Better Software West 2017 - Business Analyst - 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...
Git and GitHub for Developers and Testers
PreviewGit clients and the GitHub cloud have achieved an enviable adoption rate. Major corporations as well as open source projects now host their code on GitHub. Developers, DevOps, and non-technical writers alike now use Git to work with text files in a way that enables them to go back to specific versions at any point in time. Websites at GitHub.io are proliferating. Job interviewers look to GitHub to gauge each individual's creativity, popularity, capability, and tenacity. Join Wilson Mar in this hands-on tutorial to become immediately productive with these vital tools. Wilson has...
Help Retain Knowledge: Increase Engagement to Achieve Learning
Ever walk out of a meeting or training class struggling to remember what was just discussed? Or be annoyed that people request information that you’ve already shared? You are not alone! Leaders struggle with how to create an engaging environment that results in high collaboration and learning. Unfortunately, most leaders start off with the disadvantage of being exposed to practices that recent brain science has proven to be ineffective, such as standing up front in the room and talking with slides for an hour instead of engaging people every 10–20 minutes. In an agile environment, learning...
Tuesday, June 6
The Architecture of Microservices
PreviewMicroservices—one of the latest software architecture styles—promises to deliver benefits such as fast and easy deployment, ease of testing, fine-grained scalability, architectural modularity, and high overall agility. Unfortunately, a lot of complexity comes coupled with these benefits. In this product-agnostic architecture tutorial, Mark Richards provides you with an understanding of the microservices architecture style and what hybrids and alternatives exist. This helps guide you in making the right architecture and design decisions for your organization. Mark discusses the core...
Improve the Mobile User Experience (UX): Keep Your Users Coming Back
Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you do that? With a UX that...
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
Mobile Testing: Challenges and Solutions
Now that we’ve gotten beyond the initial shock and prevalence of mobile applications, we’ve come to realize that it’s not just about making apps work. In chasing the mobile market, we often don’t really understand or choose to ignore the differences in the mobile platform when it comes to designing and building a successful app. Of course, the mobile platform is smaller, but what else do you need to consider? To be successful, you need more than just “it works.” Phil Lew explores the top mobile quality challenges, and discusses how to approach and solve them. Some of these challenges...
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...
Shave Mobile Development Time and Cost with Xamarin
By shaving time and cost to build and maintain your app by half, Xamarin—a free, open source framework offered by Microsoft—can revolutionize your mobile application development. Most app development approaches result in building the app twice—once for iOS and once for Android—or producing a sluggish app that has an inconsistent HTML-driven user interface. Xamarin lets you write C# code that’s compiled for each operating system to leverage each platform’s native UI, API access, and performance. Create an app that feels and performs like it was custom-built for that device, while sharing 90...
Finding the 'Seams': Making User Stories Smaller
PreviewWhen we adopt agile practices and a lean mindset, we make great promises to ourselves but we often encounter difficulties in creating user stories that are of high quality and utility. Mitch Goldstein describes why user stories and their value are the currency of agile and lean software development. Mitch illustrates why making smaller and more nimble stories significantly increases the likelihood of a story's completion and success. What do we look for in user stories that tell us they need to be split? Are there certain words or phrases that identify stories as good candidates...
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...
Drive Product Improvements with Telemetry
Do you want to know how real users are interacting with your product? Do you want to know which features they don’t use? Would you like to understand how your product works internally under real operational conditions? Then you need telemetry—the instrumentation of your product to record this information and transmit it back to you for analysis. Windows 10 implemented this capability. Today, there are more than 450 million devices running Windows 10 providing constant feedback on its operation. Ken Johnston says Microsoft learned a lot about what they did right for that launch—and what...
Microservices and Docker: Foundation for a New Generation of Applications
Docker has matured and expanded from its primary use in the build/test stages into production deployments. Similarly, microservices are expanding from use mostly for greenfield web services to use in the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolith to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says that running microservices-based applications in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—for both build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. Docker and microservices are natural companions, forming the foundation for a new generation of...
Lightning Strikes the Keynotes
Throughout the years, Lightning Talks have been a popular part of the STAR testing conferences. Now, they’ve come to the combined Better Software, Agile Dev, and DevOps conferences too. If you’re not familiar with the concept, Lightning Talks consists of a series of five-minute talks by different speakers within one presentation period. Lightning Talks are the opportunity for speakers to deliver their single biggest bang-for-the-buck idea in a rapid-fire presentation. Some of the best-known experts will step up to the podium and give you their best shot of lightning. Get multiple keynote...
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...
Experience Agile Emergence through Sketch Comedy
“The best architectures, requirements, and designs emerge from self-organizing teams.” Most people read this principle from the Agile Manifesto and focus on the self-organization element. What about the concept of emergence? Exactly how do requirements and designs emerge? And how do self-organizing teams enable emergence? Get a hands-on lesson on self-organization and emergence using an unlikely source of inspiration—sketch comedy. John Krewson leads courageous delegates to envision, write, rehearse, and perform an episode of The Waterfall Comedy Hour. Others watch the process unfold and...
Improv(e) Your Requirements
Improvisational comedy—sometimes called improv—is a form of theater in which the performance is created spontaneously, in the moment. Successful improvisers learn and use a variety of skills and techniques which allow them to better extract ideas, expand on them, and make them meaningful and manifest. Now, reread the previous sentence but replace the word “improvisers” with “analysts.” In many ways, improv is a great analogy for requirement elicitation, analysis, and specification. In this highly interactive session, Damian Synadinos uses his extensive experience with improv and...
Agile Release Planning: The Middle Time Frame
Lean and agile development methods, which emphasize planning on five different levels, can generate amazing high-level vision and long-term plans to achieve business goals. These methods also can produce plans for lower-level detailed iteration and daily planning. Yet when it comes to release planning—the middle time frames—lean-agile methods often degrade into a best guess by the team, architect, or project manager. Sarah Harper demonstrates how to use your team’s historical data to accurately predict and plan releases. In addition, she shows how you can use Monte Carlo methods to...
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...
Your Resume is Now What You Do on GitHub
Increasingly, recruiters are looking at GitHub accounts to identify candidates who demonstrate a proven history of work over several years with specific technologies. Rather than looking at your résumé, employers prefer looking at your GitHub account because it’s verifiable. Anyone can analyze your GitHub history to see what you have been working on, when, with whom, and with what technologies. They can see how “technical” you are by what type of files you changed. Wilson Mar helps you create your own GitHub account, your personal website available from anywhere in the world, with keywords...
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...
DevOps in an Embedded and Regulated Environment
Working in embedded environments greatly restricts the tools available for a DevOps pipeline. A regulated environment changes the processes a development team can use to deliver software. This combination results in a highly restricted environment that forces the team back to first principles, searching for a process that actually works, and tools to help foster iteration and rapid feedback. Arjun Comar describes the options, identifies a set of useful tools, and discusses the challenges facing any team working on DevOps in necessarily unfavorable environments. Together, examine Arjun’s...
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...