Skip to main content

Business Analysis - Requirements

Tutorials

ME Build Product Backlogs with Test-Driven Thinking―and More SOLD OUT NEW
David Hussman, DevJam
Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

Many product backlogs of user stories are nothing more than glorified to-do lists. Teams have lost the idea of prioritizing real business value and focus instead only on finishing stories and accumulating story points. Join David Hussman as he drives a stake into the heart of lame backlogs and breathes new life into product design with pragmatic UX and test-driven thinking. Using real-world examples, David shares his experiences and teaches tools you can use to fuse centered-product thinking with end-to-end testing. These techniques include: developing test-driven user experiences, improving product discovery (backlog grooming) sessions with testing talk, adding story clarity with examples and tests, validating requirements with tests, connecting program teams by decomposing product ideas into small testable stories, and recomposing them to validate product level learning. Because we learn by doing and questioning as we go, show up ready to work. This session is for testers, developers, product owners, and anyone else interested in improving their product thinking and product backlog. Bring your failing product backlog stories for discussion, too.

Read more
MF Get the Requirements Right―the First Time
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Mon, 06/08/2015 - 8:30am

One group—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 it. 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 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 turn out to be what the users think they need. Tim Lister presents a strategy to get accurate and explicit requirements, tactics to efficiently develop these requirements, and a process to keep everything glued together when tackling a large, complex job. Take back an 85-page, annotated requirements specification template to help get your requirements right—the first time.

Read more

One of the latest facets of the mobile paradigm is mobile wearables―a new generation of personalized technology that knows us better than our closest friends do. How many of your friends know how far you walked or what you ate today? Although you may think mobile wearables are just for geeks, they will become commonplace very quickly. Our challenge is to develop applications that can synthesize context from the gigantic amount of data these devices and their sensors generate. Ensuring the privacy and security of device usage and its data will be of highest concern. Philip Lew systematically analyzes context―the most important element in future design and development of mobile applications while incorporating big data, privacy, and security. Using examples, Philip shows the contextual elements you need to consider now and discusses how to identify key factors for a future generation of wearable products based on discovering anticipatory services.

Read more
MN It’s All About Me™: Owning Your Behavior, Improving Your Team NEW
Doc List, Doc List Enterprises
Mon, 06/08/2015 - 1:00pm

Successful high-performing teams have many common attributes. One is their ability to function together collaboratively. In order to collaborate well, they must communicate effectively and get beyond the members' personal biases and quirks. In this interactive workshop, Doc List shares common problems with behavior, motivation, emotions, and interpretation that frequently get in the way. Participate in exercises that lead you to understand―and sometimes expose―your own blind spots and limitations. Challenge your own assumptions, learn about taking ownership of your own feelings and behavior, and articulate the difference between behavior and interpretation. Along the way, gain a new understanding of intuition and how you're using it in your interpersonal situations. Leave this workshop with a new and clearer understanding of how you've been interpreting others' behavior and acting on those interpretations.

Read more
TB Great Product Design with User Story Mapping NEW
Jeff Patton, Jeff Patton & Associates
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

A story map is a simple model, built from index cards or sticky notes, which helps the people who make it envision a customer’s experience with their product. Jeff Patton explains that within a design process story maps are a core practice 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 service. The design process and story mapping can identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Join Jeff to learn how to map your customer’s and user’s experience today and then how to deliberately improve that experience. Use empathy maps, persona sketches, archetypes and stereotypes, story mapping, and design studio concepts to speed your design work. Since all solution ideas are speculative, learn how to validate solutions as quickly and cost-effectively as possible. In the end, discover an essential design process that allows you to identify and validate innovative product solutions.

This is a hands-on workshop. Come prepared to learn.

Read more
TD Giving Great Presentations: The Art of Stage Presence SOLD OUT
James Whittaker, Microsoft
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Every hour of every day in every country where business is conducted, the same scene plays out―dozens of well-paid people sitting in a conference room being bored senseless. Death by a thousand slides. This mind numbing, soul crushing, grotesquely expensive experience ends here and now! James Whittaker reveals the secrets to conceiving, building, and delivering a great presentation. Whatever your level of presentation skills, this tutorial will hone them. Learn how to build a compelling story from the ground up. Receive advice on how to remember and recall that story as you deliver it. Learn how to use oratory and literary instruments to make the story come alive for your audience. Do your part to put an end to bad presentations―attend this tutorial.

