Quality Assurance

Tutorials

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.

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.

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.