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Tutorials

Begin your experience by attending half- or full-day tutorials. Please note that you must register for the tutorial(s) you want to attend as space is limited and many sell out quickly.

Tutorials
MA Practical Agile Metrics for Release Planning, Estimation, and Retrospectives
Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning. In hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.

Laptops Preferred. To take full advantage of this tutorial, delegates should bring a Windows-based PC (with admin rights) for use during data capture and productivity calculations. If you can’t bring one, share with another delegate.

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Learn more about Michael Mah.
MB Continuous Delivery: Rapid and Reliable Releases with DevOps
Bob Aiello, CM Best Practices Consulting
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

DevOps is an emerging set of principles, methods, and practices that enables the rapid deployment of software systems. DevOps focuses on lowering barriers between development, testing, security, and operations in support of rapid iterative development and deployment. Many organizations struggle when implementing DevOps because of its inherent technical, process, and cultural challenges. Bob Aiello shares DevOps best practices starting with its role early in the application lifecycle and bridging the gap with testing, security, and operations. Bob explains how to implement DevOps using industry standards and frameworks such as ITIL v3 (IT Service Management) in both agile and non-agile environments, focusing on automated deployment frameworks that quickly deliver value to the business. DevOps includes server provisioning essential for cloud computing in what is becoming known as Infrastructure as Code. Bob equips you with practical and effective DevOps practices—automated application build, packaging, and deployment—essential for meeting today's business and technology demands.

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Learn more about Bob Aiello.
MC Creating Android Apps in Java NEW
Mark Meretzky, New York University
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

Join Mark Meretzky to learn how to create Android apps using the Eclipse IDE on Mac, PC, or Linux. The apps Mark demonstrates are composed of objects written in Java, plus a screen layout in XML. Find out how the Java code manipulates the XML to present a user interface including buttons, sliders, and other widgets. Draw text and graphics, respond to a touch or keystroke, and recognize a swipe or pinch. Three important design patterns involve views, which are visible areas on the screen. (1) A listener is an object whose methods are called in response to a stimulus. A view is made touch sensitive by plugging a listener into it. (2) A cursor is a source of data. A cursor is connected to an adapter, which encases each data item in a separate view object. (3) An adapter view displays the series of views created by the adapter. As our finale, we let a component of one app launch and communicate with a component of another app on the same device.

Prerequisite: Delegates should have a reading knowledge of Java.

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Learn more about Mark Meretzky.
MD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it. Learn how to use oratory and literary instruments to make the story come alive for your audience. Do your part to put an end to crap presentations―attend this tutorial.

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Learn more about James Whittaker.
ME Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing SOLD OUT
Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep pace with development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins. Learn to switch from tests as verification to tests as specification, and to guide development with acceptance tests written in the language of your business. Start by joining a team for a simulation and experience how ATDD helps build quality in instead of trying to test defects out. Then progress to increasingly more realistic scenarios and practice the art of specifying intent with plain-language and table-based formats. This isn’t a tools session. These are tabletop, paper-based simulations that give you meaningful practice with how executable specifications change the way you think about tests and collaborate as a team. Leave empowered with a kit of exercises to advocate ATDD with your own teams.

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Learn more about Nate Oster.
MF What Do Agile Managers Do? NEW
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

The Agile Manifesto makes no mention of management. So does that mean that we don’t need managers? No. We need managers, but what they do changes in an agile organization. In an agile organization, where managers no longer define and monitor daily tactical project tasks, we need them more than ever as organizational leaders―setting strategy, managing the organization-wide project portfolio, removing organizational obstacles, building trusting relationships with the staff, coaching, providing feedback, assisting with career development, leading the hiring decisions and process, and building the capacity of the organization. Do you know how to perform this work? In this experiential session, Johanna Rothman invites you to experience part of the day of an agile manager. Feel what it is like to set strategy, manage the project portfolio, remove obstacles, provide feedback, and build the capacity of the organization. This is a simulation-based tutorial. Come prepared to experience and debrief to learn.

