrates how to refactor to achieve better designs, which really is quite different from refactoring bad code.

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Learn more about Al Shalloway.
BT3 Accelerate Software Delivery with the Cloud
Rohit Jainendra, Electric Cloud
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am

The rate of technology innovation continues to accelerate, creating a demand for businesses to quickly deliver software that keeps pace with customer expectations. From development teams working across multiple locations to numerous tools within IT, releasing software in any enterprise has always been a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. While methodologies like agile and DevOps have reduced the release cycle time, organizations can now combine these methodologies with the cloud to deliver software even faster. Rohit Jainendra shares how public and private cloud technologies enable development teams to practice continuous delivery, avoid virtual machine sprawl, and minimize the bookkeeping associated with typical virtualization implementation. Get helpful tips to architect and adopt an elastic cloud solution using OpenStack and other commonly used tools that provide flexible capacity to teams while minimizing resources and maximizing productivity. You can improve cycle time by scaling cloud resources up or down to accelerate release frequencies from months to days to create your competitive advantage.

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Learn more about Rohit Jainendra.
BT4 From Good to Great: Combining Session- and Thread-Based Test Management
Michael Albrecht, AddQ Consulting
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 10:15am - 11:30am

With the increased demand of short iterations, less time for formal testing, and increasingly complex applications, your daily testing habits must change. Session-based test management (SBTM) starts with Exploratory Testing and adds some structure to make it more focused, accountable, and reportable. Thread-based test management (TBTM) organizes Exploratory Testing around threads of activity, rather than test sessions or test artifacts. Michael Albrecht has combined SBTM and TBTM into xBTM™ to take full advantage of both. In xBTM you use mind maps for test planning, models as test design, and your daily activities as management reports. Michael shares his experience on how to plan, design, execute, and report your testing using xBTM. Learn how to create a simple test design model and use the free tool SBTExecute to generate mind maps, the heart of xBTM.

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Learn more about Michael Albrecht.
BT5 Play the Lean Startup Game
Ram Srinivasan, Independent Consultant
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

Organizations often build products with minimal customer involvement. Consequently, they often build  products that are different from what the customer actually wants or what the customer will pay for. Lean startups take a different approach and involve customers at every stage of product development. Ram Srinivasan describes how to run a business based on the lean startup approach. Ram begins by playing a collaborative game that explores the marketplace. Delegates self-organize into teams and try to run a profitable business making widgets. They sell the widgets to customers and during the course of game learn what the customer wants—and is willing to pay for. The teams track a few metrics to determine their profitability. At the end of the game, Ram debriefs the teams on why customer discovery and customer validation are important.

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Learn more about Ram Srinivasan.
BT6 Service Virtualization: Speed Up Delivery and Improve Quality
Anne Hungate, Independent Consultant
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

“We could not test this because…” Every technology professional has experienced issues during system testing when unit testing was overlooked or cut short. Every project team has hit roadblocks during system testing when dependent systems or complicated data have been unavailable. Service virtualization is a tool that eliminates the waiting and the excuses, making thorough and complete unit and system testing realistic. Done well, service virtualization improves defect detection and resolution in every phase of a project—driving down cost while improving quality. Done poorly, service virtualization is expensive, time consuming, and difficult to maintain. Anne Hungate shares her formula for picking the right project, building the business case, and staffing to get the work done. Anne shows how to capture the value of service virtualization―compressing project schedules, delivering high-quality software, and delighting customers along the way. Learn how to ask for and get the most from your service virtualization efforts.

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Learn more about Anne Hungate.
BT7 She's Scrum, He's Waterfall: Can This Relationship Be Saved?
Heather Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer Partners, LLC
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

Do your developers want to try a new approach but are constrained because your customer or project manager isn’t interested in changing? Heather Oppenheimer shares the story of how one company was able to reconcile the development team’s desire to use Scrum with the customer’s requirement for status reporting based on waterfall phases. When they started, the project managers were complaining that they weren’t getting the status information they needed, and the developers were whining that their priorities were being changed daily. Even though the company was keeping customers happy by delivering reliable products, everyone was frustrated. Heather shares how you can bring your developers and project managers together by transforming mismatched expectations into a smoothly flowing process—balancing the need for quick response to change with the need for focused development priorities. She addresses the information and reporting formats required by each of the different stakeholders, and describes how to use both Scrum and waterfall lifecycles appropriately to meet everyone’s needs.

