Better Software West 2018 - Business User
Customize your Better Software West 2018 experience with sessions covering topics for business users.
Monday, June 4
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
Advanced Backlog Refinement and Estimation Techniques
One of the greatest challenges organizations face when embracing Agile is how to streamline the process of analyzing, defining, and refining the product backlogs so they can be easily consumed by their teams. Join Lee Henson to take a deep dive into advanced techniques that allow you to refine the work and ultimately achieve more accurate complexity estimates—for better project and release forecasting. Explore techniques including the creation of the Agile Press Release, which defines the who, what, where, when, why, and how behind the scope of an agile project or release in a simple one-...
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...
Creating an Innovation-Rich Culture
It's important to create a culture that inspires and infuses your development team with great ideas. But ideas are not action. Ideas in and of themselves are nothing more than unrefined, random thoughts, and worse, most ideas never get implemented. Even when you do follow through on some of the best ideas, they can cause great harm without proper planning and execution. While creativity is an asset, unbridled creativity where disparate ideas abound outside a sound decision-making and execution framework will create distraction and chaos. In this session, Melissa Petak will show you how to...
Thursday, June 7
Collaborative Curiosity
Let's try an experiment. Rather than trying to figure out what you need or want to hear from a keynote, we propose your taking over as the product owner and driving the discussion? Join Ryan Ripley and Faye Thompson as they take your most pressing, real-time questions and craft them into an inspiring keynote that is relevant to you and your needs. They will take on all agile topics: How does a team optimize their learning? How do you make it safe to explore, experiment and fail? What should you do when your teams aren’t “buying” self-direction and accountability. What do you do when those...
Fuel Agility with Transparent Expectations
PreviewDo you know how your work is aligned to tactical and strategic goals? Success is rooted in a productive and cohesive team-centered culture. When culture and execution are misaligned, failure is almost certain. Everyone on and around the team must understand their role in defining, delivering, and growing value. It sounds easy, but the discipline can be tough, which leads to disappointments and unwelcome surprises. Nabila Safdar focuses on curating transparent expectations by the following six core practices. First, foster candor and respect. This leads to unity. Second, have fresh...
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...
It's All In Our Heads: Using Neuroscience to Improve Performance
Understanding how our brains take shortcuts to process all the data they take in can help us recognize when its happening, take measures to correct our course, and use that information to build stronger teams. This talk sprang from my curiosity about the intersection of neuroscience and organizational behavior. It is my hope that attendees will leave with the ability to recognize when they and their teams are using processing shortcuts, as well as some techniques for mitigating their impact. Learning Objectives: - Identify several ways in which our brains short cut processing in order to...
Using Behavior Driven Development and Acceptance Test-Driven Development to create GREAT requirements
Defining, understanding, and agreeing on the scope of work to be done is often an area of discomfort for product managers, business analysts, developers, and quality assurance experts alike. The origin of many items living in our defect tracking systems can be traced to the difficulties encountered while performing these initial requirements activities. Ken Pugh introduces behavior-driven development (BDD), also known as acceptance test-driven development (ATDD), and explains how it works in creating detailed requirements. He outlines the different roles that team members play in the...
The Five Biggest Mistakes Your Team Is Making in Requirements Definition
Google pioneer Alberto Savoia offered this sage advice: Build the right "it" before you build It right. But few software companies take the time to define, much less build, the right "it." The problem starts with a poor requirements definition process. In this session, join Kathryn Campbell as she examines the five most common mistakes that software companies make during requirements definition—and how to avoid them. First Kathryn defines thinking too small as a huge problem and shows you how to broaden your perspectives. Next, she exposes being stuck in the past, with legacy systems...
Building the Perfect Product Backlog
"Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things." This quote from Peter Drucker identifies why even the most productive agile teams may not always deliver the most successful business solutions. The agile team depends on the product owner to correctly identify the business requirements with the highest values, to clearly describe each feature at the right level of granularity, to provide the necessary supporting documentation, and to continuously adapt the product backlog to meet the emerging needs of the organization. Otherwise, the team could be measuring its...
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...