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Learn more about Johanna Rothman.
MG Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®
Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Are you having trouble getting people in your organization to agree on a path forward? Is collaboration sometimes more like a contest to see who can yell the loudest? Is it difficult to get customers to give you the information you need to create a product charter or unambiguous requirements? Achieving meaningful collaboration with a diverse group of people can be very difficult. Michael Vizdos shares his experiences with Innovation Games®, collaboration exercises that dramatically improve the way people work together. You’ll practice with exercises that are easy to use, fun, and encourage working together in a structured fashion. This structure guides successful collaboration, helping participants stay on track and avoiding non-productive, free-for-all discussions. Learn how to choose the best Innovation Game for each situation. Leave with an understanding of how and why structured collaboration with intellectual games is one of the most productive ways to help people work together toward a common goal.

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Learn more about Michael Vizdos.
MH What’s Your Leadership IQ?
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Have you ever needed a way to measure your leadership IQ? Or been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing your need to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are and how to build on and improve them, Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. This toolkit includes a personal assessment of your leadership competencies, explores a set of eight dimensions of successful leaders, provides suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and describes techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. These tools can help you become a more effective and valued leader in your organization. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your strengths and your “development opportunities.”

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine.
MI Scaling Agile with the Lessons of Lean Product Development Flow
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Although first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand throughout the organization. With a set of principles that can help improve software development quality and productivity, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of local optimization. While agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, larger organizations can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague company-wide agile endeavors. Al Shalloway explores the lean principles of mapping value streams, creating visibility, managing work levels, and more. Together, these lean principles and practices can help your organization dramatically reduce the amount of waste in the work that teams perform. He introduces kanban, an agile method that is a strong implementation of lean principles. Al closes with agile adoption case studies that illustrate how lean thinking can extend Scrum practices.

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Learn more about Al Shalloway.
MJ Stop Making Lists, Start Making Products NEW
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Many product backlogs are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value, focusing only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. If this sounds like your team, join David Hussman and Janet Gregory as they drive a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathe new life into test-driven thinking that is meaningful to testers, developers, product owners, and others. Using real-world examples, David and Janet combine their shared experiences to teach tools you can use to fuse centered product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. Bring your failing product backlog stories and discuss them, too.

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Learn more about David Hussman and Janet Gregory.
MK Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups NEW
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then? When done with utmost skill and to its greatest advantage, risk management starts before a project is even born. Tim Lister presents the advantages—and the dangers—of practicing risk management like a grown-up. Tim offers a process for you to consider tailoring for your organization and discusses how your organization can grow up.

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Learn more about Tim Lister.
ML Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—And What to Do about Them NEW
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Every large software project is unique—each with its own complex array of challenges. When projects get into trouble, however, they often exhibit similar patterns and succumb to risks that could have been anticipated and prevented—or detected sooner and managed better. Common responses to the problems—blaming, deferring action, or outright denial—only make things worse. Payson Hall reviews a dozen patterns he has observed over and over again on troubled projects during his career: trouble with subcontractors, challenges with project sponsors, friction within the team, perils of interfacing with adjacent systems, issues with data cleansing and conversion, and more. Payson shares the tools he uses to help identify the symptoms of common risks, reduce the likelihood of risks occurring, facilitate early detection of problems, and establish a foundation for helpful responses when problems arise. This session is designed for project managers, team leaders, project sponsors, and anyone responsible for building or rolling out large enterprise systems.

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Learn more about Payson Hall.
MM An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework NEW
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Many organizations have achieved agility at the team level only to be unable to achieve it across teams. The Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) provides both a vision and method for how to achieve this. SAFe is the first documented framework that can be used to scale agile throughout an organization. It is a combination of lean, kanban, and Scrum—lean to provide a context for an organization, kanban to manage the flow of projects, and Scrum to provide agile at the team level. Beginning with an introduction to lean and kanban, Al Shalloway explains why they are required for agile at scale. Al then describes the framework of SAFe—specifically how it creates a structure to manifest the behaviors required for agile at scale. In particular, learn how to coordinate your organization’s portfolio, programs, and projects. Al concludes by discussing when it is advisable to use the framework and when a more emergent method is preferable.

