Use Cases for Agile and Traditional Development  

Use cases haven't gone away with the advent of Agile development. Rather, they are showing their true advantages—improving communication patterns in the organization, describing work-flow across system uses, showing requirements in context, checking for requirements completeness, and providing a look-ahead mechanism for tough and unresolved issues. However, these advantages apply only to properly written use cases that do not discuss user interface details and are two pages or less in length, not the bloated 25-page monstrosities that can give use cases a bad reputation. Alistair Cockburn, author of Writing Effective Use Cases, discusses why and how use cases matter to both Agile and traditional, plan-driven projects. Through examples of good and poor use cases and hands-on exercises, you will first understand and then practice the core elements of use cases.

 
About the Instructor
Earning his Ph.D. at age 49 with his thesis “People and Methodologies in Software Development”, Alistair Cockburn proved it can be done in the middle of life and that it is possible to use the word “people” and “software development” in the same sentence in an academic setting. He has led a string of successful projects—some in software and some not in software—and rolled together the above experiences together to help craft both the Agile Manifesto and the Declaration of Interdependence. When consulting, his lead card is not to “improve techniques but rather to improve attitudes.” His supporting materials can be found at http://Alistair.Cockburn.us.

Many managers start their careers as technical people and then are promoted to “management” with little or no training. The technical work is challenging, but the management work—exercising those “soft” skills—is probably the hardest thing you have to do. If you’ve been managing for a while and are frustrated by your management role or simply want to get to the next level, join Johanna and your peers in this tutorial to discuss and practice the skills you need to become a great manager. If you’re a new software lead or manager, come learn what you need to do to become a great manager. In this hands-on session, you’ll learn to define a personal mission and how to decide what is strategically important for you, your team, and your organization. You’ll find new ways to create an effective work environment, hire the best people available, and help people do their best work. You’ll learn about and practice effective one-on-one communication, evaluating people, and even when and how to deal with those who won’t or can’t perform. Perhaps, most importantly, you’ll take away new insights in how to manage yourself and to identify when your personal behavior is constructive or destructive.

 
About the Instructor
Johanna Rothman is a well-known consultant, speaker, and author on managing high-technology product development. During her decade-long consulting career, she has assisted managers, teams, and organizations become more effective by applying her pragmatic approaches to the issues of project management, risk management, and people management. She’s helped engineering organizations, IT organizations, and startups hire technical people, manage projects, and release successful products faster. Her action-based assessment reports have helped managers and teams improve their projects, products, and financial results. Johanna is a sought-after speaker and teacher in the areas of project management, people management, and problem-solving.

Principles, Patterns, and Practices of Agile Development  

In this hands-on programming workshop you can explore and experience the fundamentals of Agile software development by designing and coding a real, but simple, application. Special emphasis is placed on test-driven development (TDD), including both automated unit testing and acceptance testing. The workshop begins with a brief overview of Agile Development and a demonstration of TDD practices. The application is specified in terms of executable acceptance tests using the open source FitNesse tool. The open source JUnit tool is used to develop automated unit tests. During development, Robert discusses important design principles and design patterns of TDD and Agile development.
 
Students must have a programming background and some familiarity with Java or Javascript.
Students should bring a laptop computer loaded with a Java compiler (1.4 or later), JUnit (www.junit.org), and FitNesse (www.fitnesse.org). The preferred IDE is IntelliJ, but Eclipse (www.eclipse.org) is acceptable.

 
About the Instructor
Michael doesn't know when he started developing software, but he knows that he has been developing for play for at least the last twelve years. He has been active in the XP community for the past four years, balancing his time between working with, training, and coaching various teams around the world. Prior to joining Object Mentor, Michael designed a proprietary programming language and wrote a compiler for it, he also designed a large multi-platform class library and a framework for instrumentation control. Publically, Michael developed Cppunit, the initial port of JUnit to C++, and has spoken at several conferences. He is a member of the ACM and the IEEE and he has acted as the chair for the Codefest event at the last three OOPSLA conferences.

