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| Today’s fast-paced business environments require just-in-time decisions based on the best information available. What initiatives should we fund? Are we getting value from our efforts and investments? Are we getting better over time? Project teams are concerned with their ability to meet budgets and schedules, whether they will be ready to release as planned, and whether customer requirements have been satisfied. Beth Layman explains the concepts of Practical Software Measurement (PSM) to define measurement programs that can improve your decision making. Beth discusses the role of measurement at all levels of the enterprise and how history, culture, and maturity influence the measurement footprint. She describes how to use an issue-driven measurement approach by defining what to measure, how to collect the data, how to analyze the information, and how to use the results. Beth illustrates this approach through real-world case studies. Take away a practical approach for measuring what’s important to your organization and learn ways to avoid the typical measurement roadblocks that plague many organizations. |
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| Learn more about Beth Layman |
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Join Jean Tabaka for an exploration of better decision making through collaboration and facilitation. In this exercise-packed session, learn and apply facilitation tools and techniques that support a collaborative mode of decision making for the planning, daily interactions, and reviews especially useful for agile software development project teams. Jean leads you in evaluating collaboration versus command-and-control leadership styles, collaborative decision-making, and the facilitation techniques vital for effective planning and directing of collaborative meetings and interactions. Working in small teams, facilitate decisions through a series of exercises. Practice helping teams gather insights and arrive at decisions without taking over and making the decisions yourself! It is all about making better, more insightful decisions that enable high-performing teams. Be prepared to be on your feet, be challenged, and watch your skills grow!
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| Learn more about Jean Tabaka |
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| It has been compared to jumping onto a moving train—the project has left the station and now you must determine its health and assess where it has been, where it is, and where it is going. Whether you are a project manager, a sponsor evaluating the contents of your portfolio, an auditor, or a consultant just trying to help, you often must assess the situation quickly and identify and prioritize areas requiring further analysis. Payson Hall helps you build and reinforce your project assessment skills and provides helpful task lists and checklists to support your assessment efforts. Take away an introduction to the project management principles that guide an assessment; a model to help establish a context for the review based upon project size, complexity, business risk, and the maturity level of the organization; and practical techniques to get up to speed quickly. Learn what work products to ask for to facilitate orientation and maximize review efficiency, gain an approach to critically review project work products, and obtain and work with checklists and questionnaires that facilitate quick orientation and identification of areas needing further analysis. |
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| Learn more about Payson Hall |
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| Transitioning to an agile development process is unlike most transitions development organizations make. Often, transitions begin when a strong, visionary leader plants a stake in the ground and says, “Let’s take our organization there.” Other transitions start with a lone team thinking, “Who cares what management thinks, let’s do this.” The problem in transitioning to agile is that neither of these approaches is likely to lead to the long-term, sustainable change you want. Mike Cohn describes how you can iterate toward more agility by combining a senior-level “guiding coalition” with multiple “action teams.” Along the way, you will learn the acronym ADAPT to describe the five steps necessary for any successful agile transition: Awareness, Desire, Ability, Promote, and Transfer. Explore the real role of leaders and managers in guiding self-organizing teams toward agility. Take back proven patterns for getting started—Start Small, Stealth Mode, Going All In, Public Displays of Agility, Impending Doom, and more. Leave knowing what you must—and must not—do to succeed with agile in your organization and team. |
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| Learn more about Mike Cohn |
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| Saying the right thing at the right time can be difficult. Many of us find ourselves wishing we had some magic phrases that would make difficult conversations easier and more productive. Join Michele Sliger for this interactive session and fill up your toolkit with just the right things to say, the perfect questions, and the best ways to start, guide, and end discussions. Whether you are a manager, a developer, or a tester, you can benefit from learning new, open ways to exchange ideas—after all, to get better software we must have better communication. You’ll have ample opportunity to try your new communications skills in simulations with your colleagues in an environment that’s safe for learning and experimentation. Find out how to stop a pontificator, keep meetings on track, disagree without shutting down the discussion, deliver feedback, say “no” politely yet firmly, and encourage further dialog. Discover how to pack your discussion toolkit with what you need to keep conversations going in the right direction. |