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Learn more about Al Shalloway.
MN Six Free Ideas to Improve Agile Success
Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Free? Is anything free these days? Based on her experience working with organizational leaders and her research into what drives organizational performance, Pollyanna Pixton shares six ideas—and the keys to their effective implementation—to help assure the success of your agile teams. As a bonus, her suggestions won’t cost you a thing. Pollyanna’s first free idea is how to create a culture of trust—the keystone of open collaboration—within your team and organization. The second free idea is about ownership—how to give it and not take it back. Third is empowering teams to make decisions by helping them understand and internalize the project and product’s purpose and value. The number four idea is that you can only fix processes, not people, so invest your energy toward the correct target. Idea five is to match people’s roles to their passion. Her final free idea is that integrity does matter—and matters most. Explore with Pollyanna why each of these ideas is important and how you can adopt them on your agile team.

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Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton.
MO Essential Test-Driven Development
Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles. The developer first writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested. Rob Myers demonstrates the essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring as just-in-time design, plus Fake It, Triangulate, and Obvious Implementation. During this hands-on session, you’ll use exercises to practice the techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of test-driven development.

Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and be familiar with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Delegates should bring a laptop installed with their favorite programming language and IDE—and come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java, and NUnit for any .NET language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install and verify your chosen IDE and xUnit framework prior to the tutorial, as technical support for those platforms will be very limited.

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Learn more about Rob Myers.
MP Agile Test Automation: Do It Early and Often SOLD OUT
Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Agile teams deliver “potentially” shippable software at the end of every iteration—typically, one to four weeks but possibly as often as daily. This goal can't be achieved without comprehensive automated tests, a place where many teams struggle. The challenge of automating functional regression tests even frightens many experienced and competent testers. But it doesn’t have to be this way. By combining collaborative teamwork with appropriate tools and design approaches, you not only can automate regression tests, but the team also can use test automation tools to enhance exploratory testing. Janet Gregory describes how to implement automation early in the project to guide development by providing real-time feedback to the team. Janet explores techniques for determining which tests to automate and which should remain manual. She demonstrates with examples how to design automated tests for maximum effectiveness and ease of maintenance. By the end of this session, you’ll understand how to fit automation activities within each iteration so testing keeps up with coding.

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Learn more about Janet Gregory.
MQ The Role of the Agile Business Analyst
Steve Adolph, BootStrap Agile
Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

The business analyst (BA) role seems conspicuously absent from most agile methods. Does agile make the BA role obsolete? Certainly not! But how does a BA exploit the short cycle times and collaborative nature of agile methods? Drawing from the principles of lean product development flow, Steve Adolph introduces five principles for the agile BA—Open the Channels, Chart the Flow, Generate Flow, Lean Out the Flow, and Bridge the Flow. As a communicator, the BA must Open the Channels and Chart the Flow to align all stakeholders. BAs can leverage traditional tools such as use cases to Generate Flow and feed user stories to fast moving agile teams. However, large backlogs of stories are wasteful, so lean principles are applied to Lean Out the Flow. Finally, BAs may need to Bridge the Flow between more traditional elements of the organization and its agile teams. Whether you are a BA new to agile or struggling to find the right fit in your team, join this highly interactive session to “get your flow” going.

