Product Manager

Tutorials

MA Practical Agile Metrics for Release Planning, Estimation, and Retrospectives

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

MC Creating Android Apps in Java NEW

Mark Meretzky, New York University

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

MD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

ME Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing SOLD OUT

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

MG Solving Real Problems through Collaborative Innovation Games®

Michael Vizdos, Vizdos Enterprises, LLC

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

MH What’s Your Leadership IQ?

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Mon, 06/02/2014 - 8:30am

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.

ML Twelve Risks to Enterprise Software Projects—And What to Do about Them NEW

Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.

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

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.

MM An Introduction to SAFe: The Scaled Agile Framework NEW

Al Shalloway, Net Objectives

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

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.

TC Leadership and Career Success—On Purpose NEW

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 06/03/2014 - 8:30am

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.

TN Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities NEW

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

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

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).

Keynotes

K1 Beyond the Web and Apps: The Domestication of Knowledge

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Wed, 06/04/2014 - 8:30am

Since the dawn of computing, we've invented only two ways to get work done―the web or apps. We hunt for information on the web or we gather functionality from the app store. In each case, users must take the initiative to find the information they need. We've become used to this life of hunting and gathering, but its time is ending. A new era of domesticated information and functionality is dawning. In this new world, the web's information comes to users when and where they need it.

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

BW3 This Is Not Your Father's Career: Advice for the Modern Information Worker

James Whittaker, Microsoft

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

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.

BW5 You’re Not as Smart as You Think: Improve Your Decision-Making Skills

Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques, Inc.

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

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.

BW7 Collaboration and Communication through Improvisation

Kupe Kupersmith, B2T Training

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

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.

BW11 Speed-Reading Your Colleagues and Bosses for Understanding

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

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

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.

BT5 Play the Lean Startup Game

Ram Srinivasan, Independent Consultant

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 12:45pm

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.

BT9 Helping Others Take Ownership of Conflict Resolution

Tricia Broderick, Pearson

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 2:15pm

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.

BT11 Demystifying Big Data and NoSQL

Jon Mills, PaigeTechnologies

Thu, 06/05/2014 - 2:15pm

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.