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Michael Mah, QSM Associates
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How do you compare the productivity and quality you achieve with agile practices with that of traditional waterfall projects? Join Michael Mah to learn about both agile and waterfall metrics and how these metrics behave in real projects. Learn how to use your own data to create measurements of productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action in retrospectives and release estimation and planning. Using hands-on exercises, learn how to replicate these techniques to make your own comparisons for time, cost, and quality. Working in pairs, calculate productivity metrics using the templates Michael employs in his consulting practice. You can leverage these new metrics to make the case for changing to more agile practices and creating realistic project commitments within your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
 To take full advantage of this session, participants need to bring a laptop computer for metrics capture and productivity calculations.
Learn more about Michael Mah
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Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.
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Risk in software projects is like the weather: people complain about it, but no one DOES anything about it—until now. Payson Hall’s session on risk management is targeted at software and systems engineering project managers and sponsoring executives. Learn about and apply practical techniques to identify, quantify, prevent, and mitigate risks associated with your software and systems projects. Take away new decision-making processes that support prioritizing and integrating preventive actions and contingency plans into your existing or new project plans. Participate in a Monte-Carlo simulation that underscores the surprising impacts of typical schedule and resource risks and highlights the effectiveness of specific straightforward risk mitigation strategies. Share with your peers information about risks and mitigation strategies you have encountered that are working—or have failed—in the real world. This is a hands-on tutorial, focusing on exposing risks and integrating practical risk management into project plans.
Learn more about Payson Hall
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Jeff Payne, Coveros, Inc.
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Many organizations use the terms “quality assurance” and “software testing” interchangeably to describe their testing activities. But true quality assurance is much, much more than testing alone. Quality assurance encompasses a planned set of tasks, activities, and actions used to provide management with information about the quality of software so appropriate business decisions can be made. Jeff Payne discusses the differences between software testing and quality assurance and examines the typical activities performed during a true quality assurance program. Topics discussed include: evaluating software processes, validating software artifacts (such as requirements, designs, etc.), presenting a quality case to management, and how to get started implementing a true quality assurance program. Leave with a working knowledge of quality assurance and a framework for incrementally improving your overall software quality assurance program.
Learn more about Jeff Payne
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Jennifer Bonine, Up Ur Game Learning Solutions
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Have you ever wanted or needed a way to measure your leadership skills or those of others in your organization? Ever been in a performance review where the majority of time was spent discussing how to improve as a leader? If you have ever wondered what your core leadership competencies are—and how to build on and improve them—Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you do just that. These tools include a personal assessment of leadership competencies, explore the eight dimensions of successful leaders, offer concrete suggestions on how you can improve competencies that are not in your core set of strengths, and provide techniques for leveraging and building on your strengths. Exercises help you gain an understanding of yourself and strive for balanced leadership through recognition of both your leadership strengths and development opportunities. Join Jennifer and your peers to become a more effective and valued leader in your organization.
Learn more about Jennifer Bonine
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Ahmed Sidky, Santeon
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Some books make adopting agile seem simple and straightforward. Unfortunately, it is not—especially when organizational policies and procedures hinder organizational change. Ahmed Sidky (aka Dr. Agile) shares a step-by-step process for designing a tailored road map to becoming agile, despite the constraints surrounding you. This road map includes the three main phases of most adoption initiatives—Getting Ready, Piloting, and Spreading Agile. The getting ready phase includes evaluating your agile readiness and educating your organization on adopting agile principles and values rather than just agile practices. The piloting phase describes the different criteria to remember when choosing your pilot project(s) and the value of creating a core team to assist the adoption efforts. For the spreading agile phase, Ahmed presents five steps that will help you adopt agile values in an iterative manner. If you’re just starting out your agile transition, this tutorial will equip you with practical techniques and strategies to move from your existing process to an agile process without starting from scratch.
Learn more about Ahmed Sidky
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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While first generation agile methods have a solid track record at the team level, many agile transformations get stuck trying to expand to larger, multi-team projects and throughout the organization. With its set of overarching principles to improve quality and productivity in software development, lean thinking provides a method for escaping the trap of team optimization that ignores the bigger picture. While individual agile teams can use lean principles to improve their practices, the larger organization can embrace lean to solve problems that commonly plague organization and company-wide agile endeavors. Alan Shalloway explores the lean principles of mapping value streams, creating visibility, managing work levels, and more. Together these lean principles and practices can help your organization dramatically reduce the amount of waste in the work teams perform. Alan introduces and explains the currently popular lean-agile method Kanban in terms of the lean principles it supports.
