Business User

Tutorials

ME Build Product Backlogs with Test-Driven Thinking―and More SOLD OUT NEW

David Hussman, DevJam

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and focus instead only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into product design with pragmatic UX and test-driven thinking. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches 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. This session is for testers, developers, product owners, and anyone else interested in improving their product thinking and product backlog. Bring your failing product backlog stories for discussion, too.

MN It’s All About Me™: Owning Your Behavior, Improving Your Team NEW

Doc List, Doc List Enterprises

Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation. Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.

TB Great Product Design with User Story Mapping NEW

Jeff Patton, Jeff Patton & Associates

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

A story map is a simple model, built from index cards or sticky notes, which helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Jeff Patton explains that within a design process story maps are a core practice focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or service. The design process and story mapping can identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Join Jeff to learn how to map your customer’s and user’s experience today and then how to deliberately improve that experience. Use empathy maps, persona sketches, archetypes and stereotypes, story mapping, and design studio concepts to speed your design work. Since all solution ideas are speculative, learn how to validate solutions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. In the end, discover an essential design process that allows you to identify and validate innovative product solutions.

This is a hands-on workshop. Come prepared to learn.

TD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence SOLD OUT

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 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. 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 bad presentations―attend this tutorial.

TF A Product Ownership Practicum for Product Owners and ScrumMasters NEW

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Congratulations! Your boss has selected you for a Product Owner role ... or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how to play with your Product Owner ... or you’re an experienced Product Owner struggling achieve balance among your stakeholders, customers and team ... or you’re newly CSPO certified but don’t know how to be a REAL Product Owner. Well fear not. Join author and Product Owner coach Bob Galen in this fast paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and delivering high-impact sprint reviews. Then we’ll raise the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively interact with your teams. Leave this workshop with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner you—and your boss—envisioned you to be.

TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities SOLD OUT

Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.

Tue, 06/09/2015 - 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). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be 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.

Concurrent Sessions

BW2 Business Analysis: From Interviews through Implementation

Barry Harvey, Florida Virtual Campus

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 11:30am

The keys to delivering better software lie in understanding what customers want―even when they are unable to articulate what they want―and being able to create a system that will improve the end users’ work. This is why your starting point should be understanding the differing, and sometime conflicting, needs of the customer and the end-users. Analyzing user needs, developing clearly defined requirements, and managing stakeholder expectations are three areas of business analysis that lead to greatly improved customer and end user satisfaction. Barry Harvey details his experience analyzing the system needs of a culturally and geographically diverse statewide academic support organization; explains how to translate those needs into detailed requirements; and most importantly, shares proven strategies for managing stakeholder expectations throughout the development and implementation process. Transparency and traceability allow both customers and users to understand how specific features and functionality came to be included in the final system, and how their particular needs are being addressed.

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

James Whittaker, Microsoft

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 11:30am

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.

BW10 Requirements Are Simply Requirements—or Maybe Not

Robin Goldsmith, Go Pro Management, Inc.

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 2:45pm

People talk about requirements, use identical terms, and think they have a common understanding. Yet, one says user stories are requirements; another claims user stories must be combined with requirements; and another has a still different approach. These “experts” seem unaware of the critical inconsistencies of their positions. No wonder getting requirements right remains a major challenge for many projects. Robin Goldsmith analyzes often conflicting, not-so-shared-as-presumed interpretations of what requirements are, reveals likely implications, and challenges not-so-wise conventional wisdom. Robin describes a more appropriate model of REAL business requirements—whats that provide value when combined with product/system/software hows. He introduces the powerful Problem Pyramid™ systematic disciplined guide to help you more reliably get requirements right. The structure makes it easier to see where user stories do or do not fit, identifies pitfalls of the “as a <role>” format, and reconciles some of the conflicts between user stories, features, use cases, and requirements.