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| Learn more about Michele Sliger |
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| Test estimation is one of the most difficult software development activities to do well. The primary reason is that testing is not an independent activity and is often plagued by upstream destabilizing dependencies. Julie Gardiner describes common problems in test estimation, explains how to overcome them, and reveals six powerful ways to estimate test effort. Some estimation techniques are quick but can be challenged easily; others are more detailed and time consuming to use. The estimation methods are FIA (Finger in the Air), Formula or Percentage, Historical, Consensus of Experts, Work Breakdown Structures, and Estimation Models. Julie looks at how we can approach the “set-in-stone deadlines” that often are presented to us and effectively communicate estimates for testing to senior management. Through the use of exercises, gain experience using these techniques. Spreadsheets and utilities will be given out during this session to help testers, test managers, and development managers improve their estimation practices. |
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| Scrum appears deceptively simple, but effective implementation is complicated. Scrum’s rules are simple to understand, but organizations often ignore basic Scrum principles claiming they are “different” and don’t need to “follow all the rules.” Listen for the phrase, “We do Scrum, but …”. Inevitably, it will be the “but” that prevents the organization from achieving its greatest productivity. In this highly interactive session, Mitch Lacey presents a short overview of Scrum principles and why they are important. Then, you’ll create a list of your own ScrumButs, those principles your organization wants to ignore. We’ll prioritize this list into a backlog for discussion and work through it, explaining the reason for the Scrum principle, why the ScrumBut is potentially dangerous, and how to eliminate it. Everyone is encouraged to participate and share how they have addressed their ScrumButs. And if you haven’t yet encountered a particular ScrumBut, learn how to “head it off at the pass.” |
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| Learn more about Mitch Lacey |
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| Has this happened to you? You try to implement a change in your organization and it fails. And, to make matters worse, you can't figure out why. It may be that your great idea didn't mesh well with your organization’s culture or a host of other reasons. Jennifer Bonine shares a toolkit to help you determine which ideas will—and will not—work well within your organization. This toolkit includes five rules for change management, a checklist to help you analyze the type of change process needed in your organization, a set of questions you can ask to better understand your executives’ goals, techniques for overcoming resistance to change, and the formal roles necessary to enable successful change. These tools—together with an awareness of your organization’s core culture—allow you to identify the changes you can successfully implement. Cultural awareness helps you align your initiatives with the objectives of the organization, make your team successful, and demonstrate the value of the change, which is increasingly important in these challenging economic times. |
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| Learn more about Jennifer Bonine |
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| Even candidates who have experience on agile teams may not be experienced working the same way your team works. And, because not everyone is using the same—or any—agile approaches, some people who are not using your team’s approaches may be perfect candidates—or not. How do you decide? If you’ve tried to hire technical people, you know you can’t rely on their résumé describing “agile experience” to be a predictor of success. Nor can a résumé that doesn’t specifically cite “agile experience” be a predictor of failure. Will the candidate be just right for your open position—even if technical skill is not an issue? Selecting the right team members doesn’t have to be frustrating. Instead, you can reframe your interviewer role to be that of a detective. You need to define your team’s culture in advance and determine during the interview process whether or not a candidate fits into that culture. In this hands-on session, you will practice defining the essential technical and non-technical skills for your teams, identifying your cultural issues, and practice interviewing so that you can select people who fit for your agile team. |
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| Learn more about Johanna Rothman |
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| Agile methods bring wonderful dynamics to software projects—focus on the team, embracing change, quality-driven development, and business value connected by customer engagement—that lead toward vastly improved project performance. However, most agile projects are developed within a wider enterprise or larger-scale context that may still be waterfall-bound in their thinking. Bob Galen shares his enterprise or “large-scale extensions” for agile releases including methods for integrating agile teams and practices at scale. He discusses blitz and iteration planning models for larger scale agile projects that include extending agile testing across the enterprise in regulated and other heavier weight testing environments. Learn “Agile Release Train” planning dynamics when integrating releases across multiple agile teams. Discover how to implement larger scale feature sets using UX story mapping techniques and how to best create powerful feature teams. Take away new tools and techniques to make agility work at scale and ensure that your agile products release successfully. |
