Requirements

Tutorials

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 1:00pm

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.

TL Get the Requirements Right―The First Time

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

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.

TP The Essential Product Owner: Championing Successful Products

Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 1:00pm

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.

Keynotes

K2 For Maximum Awesome

Joe Justice, Scrum, Inc

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 10:15am

An agile hardware and engineering company of 500 collaborators in twenty countries, Team WIKISPEED uses test-first development practices, is run by Scrum teams, and produces road legal cars, micro-houses, and social-good projects. Joe Justice shares how their 100-MPG road car was created in just three months through object-oriented design, iterative development, and agile project management.

K3 An Agile Throwdown: Munich Takes on the Columbus Agile Benchmark Study

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 8:30am

Agile has not only gone mainstream, it’s gone global. Data on agile team performance, time-to-market, and quality have emerged in the past decade. In 2012, a group of Columbus, Ohio, companies—business, IT, and financial services firms—participated in the first ever “Columbus Agile vs. the World” study. They collected velocity, schedule, effort, staffing, and quality data which were compared against QSM’s Software Lifecycle Management (SLIM) database. Analysis revealed delivery was 31 percent faster with 75 percent fewer defects than industry norms. Enter Munich, Germany.

K4 Producing Product Developers

David Hussman, DevJam

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 3:45pm

Many teams and organizations have found agile methods help them produce more. Where critical thinking is alive, a more important question arises: Are we producing the right thing? Even though agile tools and processes have helped produce more, they often fail to help us produce the right product, change our focus to product over process, or improve product learning.

Concurrent Sessions

BW2 Forward Thinking for Tomorrow's Projects: Requirements for Business Analytics

Joy Beatty, Seilevel

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 12:45pm

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.

BW6 Nonfunctional Requirements: Forgotten, Neglected, and Misunderstood

Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 2:15pm

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.

BW10 Specification by Example: Stop Testing at the End

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 3:45pm

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.

BT1 Create Personas to Never Lose Sight of Your Customers

Dan Radigan, Atlassian

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 10:15am

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.