|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| In this highly interactive session, Andy Kaufman helps you wrestle with real-world leadership issues we all face—influencing without authority, motivating your team, and dealing with conflict. Explore the difference between leadership and management—and why it matters—and get a clear picture of a leader’s responsibilities, including the balance between short- and long-term focus and the need to deliver results while developing organizational capability. Discuss the importance of developing your team members’ leadership skills, including practical ways to do so even with a limited training budget. Andy delves into the importance of one-on-one relationships and delivers proven insights on managing upward, dealing with peers, and developing stronger bonds both inside and outside your organization. Accelerate your ability to influence your organization, your projects, and your career to become the leader your team needs and demands. Walk away with practical tools to help you lead your team, including a template for formalizing a team charter and a reproducible survey to solicit leadership feedback from bosses, peers, stakeholders, and team members. |
 |
| Learn more about Andy Kaufman |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
In many organizations, use cases have replaced the 500-pound requirements document of the past. As teams move to agile practices and adopt user stories to document features, where do use cases fit in the development process? Teams adopting agile practices try to “right size” written requirements and eliminate documentation that doesn’t clearly support users or developers. However, adopting agile practices doesn’t mean you should necessarily abandon use cases. In this hands-on session, Rebecca Wirfs-Brock shows you how to write agile use cases, adding details only when and where they matter. She shows how to “lighten up” use case descriptions by focusing on usability and incrementally adding information as needed. Join Rebecca and discover how to “tune” your use cases to be more agile. Learn how to effectively describe error conditions, compactly express complex business rules, and define acceptance criteria. See how to relate use cases to features and how to break down use cases into user stories for iteration planning.
|
 |
| Learn more about Rebecca Wirfs-Brock |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 move from sketches on a whiteboard to create agile project trends on productivity, time-to-market, and defect rates. Using recent, real-world case studies, Michael offers a practical, expert view of agile measurement, showing you these metrics in action on retrospectives and release estimation and planning. In 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 in your organization. Take back new ways for communicating to key decision makers the value of implementing agile development practices.
 Laptops Required. To take full advantage of this tutorial, particpants should bring a Windows Based PC (with admin rights) for use during data capture and productivity calculations.
|
 |
| Learn more about Michael Mah |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Jean Tabaka and Bill Wake firmly believe that agile and lean teams and organizations need to embrace a “See the Whole” mentality as they adopt and adapt their practices. Jean and Bill offer systems thinking as a powerful guide for how to holistically evaluate lean/agile practices from a more objective, external perspective. Through a series of game-base simulations, participants apply the fundamentals of systems thinking, by looking at delayed feedback loops and external pressures that can stymie agile adoption. These simulations focus on three systems thinking archetypes: Unintended Consequences, Escalation, and the Tragedy of Commons. Engage in conversations about how you can apply what you’ve learned and change your team’s or organization’s perspective on effective agile and lean practices. The goal is to help you take back guidance to positively impact your organization’s culture. |
  |
|
Learn more about Jean Tabaka & Bill Wake
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Successfully delivering software projects continues to be a struggle for many organizations. Studies continue to show that nearly 25 percent of large-scale software projects are never delivered and that a majority of the projects that are delivered do not meet time, budget, or quality objectives. Jeff Payne lays out the most common causes of software project failure and explains what you can do—first to identify and then to mitigate these risks as early as possible in the software lifecycle. Join Jeff to examine the sometimes fatal risks associated with complex software projects—immature technologies, tool introduction, poor testing practices, ambiguous requirements artifacts, inadequate project staff, and failed project management. In a case study of a real-world project, practice risk identification and mitigation techniques and reinforce your new skills in group activities. Leave with a structured and proven framework for performing project risk analysis that ties risks to specific business consequences. |
 |
| Learn more about Jeff Payne |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| One of the primary responsibilities of the product owner and project teams is release planning. Stakeholders want, need, and deserve to know what they'll be getting—and when. How do you do this in an agile environment? Although many find it tempting to create a release plan as a series of sprint plans, this is a mistake. It violates the lean principle of minimal inventory and will most likely be wrong—the same as with traditional project planning. Release planning is actually the development of a release strategy that is refined and adjusted throughout the process. A release strategy defines capabilities (not stories) and often includes a game plan for “spending” story points (or effort or money) to produce the most value. Dan Rawsthorne presents “rules of thumb” for developing a release strategy and spending game plan. During a guided exercise you’ll practice using these rules, walk through an example release, and learn how to monitor and measure the release plan along the way. |
