Better Software West 2017 - Projects & Teams
Wednesday, June 7
From Monoliths to Services: Paying Your Technical Debt
PreviewEver since distributed software became popular, developers have been choosing whether to use monolithic architectures or service-oriented architectures. With the advancement of cloud infrastructure and the widespread implementation of agile methodologies, the latter approach has been getting much easier. David Litvak describes how a monolithic application—due to its ever increasing technical debt—can become too big to support. He explores how to gradually reduce the size by extracting its components into smaller services, so ultimately the application is decoupled and highly...
The PM's Guide to Team Dynamics
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 basically the same when it came to people issues. Now, with the popularity of agile and its cross-functional teams, leaders have another factor to consider in addition to people―their different specialties. How can our leadership approach help us achieve great results and a happy team? Join Julie Gardiner as she presents a communication model that can be used to help motivate every team member—and minimize personality/...
Is Your Project Doomed from the Start?
When we think of planning, we often think about requirements planning. We get the initial features and functions down, and then see where agile takes us. Lisa Calkins claims that less than a third of software development projects are successful. Regarding this lack of success, process experts focus on the lack of planning early in the project. However, Lisa believes that all too often teams jump directly from “idea” to “feature sets” without any long-term product or business strategy. Software projects should be value-driven rather than focused on specific requirements or features that may...
Thursday, June 8
Finding Efficiencies in Your Development Lifecycle
Many of us feel like we never have enough time to complete everything we want in a given sprint, cycle, or phase. Even though we can't add more hours to our day, we can add time by removing inefficiencies in our development lifecycle management approach. Melissa Tondi explores a number of areas that may be causing inefficiencies in our overall approach. These problem areas include acceptance criteria for requirements that are not understood, actionable, or demonstrable; unit tests that are misunderstood or non-existent; and demos that don’t actually demonstrate capability. Melissa shares...