Better Software West 2018 - Usability
Monday, June 4
Get Started with Acceptance Test-Driven/Behavior-Driven Development
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done are often areas 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 our difficulty performing these initial activities. Ken Pugh introduces acceptance test-driven development (ATDD)/behavior driven development (BDD), explains why it works, and outlines the different roles team members play in the process. ATDD/BDD improves communication among customers, developers, and testers. By decreasing re-work, ATDD/...
Fundamentals of Lean Startup
Is your industry being disrupted? Is it getting more difficult to keep your customers—or to find new ones? Agile and DevOps form the foundation of best practices for how to build products, but they work just as well when applied to the right—or to the wrong— products. We need a different process to help us distinguish between the two. Lean Startup drives to the source of the problem and helps us answer the question—Should we build it? This year more than half of the participants at Lean Startup Week were from enterprise organizations. If you’re not using the Lean Startup way of designing...
Tuesday, June 5
Building the Right Thing by Focusing on the Customer
This tutorial is for product creators who are passionate about delighting their customers by solving their true needs. Join Catherine Louis as she walks you through Design Thinking, Build- Measure-Learn loops to validate assumptions, and Scrum to deliver as table stakes for building the right thing rather than building the wrong thing faster. In this highly interactive workshop, you will be “learning by doing”. Some of the topic we’ll explore include practical Product Discovery tools and how to effectively en-Vision your products. We’ll use User Story Mapping as means of defining and...
Wednesday, June 6
Outcome Over Output: Don't Be a Backlog Lumberjack
As agile goes mainstream, many organizations are only focused on mastering different elements of agile frameworks. Progress is measured by vanity metrics such as velocity and burndown charts. These metrics can turn agile teams into backlog lumberjacks! Teams, ScrumMasters, and leadership must realize that while speed to launch is crucial to delivering software, speed to learning is even more important. To accomplish this mindset shift, product owners need to learn to change their focus from mastering the art of writing user stories to connecting their teams with the users of their products...
Thursday, June 7
Stop Guessing and Validate What Your Customers Want
In agile, everything we do is an experiment. Product development is no different. We think we know what the customer wants, and the customer thinks they know what they want, but it turns out we're all wrong! To get to validated discoveries about our features, we must understand how to write a better hypothesis for our development experiments. This session focuses on challenging the mindset that we are validating options during our experiments. Natalie Warnert will show you how to eliminate options that don't work with data and feedback by looking at your product hypotheses as tests that...
Innovation: The Art of Being Wrong
PreviewSo, your company wants to be innovative. Are you comfortable with failure? The word failure is littered with negative connotations. Elon Musk financed three failed SpaceX rocket launches. Edison designed more than 2,000 light bulbs that did not work. The Wright brothers crashed dozens of planes and gliders before one took off. And the Americas were discovered through failed circumnavigation. Some failed small and learned. And some failed big but survived and thrived. The lesson is that organizations must embrace failure to accelerate innovation. Join Stefana Saxton to learn how to...
Agile Lighthouses: Navigating toward Successful Products
PreviewDirectional awareness in product development is one of the most challenging aspects of building things—whether applications, services, or true products. Gaining a true north in your journey and having a light to show you the way are often the difference between success and failure. But what is your compass? Where is your lighthouse? It’s your customer, and your challenge is determining how to effectively engage the customer. Agile product management provides a distinct mindset with techniques and patterns useful in navigating these often-convoluted courses. And Anu Smalley is an...
Friday, June 8
Limitless by Choice: Unlocking Your and Your Teams’ Potential
Agile, Waterfall, and everything in between starts and ends with teams. No matter what role you play on the team you have the power to unlock the team’s real potential. No – this isn’t a talk on how to get a higher velocity while working less. This session is the practical view into HOW to become or inspire high performing teams. Join seasoned agile and leadership coach Jessica Soroky as she shares the secret to unlocking your own personal power first. Sick of talking conceptually? Don’t worry this session is all about giving you real tools and techniques you can start using today to take...
Agile in a Regulated Environment – Advice from a “Blues Traveler”
Implementing Agile practices in a regulated industry has its own set of unique challenges. Learn what worked and didn't work at Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina (BCBSNC) and WellCare Health Plans as they adopted Agile practices in product and software development within their regulated organizations.
Join Leon Sabarsky as he shares his advice and lessons learned on implementing Agile at the Blues and other healthcare organizations. Some or their particular challenges included scaling up, connecting with non-agile PMO’s, reconfiguring our traditional testing processes, and...