Read more
TE Eight Steps to Kanban
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

 Transitioning to agile can be difficult—often downright wrenching—for teams, so many organizations are turning to kanban instead. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual transition to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization. Ken begins with a value stream map of existing processes to establish an initial kanban board, providing transparency into the state of the current workflow. Another step establishes explicit policies to define workflow changes and engender project visibility. Because you can easily expand kanban to cover many parts of development, another step is to increase stakeholder involvement in the process. Join this interactive session to practice these key steps with hands-on exercises and take away an initial plan for implementing kanban in your organization.

Read more
TF A Product Ownership Practicum for Product Owners and ScrumMasters NEW
Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Congratulations! Your boss has selected you for a Product Owner role ... or you’re a newly minted ScrumMaster trying to figure out how to play with your Product Owner ... or you’re an experienced Product Owner struggling achieve balance among your stakeholders, customers and team ... or you’re newly CSPO certified but don’t know how to be a REAL Product Owner. Well fear not. Join author and Product Owner coach Bob Galen in this fast paced, crash course in how to ROCK your new role. Explore the dynamics of user stories, product backlogs, valuation and prioritization, establishing minimal marketable deliverables, and delivering high-impact sprint reviews. Then we’ll raise the bar to talk about product ownership at scale, how to build quality into your products, and how to effectively interact with your teams. Leave this workshop with the ideas, skills, and techniques to become the Product Owner you—and your boss—envisioned you to be.

Read more
TH Risk Management: Project Management for Grown-Ups
Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 8:30am

Many organizations are childlike. They blithely plan the project as if nothing will go wrong. And then, when something does go wrong, they are shocked and dismayed. Risk management is not just worrying about your project, and it is not about running away from risk. Risk management for software projects is all about when you make decisions and when you take action. How do you deal with uncertainty? When do you decide to deal with a risk while it is still just a risk, and when do you decide to wait to see if the risk does turn into a problem and manage it then? When done with utmost skill and to its greatest advantage, risk management starts before a project is even born. Tim Lister presents the advantages—and the dangers—of practicing risk management like a grown-up. Tim offers a process for you to consider tailoring for your organization and discusses how your organization can grow up.

Read more
TM Innovation Thinking: Evolve and Expand Your Capabilities SOLD OUT
Jennifer Bonine, tap|QA, Inc.
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Innovation is a word frequently tossed around in organizations today. The standard cliché is “Do more with less.” People and teams want to be innovative but often struggle with how to define, prioritize, implement, and track their innovation efforts. Jennifer Bonine shares the Innovation Types model to give you new tools to evolve and expand your innovation capabilities. Find out if your innovation ideas and efforts match your team and company goals. Learn how to classify your innovation and improvement efforts as core (to the business) or context (essential but non-revenue generating). With this data, you can better decide how much of your effort should be spent on core versus context activities. Take away new tools for classifying innovation and mapping your activities and your team’s priorities to their importance and value. With Jennifer’s guidance you’ll evolve and expand your innovation capabilities on the spot.

Read more
TO Security Testing for Test Professionals
Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
Tue, 06/09/2015 - 1:00pm

Your organization is doing well with functional, usability, and performance testing. However, you know that software security is a key part of software assurance and compliance strategy for protecting applications and critical data. Left undiscovered, security-related defects can wreak havoc in a system when malicious invaders attack. If you don’t know where to start with security testing and don’t know what you are—or should be—looking for, this tutorial is for you. Jeffery Payne describes how to get started with security testing, introducing foundational security testing concepts and showing you how to apply those concepts with free and commercial tools and resources. Offering a practical risk-based approach, Jeffery discusses why security testing is important, how to use security risk information to improve your test strategy, and how to add security testing into your software development lifecycle. You don’t need a software security background to benefit from this important session.

Read more