Learn more about Alan Shalloway
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Don Gray, Independent Consultant
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Sitting around the table with the ScrumMaster and his development team, I quickly noticed Jack was the team's “big dog.” Once he weighed in on a user story, discussion ceased, the team agreed with him, and they moved on. When I reconnected with this client two years later, I learned that after Jack had been transferred, the team's productivity almost doubled. Welcome to the “Uneven Participation” pattern. When one person or a small group dominates the team's interactions, that team often experiences serious problems because quieter team members fall by the wayside. The team loses valuable input and dialogue, frustration sets in, and lack of buy-in creates false consensus—yet another dysfunctional agile team pattern. When these team patterns occur, they reduce the team's ability to deliver value to the organization. Don Gray shares the tell-tale signs of anti-team patterns and explores way to stop them in their tracks. Join Don and your peers to develop strategies for changing a team's dysfunctional patterns, improving the team's performance, and enhancing their job satisfaction.
Learn more about Don Gray
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Andy Hunt, The Pragmatic Programmers, LLC
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Software development happens in your head—not in an editor, IDE, or design tool. We’re well educated on how to work with software and hardware, but what about wetware—our brains? Join Andy Hunt for a look at how the brain really works (hint: it’s a dual processor, shared bus design) and how to use the best tool for the job by learning to think differently about thinking. Andy looks at the importance of context and the role of expert intuition in software development. Learn to take advantage of pole-bridging and integration thinking. Compare different laterally-specialized functions, including synthesis vs. analysis and sequential processing vs. pattern-matching. Discover the one simple habit that separates the genius from the “wanna-be.” Explore practical learning techniques, including mind maps, reading techniques, and situational feedback that help you cope with the torrent of new information that assaults each of us. Let Andy help you discover how to learn more deliberately by managing your knowledge portfolio.
Learn more about Andy Hunt
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Hillel Glazer, Entinex
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A model for implementing process improvement systems, CMMI® practices can apply to both traditional and agile development teams and environments. Although CMMI® does not specify how to develop software products or run projects, it does specify a set of practices for measuring, improving, and monitoring product development and project management practices and processes. This, and many other basic facts about CMMI®, are frequently overlooked, misunderstood, or outright misrepresented in what most people hear and read about CMMI®. Hillel Glazer provides insight and no-nonsense information on where CMMI® came from and why it matters; what CMMI® and its appraisal process are and aren't about; the mechanics of how the appraisal works; and how to prepare for an appraisal. Hillel discusses key facts and addresses critical questions about CMMI®, including what can be expected in terms of costs, schedules and outcomes. Learn how CMMI® has been used successfully in traditional, agile, and hybrid development environments.
CMMI® is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office by Carnegie Mellon University. The CMMI® Crash Course is not an SEI-Licensed course, nor is it a substitute for any SEI-Licensed courses and does not qualify for any rights, privileges, or benefits afforded by taking SEI-Licensed courses
Learn more about Hillel Glazer
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Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
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One group of people—the customers, users, and business—need a software system to help them work more efficiently or make more money, but they don’t know how to build the system. Another group—software developers and testers—know how to build the system, but they don’t know what it is supposed to do. Bridging this gap is where requirements—the documents and other work products describing the system accurately and concisely while at the same time not missing important customer and user needs—are essential. To get the requirements right the first time, you need strategy, tactics, and a practical process for discovering the real requirements—which may not be what the users think they need. Tim Lister presents all three: a strategy to get accurate and explicit requirements, tactics to develop those requirements efficiently, and a process to keep everything glued together when tackling a large complex job. Take back a 76-page, annotated requirements specification template in electronic form to help get your requirements right—the first time.
Learn more about Tim Lister
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Rob Myers, Agile Institute
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Test-driven Development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, testing, and coding to increase reliability and productivity. Rob Myers demonstrates the basic and essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring code, and using mock/fake objects in development. Use exercises to practice the techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of the techniques.
Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and be familiar with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Delegates should bring a laptop installed with their favorite programming language and IDE—and come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java and NUnit for any .NET language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install (and verify) your chosen xUnit framework prior to the tutorial.
