Better Software West 2017 - Business Analysis & Requirements
Monday, June 5
Great Product Design with User Story Mapping
Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process 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 services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer and user...
Acceptance Test-Driven Development
PreviewDefining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulty of performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. ATDD has proven to dramatically increase productivity and...
Tuesday, June 6
Statistics in Big Data Analysis: Beyond Counting
Do you have data—lots and lots of really big data? Do you know what it’s telling you? Maybe your organization is stuck in dashboard mode, counting how many of this or that. And since you have big data, perhaps you even calculate an average every once in awhile. Therein lies the problem: Organizations don’t advance their use of big data. They just spend more time and money processing more data so they can count it just a little better. Ken Johnston helps you go beyond counting and into statistical relevance. This statistics primer is designed for those with no prior experience or those...
Wednesday, June 7
Modern Evolutionary Software Architectures
For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later.” Modern advances in architecture have shown that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. Neal Ford describes a family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, how we can build evolvable systems, and how to retrofit existing ones. He discusses three key concepts that support evolutionary architectures. Incremental change covers engineering practices to support continuous delivery and DevOps. Neal explains how fitness functions build...
Storytelling Techniques for Better Requirements
Do you struggle with making your ideas clear and understandable to others? Does it annoy you to sit in requirements sessions for hours only to leave with more questions than answers? As human beings, we’re made for storytelling. It is a natural form of communication. So, Jeff Howey suggests that we use some of the same techniques we use talking to friends and family when trying to share our complex ideas and define software requirements. Whether you are a product owner or a traditional business analyst trying to make your approach to requirements more lean and nimble, join Jeff to explore...
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...
Improving Profitability through Accessibility
Michael Durrant has found that paying attention to basic usability and accessibility guidelines can make millions of extra dollars for his company. He describes his uphill journey to improve accessibility and usability for users purchasing car insurance through their website. Michael shares many factors to consider and barriers to overcome—from those who thought it wouldn’t make much difference to their customers, to those who pointed out that it had been tried before and not made any money, to those who didn’t have knowledge of or even agree with some of the basic principles of usability...
Thursday, June 8
Big Data: The Magic to Attain New Heights
There is magic in Big Data. There are also goblins, fairies, and rainbow-colored unicorns. The problem is to take all that data and turn it into magical insights that help make your software products better and help the business grow. Ken Johnston has been employing data for decision-making for years in service operations, cloud development, A/B testing, and recently with business intelligence. Ken shares examples of building big data infrastructures, using telemetry to predict and react to service outages, deploying A/B experiments to drive post sales monetization, mining text data for...
RAMP: Requirements Authors Mentoring Program
PreviewIndustry data indicates that untrained and inexperienced requirements authors commonly inject thirty to fifty major defects per page of text. With many requirements specifications reaching several hundred pages, potentially thousands of defects are injected into the software development process. John Terzakis says training and mentoring of authors by a requirements coach is effective in reducing defect densities by an order of magnitude—when each coach is assigned only a few authors, they are collocated and, most importantly, experienced requirements coaches are available. So what...
Agile at the Intersection of Mobile, Cloud, and the Internet of Things
The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explains how agile is being used in Internet of Things systems—often combined with mobile and cloud technologies. Don reviews how agile is successfully being used today in a wide range of development environments, including software as a service applications, large and complex mission critical systems, and for both mobile software and hardware. Don looks closely at IoT, examines how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and explores how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Learn which...
Impact Maps: Let Your Goals Drive Your Product Features
Wouldn’t it be great if there were a way to combine quantified business goals, direct traceability from goals to features, surfacing of value assumptions, cause-and-effect analysis, design thinking, and visual facilitation in a single approach? Mathias Eifert says there is! Impact maps support multiple stakeholders in gaining consensus on which features or actions are most useful in helping an organization achieve its goals. In the process, stakeholders agree what needs to be accomplished, create shared understanding of possible solutions, decide which user groups or personas to target...
DevOps and Regulatory Compliance—Like Oil and Water or Peanut Butter and Jelly?
DevOps and regulatory compliance are two critically important ingredients in today’s connected organizations. DevOps enables you to move quickly and respond to change in an era where change is increasing at an exponential rate with no sign of slowing down. Regulatory compliance ensures that your organization takes the appropriate steps to follow relevant laws that appear to require adding burdensome processes and controls to your software development lifecycle. Brandon Carlson acknowledges that at first glance these two ideas seem incompatible, but they actually go together like peanut...