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Learn more about Steve Adolph.
TA Requirements Engineering: A Hands-On Practicum
Erik van Veenendaal, Improve Quality IT Services BV
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

Identifying, documenting, and communicating requirements are key to all successful IT projects. Common problems in requirements engineering are How do we discover the real requirements?, How do we document requirements?, and How do user stories, use cases, and epics fit into requirements? Erik van Veenendaal answers these questions and more while helping you improve your skills in requirements engineering for both traditional and agile projects. With practical case studies and hands-on exercises, Erik illustrates requirements issues and solutions. Practice finding, specifying, and evaluating traditional requirements and user stories while learning how to gather information through varied elicitation techniques. Explore the advantages and disadvantages of each technique. Learn a rule set for determining how much documentation you need for “good enough” requirements. Explore requirements review techniques—walkthroughs and inspections—to determine what will work best for you. Create a set of Golden Rules for requirements engineering that your project can use.

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Learn more about Erik van Veenendaal.
TB Testing Mobile Apps—From All Angles
Randy Rice, Rice Consulting Services, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 4:30pm

As the need for testing mobile apps increases, so does the need to understand and apply test practices that cover more than just functional correctness. Randy Rice leads you through techniques for designing the right tests for your mobile applications, whether they are on the device or on a website. Learn how to know which items of functionality are important to test based on relative risk. Randy presents his visual method of how to rank important attributes including usability, compatibility, accessibility, and security, and then how to design tests for them. Randy covers both manual and automated approaches to testing mobile devices. Learn the pros and cons of each test approach. See an array of tools from simulators and emulators to cloud-based testing on real devices. This is an interactive session, so bring your mobile device with you and learn mobile testing by doing it.

In this tutorial we will be performing tests of mobile applications and mobile web sites. To participate fully in the exercises, please bring your own mobile device of any brand and operating system—iOS, Android, or other

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Learn more about Randy Rice.
TC Leadership and Career Success—On Purpose NEW
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Line up all the successful people in the world. Take away the pedigreed and the prodigies—you know the people who are going to succeed no matter what. Remove the brown-nosers and right-time-right-place lottery winners. And who do you have left? People who succeeded on purpose. Study these folks carefully, and you’ll find theirs paths to the top have common themes. James Whittaker exposes the career strategies of the ultra-successful and analyzes them in detail. Learn about personal strategies for identifying high-payoff activities and gain insight into being more effective as an individual contributor, manager, and leader. Discover how to identify and interact with the right set of career mentors and role models. Being successful doesn’t have to be an accident. Join James and learn how to succeed—on purpose.

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Learn more about James Whittaker.
TD Measurement and Metrics for Test Managers
Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics is complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Rick Craig as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Rick identifies several metrics paradigms—including Goal-Question-Metric—and discusses the pros and cons of each.

Rick urges those attending to bring their metrics problems and issues for use as discussion points.

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Learn more about Rick Craig.
TE A Test Leader’s Guide to Agile
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized―but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective. Join experienced agile test leader and long-time coach Bob Galen to explore the central leadership challenges associated with agile adoption: how to transform your team’s skills toward agile practices, how to hire agile testers, how to create a “whole-team” view toward quality by focusing on executable requirements, and how to create powerful doneness criteria. Beyond the tactical leadership issues, Bob explores strategies for becoming a partner in agile adoption pilot projects, making changes to test automation strategies, and reinventing your traditional planning and metrics for more agile-centric approaches that engage stakeholders.

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Learn more about Bob Galen.
TF Software Design for Testability
Keith Stobie, Salesforce.com
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Testability is the degree to which a system can be effectively and efficiently tested. This key software attribute indicates whether testing (and subsequent maintenance) will be easy and cheap—or difficult and expensive. In the worst case, a lack of testability means that some components of the system cannot be tested at all. Testability is not free; it must be explicitly designed into the system through adequate design for testability. Keith Stobie describes influencing factors (controllability, visibility, operability, stability, simplicity) and constraints (conflicting nonfunctional requirements, legacy code), and shares his experiences implementing and testing highly-testable software. Keith offers practical guidance on two key actions: (1) designing well-defined control and observation points in the architecture, and (2) specifying testability needs for test automation early. He shares creative and innovative approaches to overcome failures caused by deficiencies in testability. Keith presents a new and comprehensive strategy for testability design that you can implement to gain the benefits in a cost-efficient manner.