Learn more about Rob Myers
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Are you using agile practices but struggling? If so, you are not alone. Experienced agile practitioners know that some practices are more difficult than others, and most need tuning over time. If you are looking for ways to get more value or improve your skills, this session will pass your acceptance tests. David Hussman shares his coaching tools for improving and tuning practices including product planning, road mapping, story writing, planning sessions, and stand up meetings. David divides the journey to deliver value into four essential areas: growing community and vision, planning releases and iterative delivery, delivering value, and continuous improvement and learning. For each, David shares tools for evaluating the value you are receiving relative to the ceremony you are using. If your stand up lacks value or energy, you will learn new ideas for truly getting value instead of merely meeting and standing; standing is the easiest part.
Learn more about David Hussman
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Chris Shinkle, Software Engineering Professionals
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Kanban is a proven tool for scheduling production—telling manufacturers what to produce, how much to produce, and when to produce it. Kanban does this by helping visualize the workflow and limiting the amount of incomplete, work-in-progress (WIP). Today, more and more teams and organizations are turning to a form of Kanban to manage their software development projects. Whether you are a project manager, product owner, or consultant, Kanban will allow you to see, in real time, the actual state of your project and provide you with tools for making better planning and scheduling decisions. Join Chris Shinkle for this interactive tutorial in which he demonstrates the process he uses with clients to design and implement a Kanban system. Chris discusses how to visualize your workflow, set WIP limits, identify classes of service, recognize areas for improvement, kick off a Kanban team, and more. The information Chris presents isn’t just theory; it’s practical knowledge based on real world experience from successful iterations with multiple clients spanning multiple industries.
Learn more about Chris Shinkle
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Rick Craig, Software Quality Engineering
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To be most effective, test managers must develop and use metrics to help direct the testing effort and make informed recommendations about the software’s release readiness and associated risks. Because one important testing activity is to “measure” the quality of the software, test managers must measure the results of both the development and testing processes. Collecting, analyzing, and using metrics are complicated because many developers and testers are concerned that the metrics will be used against them. Join Rick Craig as he addresses common metrics—measures of product quality, defect removal efficiency, defect density, defect arrival rate, and testing status. Learn the guidelines for developing a test measurement program, rules of thumb for collecting data, and ways to avoid “metrics dysfunction.” Participants are urged to bring their metrics problems and issues for use as discussion points.
Learn more about Rick Craig
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
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We understand the vital importance of collaboration among team members. However, how can we deal with non-collaborators—people who won’t work with us? Although we may not be able to change them, we may be able to work with them or around them. Pollyanna Pixton describes how to identify non-collaborators—a leader, team member, team, or even a process. She then examines the system within which the non-collaborators work: their success factors, motivations, measurement and reward systems, fears, hot buttons, and hidden agendas. Pollyanna teaches you how to assess the risks in dealing with non-collaborators. Using a trust and ownership model, she maps the traits of non-collaborators and considers tools and techniques to cope with each trait. Finally, if all else fails, learn the options for working around non-collaborators. Learn to deal with non-collaborators by building a strategy that empowers you and your team to get the job done—no matter what.
Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton
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Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
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User stories, a lightweight requirements documentation approach used within Scrum, offer agile teams an efficient way to communicate software features among the team. Jean Tabaka leads you through a series of simulations based on the life of a user story. She first sets the context in the Scrum framework—the roles and responsibilities for identifying and elaborating user stories. Then, the real work (fun) begins! Work in small teams, applying and reinforcing what you have just learned. Each team first writes a set of user stories based on a Product Owner’s definition, gathering acceptance criteria as the work proceeds. Once prioritized, the teams size the stories’ development effort and discuss their experiences. Practice determining the tasks and effort necessary to complete user stories to meet their acceptance criteria. To end the session, teams debrief the class on their work. Come and be part of the fun in this exercise-driven, on-your-feet class.
Learn more about Jean Tabaka
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Bob Aiello, CM Crossroads
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Robust configuration management (CM) practices are essential for creating continuous builds to support agile’s integration and testing demands, and for rapidly packaging, releasing, and deploying applications into production use. Classic CM—consisting of identifying system components, controlling changes, reporting the system’s configuration, and auditing—won’t do the trick anymore. Bob Aiello present an in-depth tour of a more robust and powerful approach to CM consisting of six key functions: source code management, build engineering, environment management, change management and control, release management, and deployment. Bob describe current and emerging CM trends—support for agile development, cloud computing, and mobile apps development—and review the industry standards and frameworks that are essential in CM today. Take back an integrated approach to establish proper IT governance and compliance using the latest CM practices while offering development teams the most effective CM practices available today.
Learn more about Bob Aiello
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