 |
| Learn more about Dan Rawsthorne |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Planning is important for all projects, especially agile ones. Unfortunately, we’ve all seen many worthless plans and are tempted to throw out planning altogether. Regretfully, too many teams today view planning as something to be avoided, and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. But don’t give up yet! With the right type of agile estimating and planning, you can create an accurate and useful project plan that looks six to nine months in the future. Join Mike Cohn to learn new skills that will help you create reliable plans that improve decision-making and break the cycle of poor estimates and failed expectations. Leave with a solid understanding of and experience in agile planning as you learn new approaches to estimating—unit-less points, ideal time, and more. Practice estimating with the popular Planning Poker® technique and see how these techniques work on fixed-price and fixed-scope projects. With Mike and the other participants, you’ll explore techniques that dramatically increase your project’s chances of on-time completion. |
 |
| Learn more about Mike Cohn |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| As the popularity of agile development spreads, more and more organizations are discovering that agile requires changes in management, analysis, architecture, design, testing, and quality assurance, as well as project management. Given the substantial adjustments required, where can a team or enterprise look for guidance in its transition? Team-focused agile methods are insufficient when attempting to spread agile beyond a few pilot projects. Alan Shalloway shows how lean thinking can take agile beyond the team and throughout the enterprise. By looking at the entire value stream—from concept to consumption—Alan shares proven techniques to eliminate waste, shorten time to market, raise the quality of your product, and lower overall development costs. These lean principles not only help agile teams perform better but also enable agility to spread more easily. Leave with an understanding of the lean principles that underlie effective agile methods including Kanban, an increasingly popular method based on lean thinking. |
 |
| Learn more about Alan Shalloway |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| The velocity metric is often misunderstood and unintentionally misused by both management and development. Developers worry they're being evaluated based on this number. Managers want to know how it can be increased. How a team defines velocity—explicitly or implicitly—affects the team’s ability to meet delivery commitments. Velocity must be rigorously defined and consistent; otherwise planning efforts quickly unravel. Rob Myers clarifies velocity—its definition and use. He explores velocity as a realistic planning tool, offers various ways to measure velocity, and presents simple analogies that make it understandable. He will also compare velocity with lean’s Kanban approach to reducing work-in-progress. Learn effective ways to obtain consistent estimates, discuss approaches to planning iterations and releases, and track your progress. Realistic group exercises explore and reinforce these analogies including playing the “Team Estimation Game” and talking briefly about Planning Poker®. Learn what to do about vacations, meetings, sick days, and surprises, and what to do if the answer to "Are we on schedule?" is "No." |
.jpg) |
| Learn more about Rob Myers |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Bob Martin takes you through many different software design patterns from the classic Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software, and from several other sources as well. Bob describes how these patterns are used from the point of view of solving real software design problems, and deals with their costs, benefits, traps, and pitfalls. This session is for the developer who is serious about learning how to effectively use design patterns, common structures that repeat over and over again in system design. The patterns discussed include Adapter, Decorator, Visitor, Acyclic-Visitor, Command, Composite, Proxy, Factory, Singleton, Monostate, and others. To get the most from this session, you should be familiar with UML and have a working knowledge of an OO programming language such as Java, C++, C#, or Python. |
75x114.jpg) |
| Learn more about Robert C. Martin |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Management—business, software, and IT managers—and the test team often come to a project with different perspectives that can lead to miscommunications, misunderstandings, and worse. Left unaddressed, these and other gaps between management and test can leave testers with little guidance about the organization’s testing goals and managers lacking the information they need to make good decisions. Join Dale Emery in this highly interactive session to identify the management–test gaps in your organization and develop new approaches to bridge those gaps. Learn techniques for identifying each stakeholder’s needs, making clear requests, negotiating productive agreements, and keeping everyone informed. Practice navigating necessary changes as new information surfaces, organizational priorities shift, and project pressures mount. Take back new tools you can use to form and sustain productive testing partnerships that serve your projects and your organization. |
 |