BW11 Conflict: To Know It Is to Love It

Doc List, Doc List Enterprises

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 2:45pm

We all talk about conflict. We all experience it. But do we really understand what causes it and how we deal with it? Do we have any idea what to do about it? Much research and study has been done, but that doesn't help when you're in the middle of conflict. You don't have time to pull out the reference book or go to a website. You need simple, clear understanding. Learn the categories of conflict and how to recognize them, which means having an understanding of what generates them. Learn the different strategies of dealing with conflict, recognize your own preferred strategies, and understand where you may choose to change your strategy. Discover specific tools you can use in any situation to comfortably and confidently deal with conflict. Doc List introduces some ideas to enhance your learning after you leave the session, so you can continue to expand your love affair with conflict.

BW13 Get the Most from Your Cross Functional Team: The Project Manager’s View

Julie Gardiner, Hitachi Consulting

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 4:15pm

Jerry Weinberg once said, “No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem.” In the past, the challenges for any team leader, regardless of specialty, were the same when it came down to people issues. Now, with the popularity of agile and its cross-functional teams, we have another factor to consider in addition to the people―their different specialties. How can our leadership help us achieve great results and a happy agile team? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents a communication-style model that can be used to help motivate every member of the team and minimize personality/specialty clashes. Julie shows you how to apply this model to other assessments—such as Myers-Briggs, Belbin, and DISC—and shares experiences using the model. If you're a newly appointed team lead, ScrumMaster, or you just want to get the most out of your team (cross-functional or dedicated specialists), then this session is for you.

BW14 EARS: The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax

John Terzakis, Intel

Wed, 06/10/2015 - 4:15pm

One key to specifying effective functional requirements is minimizing misinterpretation and ambiguity. By employing a consistent syntax in your requirements, you can improve readability and help ensure that everyone on the team understands exactly what to develop. John Terzakis provides examples of typical requirements and explains how to improve them using the Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax (EARS). EARS provides a simple yet powerful method of capturing the nuances of functional requirements. John explains that you need to identify two distinct types of requirements. Ubiquitous requirements state a fundamental property of the software that always occurs; non-ubiquitous requirements depend on the occurrence of an event, error condition, state, or option. Learn and practice identifying the correct requirements type and restating those requirements with the corresponding syntax. Join John to find out what’s wrong with the requirements statement—The software shall warn of low battery—and how to fix it.

BT1 Creating a Culture of Trust

Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 10:00am

In our personal and business lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders fail. So, how do the top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores with you the ways that the best leaders create “safety nets” that allow people to discover and try new possibilities, help people fail early, and correct faster. Removing fear and engendering trust make the team and organization more creative and productive as they spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to develop open environments based on trust—the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn to step forward and do the right thing without breaking trust. Find out what to do to foster trust through team measurements, protect team boundaries, build team confidence without taking away their ownership, create transparency, and what to do when there is broken trust in the team.

BT5 The Art of People: Facilitation, Leadership, and Team Dynamics

Robert Woods, MATRIX Resources

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 11:30am

Some of the greatest products come from great teams with exceptional leaders who know how to servant-lead, create influence (rather than exacting authority), and precisely when to get out of the way. Teams are asked to be self-empowered, change on the fly, and think for themselves. And then they’re inevitably told exactly how they have to do all of those things—or else. Poor leadership can make or break not only a great team but a great product and a great organization. As part of this highly interactive session, Robert Woods highlights leadership and facilitation skills such as focused observation, communication styles, conflict avoidance (as opposed to conflict resolution), influence over authority, and active listening. Robert explains that the impact we make on individuals is often much more about what we don't do rather than what we do. It’s called The Art of People―and it’s one we can all master.

BT13 Decision Making under Extreme Pressure: Project Management Lessons Learned from Pilots in Crisis

Lee Copeland, Software Quality Engineering

Thu, 06/11/2015 - 3:00pm

Controlled Flight into Terrain is a marvelous book containing case studies of poor decisions made by pilots under extreme pressure. A CFIT is an accident in which an otherwise serviceable aircraft, under the control of the crew, is flown—unintentionally— into terrain, obstacles, or water with no prior awareness on the part of the crew of the impending collision. Using three CFIT case studies, Lee Copeland examines what mistakes the crew made, why their decisions seemed appropriate at the time, and the forces operating on the decision-making process. Then Lee takes those discoveries and applies them to our world of software development. Some learnings include consider entering a holding pattern, have a Plan B ready, beware of the loss of situational awareness, trust your co-workers but not too much, be aware of time dilation, and other key ideas.