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Learn more about Keith Stobie.
TG Agile Boot Camp for Project Managers NEW
Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

In today’s world, multiple project management approaches abound― traditional waterfall, agile using Scrum, and the methodology of the PMBOK® Guide, to name a few. Cutting through the confusion, Ken Whitaker discusses key topics including avoiding the six deadly project statistics, applying the Decision Pyramid to project decision making, casting off traditional project management techniques to become truly agile, how agile really works and how agile can fail, collaborating with product management to prioritize what’s really important for the customer, and applying three innovative techniques to improve your team’s delivery effectiveness with better focus to achieve project flow. Learn which PMBOK® Guide processes can be used to benefit running your agile projects. Join Ken to discuss case studies and example projects so that you can put what you learn into immediate action.

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Learn more about Ken Whitaker.
TH Agile Project Failures: Root Causes and Corrective Actions
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Agile initiatives always begin with the best of intentions—accelerate delivery, better meet customer needs, or improve software quality. Unfortunately, some agile projects do not deliver. If you want help to ensure the success of your agile project or to get an agile project back on track, this session is for you. Jeff 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 problems, and non-agile testing can all contribute to project failure. Learn practical tips and techniques for identifying early warning signs that your agile project might be in trouble and how you can best get your project back on track. Gain the knowledge you need to guide your organization toward agile project implementations that serve the business and the stakeholders.

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Learn more about Jeff Payne.
TI Eight Steps to Kanban
Al Shalloway, Net Objectives
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Al Shalloway shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. He begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step is to establish explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because kanban can easily be expanded to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises. By the end, you will have an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

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Learn more about Al Shalloway.
TJ Coaching and Leading Agility: Tuning Agile Practices Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am - 12:00pm

Are you an agile practitioner who wants to take agility to the next level? Are you looking to gain real value from agile instead of simply more talk? Even though many are using agile methods, not all are seeing big returns from their investment. David Hussman shares his experiences and describes a short assessment that you can use to identify both strengths and weaknesses in your use of agile methods. Creating an assessment helps you look at the processes you are using, examine why you are using them, and determine whether they provide real value. This assessment guides you through the remainder of the tutorial, helping you tune your current processes and embrace new tools—product thinking, product delivery, team building, technical excellence, program level agility, and more. Leave with an actionable coaching plan that is measurable and contextually significant to your organization. If you want to promote real agility—or lead others to do so—come ready to think, challenge, question, listen, and learn.

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Learn more about David Hussman.
TK Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the 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 workshop, we’ll 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 teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement. We’ll investigate training and standards for agile adoption, and situations and guidelines for when to trust the team and when to step in and provide guidance and direction. We’ll examine the leader’s role in agile at-scale and with distributed agile teams. Good leadership is central to sustaining your agile adoption; bad leadership can render it irrelevant or a failure. To inspire you and your teams, join Bob to walk the path of the good and to examine the patterns of the bad.

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Learn more about Bob Galen.
TL Get the Requirements Right―The First Time
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

One group—customers, users, and business—need a software system to help them work more efficiently or make more money, but they don’t know how to build it. Another group—software developers and testers—know how to build the system, but they don’t know what it is supposed to do. Bridging this gap is where requirements—the work products describing the system accurately and concisely while at the same time not missing important customer and user needs—are essential. To get the requirements right the first time, you need strategy, tactics, and a practical process for discovering the real requirements—which may not turn out to be what the users think they need. Tim Lister presents a strategy to get accurate and explicit requirements, tactics to efficiently develop these requirements, and a process to keep everything glued together when tackling a large, complex job. Take back an 85-page, annotated requirements specification template to help get your requirements right—the first time

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Learn more about Tim Lister.
TM Congruent Coaching: Choosing the Right Approach NEW
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