| Learn more about Dale Emery |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| A fundamental premise in all agile development is that work will be done in priority order. Yet, very little advice is provided to product owners about how to prioritize a product backlog. Regardless of how fast your agile team is, how brilliant your technical solutions are, or how many automated tests you run continuously, nothing matters if you’re working on the wrong features. Mike Cohn examines both financial and non-financial methods of prioritizing product backlog items. Mike describes techniques—relative weighting, theme screening, theme scoring, Kano analysis, impact estimation—and financial measures such as return on investment (ROI), net present value (NPV), internal rate of return (IRR), and discounted cash flow. Not only are these techniques helpful for prioritizing product backlog items, they also can be used for prioritizing ideas for entire projects. The techniques are easy and the concepts are powerful. Take back practical knowledge about how to apply these straightforward techniques to prioritizing your product backlog. |
|
| Learn more about Mike Cohn |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Effective retrospectives stoke the engine of team improvement. Retrospectives are the vital feedback loop the team uses to examine methods, engineering practices, teamwork, and organizational relationships. But all too often teams fail to act on their retrospective resolves. Esther Derby shares a five-part framework for retrospectives, how the parts fit together, and what happens when you omit one of the stages. She offers guidance on choosing a focus and varying activities to keep retrospectives fresh and relevant. Esther also offers tips on managing a dominant individual in a retrospective and how to bring shy voices into the mix. She also explains—and shows you how to avoid—the common traps that keep teams from realizing the improvement effect of retrospectives. If you have been dissatisfied with your team’s retrospectives, or you are ready to take your retrospectives beyond “what did we do well, what could we do better,” come to this session to learn from one of the world experts on retrospectives. |
 |
| Learn more about Esther Derby |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| In our business and personal lives, many of us know leaders who foster environments of incredible creativity, innovation, and ideas—while other leaders try but fail. So, how do top leaders get it right? Going beyond the basics, Pollyanna Pixton explores ways that the best leaders create safety nets that allow people to take risks, to discover and try new possibilities, fail early, and correct faster. Learn how to remove fear and engender trust to make your team and organization more creative and productive. They will spend less energy protecting themselves and the status quo and more energy creating and innovating. Pollyanna shares the tools you, as a leader, need to create open environments based on trust and to take the first step in collaboration across the enterprise. Learn how to do the right thing without breaking trust and find out when and how to acknowledge and reward trust within your team and organization. |
 |
| Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| To describe their testing activities, many organizations use the terms “quality assurance” and “software testing” interchangeably. As important as testing is, true quality assurance is much more than testing. Quality assurance encompasses a planned set of tasks, activities, and actions used to provide management with information about the quality of software so that 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. Learn about evaluating your 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. One step at a time, you can take incremental steps to broaden your role to include QA functions. Improve the overall quality of your software products by expanding the scope of your testing to include preventive testing and QA. |
|
| Learn more about Jeff Payne |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| Traditional software project managers are feeling left behind by new agile software development practices. This is your opportunity to bridge agile development concepts by relating these new approaches to practices with which you are already familiar—the Project Management Institute’s Body of Knowledge (PMBOK). Learn about agile frameworks and the meaning of value-driven development, Scrum, XP, lean methods, and more. Michele Sliger maps PMI’s PMBOK Guide® knowledge areas to the corresponding agile development practices. This mapping includes answers to questions such as: how to manage risk, what happens to change control, what project plans look like, and whether or not scope creep has any meaning in agile projects. Michele describes how to redefine project managers’ traditional jobs into a new—and more important—role in agile development. |
 |
| Learn more about Michele Sliger |
|
|
|
|
|
|
| User stories, a lightweight requirements documentation approach used within Scrum, offer agile teams an efficient way to communicate software features among the team, plan iterations, and more. In this highly interactive session, Jean Tabaka leads participants through a series of simulations based on the life of a user story. She first sets the context in the Scrum framework—the roles of those who create user stories and the responsibility of each for identifying and elaborating user stories. Then, the real work (fun) begins! You’ll 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 |
|
|
Top of Page
|
|
|
 |
Software Quality Engineering • 330 Corporate Way, Suite 300 • Orange Park, FL 32073
Phone: 904.278.0524 • Toll-free: 888.268.8770 • Fax: 904.278.4380 • Email: sqeinfo@sqe.com
© 2009 Software Quality Engineering, All rights reserved. | | | |