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Learn more about Heather Oppenheimer.
BT8 Spice Up Your Test Plans with Mind Maps
Jeanne Peng, Cisco Video Technologies France
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 12:45pm - 2:00pm

As our systems grow and are composed of numerous new-to-market technologies, testing becomes more complex and difficult. If you feel limited by the traditional ways your team designs tests, you can find out with Jeanne Peng how to animate test design and improve test coverage by using heuristics, mnemonics, and mind maps. Jeanne and her colleagues use these techniques to help them trigger and develop new test ideas, including their in-house Integration Maturity Level and the widely used SFDPOT mnemonic. Testing ideas are developed around the central functionality and derived from each heuristic with the aid of a mind map. Jeanne demonstrates how to improve your test analysis and test design, including mind mapping your test ideas in two dimensions to convert each idea into a test case. Discover tactics you can use to make every testing effort an enjoyable and challenging adventure.

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Learn more about Jeanne Peng.
BT9 Helping Others Take Ownership of Conflict Resolution
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Healthy conflict helps build stronger teams. This should not come as a big surprise. Yet, leaders are all too familiar with the struggle to get members of teams to appropriately resolve their own conflicts. Tricia Broderick faced this challenge until she stopped taking ownership of the conflict and its resolution. Although conflict situations can be dramatically different, underneath most conflicts is a misalignment between perceptions and intentions. Join Tricia as she steps through a real world example―helping a lead developer take ownership of his conflict with a team member―by leveraging double loop learning. Expect deep personal reflection as we explore how immediate reactions can influence perceptions and how we as leaders can encourage the problem solving skills of others to help resolve conflict. Learn techniques you can implement to avoid accidentally or intentionally taking ownership for conflict that rightly belongs to others to solve.

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Learn more about Tricia Broderick.
BT10 Technical Debt: You Can’t Afford It
David Croley, Agile Velocity
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Technical debt happens, either via strategic decisions or inadvertantly as a project progresses. Debt can slow down a project and represents a risk that is not always apparent to those outside the project. Teams must find ways to work technical debt resolution activities into sprints and get agreement from external management to reduce it. David Croley explores the sources and types of technical debt and discusses the costs associated with ignoring it. David discusses techniques for making technical debt visible and quantifiable, and shows how to reduce it in an agile fashion. Delegates break into teams and play “Tech Debt,” a game that simulates a few iterations of development. Teams vary the mix of feature stories and technical debt stories attempted in each iteration. The goal is to discover the best strategies for managing debt while delivering maximum features. Addressing technical debt makes for happier developers and happier users.

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Learn more about David Croley.
BT11 Demystifying Big Data and NoSQL
Jon Mills, PaigeTechnologies
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

Big Data is here to stay and with it comes a deluge of new buzzwords and acronyms. Phrases like NoSQL; Document Database; Velocity, Volume, and Variety; Hadoop; and Map Reduce are now commonplace. To complicate matters further, different people define these phrases slightly differently. Jon Mills explains what Big Data really means and pulls back the curtain on the buzzwords surrounding it. Jon explains the origins of NoSQL, what the various NoSQL databases are, and when each is used. He walks you through the concept of MapReduce and how this tool allows manipulation and aggregation of massive amounts of data in your enterprise. Jon helps you understand what these various new technologies are all about and how they can impact you and your business. Take back the information you need to make informed decisions about who should use these tools in your enterprise—and when and where.

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Learn more about Jon Mills.
BT12 The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Metrics Talk You'll Ever Need to Hear
Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering
Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 2:15pm - 3:30pm

The Mismeasure of Software: The Last Metrics Talk You'll Ever Need to Hear Lee Copeland claims that most organizations have some kind of metrics program—and almost all are ineffective. After explaining the concept of measurement, Lee describes two key reasons for these almost universal metrics program failures. The first major mistake people make is forgetting that the model we are using for measurement is not necessarily reality. The second major blunder is treating ideas as if they were real things and then counting them. Lee describes the “Three Don'ts of Metrics”—Don’t measure it unless you know what it means; Don’t measure it if you’re not going to do something with the measurement; and no matter what else you do, Don’t turn your measurement into a goal. Through the years, Lee has discovered his favorite project indicator is not a measurement at all—and you’ll be surprised to learn what it is. Join Lee as he shares his Zeroth Law of Metrics to guide your program to success.

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Learn more about Lee Copeland.