We have opportunities to coach people all the time. Much of what we think of as coaching is actually undercover training. Real coaching is richer—offering support while exploring options. In this interactive session, Johanna Rothman invites you to experience coaching, regardless of your position in the organization. Teaching is just one type of coaching. You have many other options, depending on your coaching stance. You may select a counselor’s stance if you are managing up or a partner’s stance if you are a peer. You might even select a reflective observer’s stance or a technical advisor’s stance, depending on the situation. Explore what to do when you see opportunities for coaching but you haven’t been asked to coach. Bring your coaching concerns, whether you are coaching onsite, or coaching at a distance, or coaching one-on-one, or coaching teams. Let’s learn and build our coaching skills together.

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Learn more about Johanna Rothman.
TN Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should being spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

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Learn more about Jennifer Bonine.
TO Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Your organization is doing well with functional, usability, and performance testing. However, you know that software security is a key part of software assurance and compliance strategy for protecting applications and critical data. Left undiscovered, security-related defects can wreak havoc in a system when malicious invaders attack. If you don’t know where to start with security testing and don’t know what you are—or should be—looking for, this tutorial is for you. Jeff Payne describes how to get started with security testing, introducing foundational security testing concepts and showing you how to apply those concepts with free and commercial tools and resources. Offering a practical risk-based approach, Jeff discusses why security testing is important, how to use security risk information to improve your test strategy, and how to add security testing into your software development lifecycle. You don’t need a software security background to benefit from this important session.

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TP The Essential Product Owner: Championing Successful Products
Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Engaged and passionate product owners balance strategic and tactical activities to ensure that the right product is built—and built right. Yet how do these product owners guide planning toward longer-term goals while also ensuring that requirements are sufficiently understood for development and delivery? Join Ellen Gottesdiener as she shares techniques for setting context and collaboratively establishing a shared understanding of requirements. Discover methods to envision the product and identify the stakeholders and their value considerations. Experience a simulated agile discovery workshop—slicing requirements based on value and allocating features, minimum marketable features, and stories to planning horizons. Learn how iteration, release, and product roadmaps plans are interwoven and aligned to the product’s strategy. Take away proven techniques to identify and allocate requirements to plans, to make difficult and effective value-based planning decisions, and to refine a lean product backlog. Leave with a new appreciation for the attitudes and aptitudes of a successful product owner.

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TQ Agile Estimation and Planning: Scrum, Kanban, and Beyond Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

If you are new to agile methods—or trying to improve your estimation and planning skills—this session is for you. David Hussman brings years of experience coaching teams on how to employ XP, lean, Scrum, and kanban. He advises teams to obtain the estimating skills they need from these approaches rather than following a prescribed process. From start to finish, David focuses on learning from estimates as you learn to estimate. He covers skills and techniques from story point estimating delivered within iterations to planning without estimates by delivering a continuous flow of value. Going beyond the simple mechanics of estimation and planning, David explores agile techniques to enable continuous learning and ways to prevent sprint planning sessions from becoming empty rituals. Join David and your peers to practice your agile estimation and planning techniques so they can become powerful tools within your project.

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TR Getting Started with Scrum: An Experiential Workshop
Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.
Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm - 4:30pm

Agile is now mainstream, but many companies continue to struggle. When agile is adopted, common issues occur in every organization: getting people to try agile, selling agile to management, learning how to do efficient standup meetings, fitting planning into a short window, and running effective retrospectives. When you add in scaling issues, different development styles, and outsourcing, your simple agile adoption just gets more difficult. In this highly interactive (no slides) introductory-to-intermediate workshop, Mitch Lacey presents the tools you need to get started and be successful with agile. Using Scrum to manage the session, you will learn the value of prioritization and how to do it, why timeboxing works, how to create a release plan using team velocity, and more. As you are learning these techniques, Mitch answers your questions to help ensure your successful agile adoption. Get started on the path to success with agile in this immersive experience.

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