Software managers are frequently challenged to provide accurate software project estimates early in the development lifecycle. Yet most managers are left to make “educated” guesses for how long a project will take and how many people resources will be needed. There is a better way! In this tutorial, David Herron discusses an estimating model based on functional sizing as a key measurement component. By using this model you will be able to accurately estimate a project earlier in the development process. At the heart of the estimating challenge are two issues: 1) the need to understand and express (as early as possible) the software problem domain, and 2) the need to understand our capability to deliver the required software solution within a specified environment. Then, and only then, will we be able to accurately predict the effort and time required to deliver the product.

 
About the Instructor
David Herron is an acknowledged authority on the use of metrics to monitor the impact of Information Technology (IT), on the advancement of IT organizations to higher levels on the SEI Capability Maturity Model, and on the governance of outsourcing arrangements. He has more than twenty-five years experience in managing, developing, and maintaining computer software systems. David is a Principal in The David Consulting Group and serves as a Cutter Consortium Expert Consultant.

Go beyond basic test methodology and discover ways to develop the skills needed to create the most effective test cases for your systems. All testers know we can create more test cases than we will ever have time to run. The problem is choosing a small, “smart” subset from the almost infinite number of possibilities. Learn how to design test cases using formal techniques, including equivalence class and boundary value testing, decision tables, state-transition diagrams, and all-pairs testing. Learn to use more informal approaches, such as exploratory testing and random testing, to enhance your testing efforts. Choose the right test case documentation format for your organization and continually improve your test designs using the test execution results.

 
About the Instructor
With more than thirty years of experience as an information systems professional at commercial and nonprofit organizations, Lee Copeland has held technical and managerial positions in applications development, software testing, and software process improvement. Lee has developed and taught numerous training courses on software development and testing issues and is a well-known speaker with Software Quality Engineering. A frequent presenter at software conferences in the United States and abroad, Lee is the author of the popular reference book, A Practitioner's Guide to Software Test Design.

Integrating Risk Management into Project Planning  

Project risk is like the weather: People complain about it, but no one DOES anything about it . . . until now. Payson Hall presents this session on risk management targeted at software and systems integration project managers and sponsoring executives. Participants learn about and apply practical techniques to identify and quantify risk factors associated with their software and systems projects. Take away new decisionmaking 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 some straightforward risk mitigation strategies. Share with your peers information about risks and mitigation strategies you have encountered that are working (or failing) in the real world. This is a “hands-on” tutorial, focusing on exposing risks and integrating risk practical management into project plans.

 
About the Instructor
Payson Hall is a systems engineer and project management consultant and founding member of Catalysis Group, Inc. Formally trained as a software engineer and computer scientist, Payson has performed and consulted on a variety of hardware and software systems integration projects in both the public and private sectors throughout North America and Europe during his 25-year professional career. He has been a featured speaker on topics of systems integration, project management, and risk management. His rare combination of IT project management experience and communication skills have made Payson a valued member of many project review and project oversight teams.

Industrial XP: eXtreme Programming for Large Development Organizations  

Without the right people, environment, values, and project direction, most teams and organizations that attempt to do eXtreme Programming (XP) will fail. This tutorial examines an adaptation of XP, Industrial XP (IXP) which was pioneered by the presenter and was the result of his five years experience implementing XP in organizations large and small. IXP—XP for large development organizations—includes practices that ease the adoption and management of XP and expand practices for coordinating the work of a diverse project community and state-of-the-art technical practices. This hands-on tutorial is chock full of real-world stories, photographs, and even video footage of IXP in action! Participants in this tutorial can expect to come away with ample ideas for how to successfully practice and scale XP within their organizations.

 
About the Instructor
Joshua Kerievsky is the founder of Industrial Logic, a company that specializes in Extreme Programming. He began his career as a professional programmer at a Wall Street bank, where he programmed numerous financial systems for credit, market, and global risk departments. After a decade at the bank, he founded Industrial Logic in 1995 to help companies practice successful software development. He has programmed and coached on small, large, and distributed XP projects since XP's emergence. Joshua has written XP articles in Extreme Programming Examined and Extreme Programming Perspectives and recently authored the 2005 Jolt Productivity award winning book, Refactoring to Patterns.