Better Software West 2017 - Leadership
Monday, June 5
Facilitation Skills for All: Create Engaging Meetings
Are you looking for techniques that will foster collaboration within meetings? Are you recognizing that meetings have become painful experiences where people struggle to achieve the purpose of the meeting and question the value of meetings? Tricia Broderick and Jake Calabrese recognize that most facilitators understand the basics of the role, such as creating a meeting goal and agenda. Unfortunately, this alone does not guarantee a meeting’s success. Join Tricia and Jake to challenge the typical ways meetings are planned and conducted. Discover alternative techniques in dealing with common...
Principles and Practices of Lean Software Development
PreviewLean software engineering emphasizes continuous delivery of high quality applications. Ken Pugh explains the principles and practices that form the basis of lean software development—concentrating on developing a continuous flow by eliminating delays and loopbacks; delivering quickly by developing in small batches; emphasizing high quality which decreases delays due to defect repair; making policies, process and progress transparent; optimizing the whole rather than individual steps; and becoming more efficient by decreasing waste. Ken describes lean’s emphasis on cycle time rather...
Tuesday, June 6
Thinking Inside the Box – Root Cause Analysis with The Six Boxes
Do you want to improve business and user value delivery, quality, efficiency, and productivity of your software engineering team? OK, who doesn’t? Poor productivity problems, quality issues, failing to meet commitments, and general team inefficiencies are unfortunately still commonplace. And what is at the root of most problems? James Waletzky says the answer is those highly imperfect creatures—humans. So how do we go about fixing the problems? First, we must discover the root causes, not just the symptoms, and those are not always obvious. In this hands-on tutorial, James focuses on a...
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training—revolves around agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this tutorial, explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the team’s performance, accountability, and engagement. Investigate...
Lean/Agile Data Driven Decisions Demystified
For many agile practitioners, software metrics beyond a burndown chart are little understood or, perhaps, very scary because poor metrics can be worse than no metrics. In this enlightening session, Larry Maccherone explores how you and your organization can use metrics to bring management and lean/agile teams closer rather than becoming a wedge that drives them into conflict. Larry covers the entire lifecycle of the metrics process—from metric selection to reporting data—in compelling ways. Join Larry to gain an understanding of a wide range of concepts including common (101-level) metrics...
Leading Change: Even If You’re Not in Charge
Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it doesn’t get the support that you thought it would. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. Or, you have a great idea but can’t get the resources required for successful implementation. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit of techniques to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you determine the type of change process needed in your organization, techniques for communicating your...
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
Notes from the Test Management Battlefield
PreviewAre you a new, aspiring, or experienced manager tasked with building a team of stars? Do you manage a team that needs to be motivated or re-energized? Join Tanya Kravtsov as she shares stories, tips, and tricks on hiring, on-boarding, and managing test engineers and turning your group into a Dream Team. From the experience of building teams in new organizations, managing test teams from five people to fifty, both onsite and onshore, Tanya shares lessons learned and successful processes that she adopted. The talent and level of commitment of individual team members, as well as their...
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/...
Agile Leadership Strategies: Winning the War on Complexity
PreviewDevelopment teams are at war with complexity. A solo programmer's craft is difficult enough, but team development adds more volatility and ambiguity—what the U.S. military calls “the fog of war.” Derek Wade’s background in cognitive science has shown him that humans have innate skills at managing this complexity. But too often Derek sees leaders wasting precious human capital because they don’t understand how these skills work. For the past six years, Derek has explored team science which evolved from studying military, aviation, and clinical teams, for practical insights into how...
Software Craftsmanship in an Agile Environment
In the past two decades agile has become the popular development methodology. Businesses have been rushing to adopt agile processes because it promises to save money and deliver working software more quickly. However, for many businesses, software quality has not improved—and often has gotten worse. In response, some software engineering leaders found it necessary to create the software craftsmanship movement. Why has agile failed to deliver on its promise of higher quality software? What can be done about it? What solutions do these craftsmen offer? Chris McKenzie explains that the core...
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...
Identify Development Pains and Resolve Them with Idea Flow
With the explosion of new frameworks, a mountain of automation, and our applications distributed across hundreds of services in the cloud, the level of complexity in software development is growing at an insane pace. With increased complexity comes increased costs and risks. When diagnosing unexpected behavior can take days, weeks, or sometimes months, all while our release is on the line, our projects plunge into chaos. In the invisible world of software development, how do we identify what's causing our pain? How do we escape the chaos? Janelle Klein presents a novel approach to...
Friday, June 9
Impact over Progress: Learning from Evidence over Following the Process
All too often, David Hussman finds that teams are overly certain that “following a process” equates with finding success. For many of these teams and organizations, their focus is on progress over product, running the risk of getting the wrong thing done faster. Expect to be challenged by examining whether you are leading process adoption rather than impact produced. Explore how leaders can support the practices that are working, challenge the practices that are not working, and convert team goals to make real change for the organization in the form of better products, better user...
The Triumph of Simplicity, Discipline, and Clarity
As a leader it can be difficult—whether in times of change or in times of relative stability—to stay centered and focused on what is important. The “noise” around you can be deafening and the pace can make your head spin. Paul Hammond has tried many approaches, both for himself and for his teams, to manage this sensory overload. A number of tactical methods have helped, but he has found he always returns to and relies on three core evergreen principles—simplicity, discipline, and clarity. Join Paul to gain insight into what each of these means to him with examples of situations where...
Leadership Coaching Dojo: A Chance to Practice What You Preach
A recent Harvard Business Review article referenced a survey in which 70 percent of leaders reported being uncomfortable with employee conversations. And these were simple conversations—not crucial or pivotal conversations. It is no surprise that most leaders really struggle as they engage in difficult conversations such as individual employee or team performance improvement discussions or those challenging leadership assumptions. Bob Galen says that these are the very conversations you need to have as you envision, engage, and guide your teams through the changes toward a successful agile...
Agile Leadership in the Public Sector
Less than a decade ago Gartner reported that 75 percent of large-scale government IT projects resulted in failure. In 2014, government software project failures such as Healthcare.gov again called national attention to this continuing problem in the public sector. To become more responsive, many federal, state, and local agencies began using agile software delivery methods. Yet, public service leaders still struggle to embrace new ways of thought or challenging long-term processes to instill agility into the public sector culture. Todd Holden examines what he sees as a fundamental thought-...