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| Learn more about Bob Galen |
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| 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." |
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| Learn more about Rob Myers |
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| Tim Lister and five of his partners at the Atlantic Systems Guild have compiled project patterns they’ve observed in their combined 150 years of project consulting and summarized them in a new book, Adrenaline Junkies and Template Zombies. Tim has come to believe that project patterns are far stronger and more important than “best practices” will ever be. What are project patterns? They are the habits, decision-making practices, and unstated rules of corporate culture that dominate business life. The key to using project patterns is to identify your organization’s current patterns. If they are positive patterns, how can you replicate them across all projects? If they are negative, how can you break the habits? Tim gets you started by describing common patterns he’s observed at individual, project, and organizational levels. Then, you’ll break up into groups and discuss patterns you see in your organization and how you might nurture them or squelch them. Finally, you’ll put them all together as a final take-away and go back armed with realistic goals and objectives for improvement in your organization. |
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| Learn more about Tim Lister |
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| Risks are endemic in every phase of every project. One key to project success is to identify, understand, and manage these risks effectively. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality. It is here that the effective tester can significantly influence the project outcome. Shortened time scales, particularly in the latter stages of projects, are a frustration with which most of us are familiar. Julie Gardiner explains how risk-based testing can shape the quality of the delivered product in spite of such time constraints. Join Julie as she reveals how you can apply product risk management to a variety of organizational, technology, project, and skills challenges. Through interactive exercises, gain practical advice on how to apply risk management techniques throughout the testing lifecycle—from planning through execution and reporting. Take back a practical process and the tools you need to apply risk analysis to testing in your organization. |
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| Learn more about Julie Gardiner |
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| If you’ve been managing projects for a while, you may not understand how an agile project works or your role in it. If you’re accustomed to predicting the schedule, assigning the work, and tracking the progress, you may be puzzled. Rather than director, you are now coach and facilitator. Rather than assigning work, the team self-assigns. Rather than updating the Gantt chart, you use empirical data to track progress. Agile projects provide the project manager (and others) with more useful information than a serial-lifecycle project. Yet, it’s difficult for many project managers to make the transition to agile, because they don’t know what they can or should do. Join Johanna Rothman in this experiential session that uses a small project to practice working in an agile environment. Learn how to collect the data—both quantitative and qualitative—that tell you how the project and the team are progressing. Practice assessing the project’s true state and be prepared to tell management when you will be done. |
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| Learn more about Johanna Rothman |
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| Since its origin on Japanese product development projects in the 1980s, Scrum has become recognized as one of the best project management frameworks for handling rapidly changing development projects. With more than 70,000 Certified ScrumMasters, Scrum is one of the leading agile software development successes. It is especially valuable for product development projects with significant technology uncertainty or evolving requirements. Through teaching, interactive discussions, and hands-on exercises, Mike Cohn explains the basics you need to know to get started with Scrum. Learn about the key aspects of Scrum, including product and sprint backlogs, the sprint planning meeting, activities that occur during sprints, the sprint review, conducting a sprint retrospective, measuring and monitoring progress, and scaling Scrum to work with large and distributed teams. Learn the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, the product owner, and each member of the Scrum team. Equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, product managers, and anyone else interested in improving product delivery, this tutorial will help you and your team in your quest for “getting agile.” |
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| Learn more about Mike Cohn |
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| What happens to software? Why does it rot over time? How can a development team prevent this rot, and prevent good design and implementation from becoming dangerous legacy code? How can we be sure our designs are good in the first place? How do you manage the structure of large agile and object-oriented systems? What is the best way to break that structure into components? What should the components contain, and how should they be interrelated? How can we effectively partition a system into independently deployable components? Robert Martin describes a set of design principles, such as "The Open Closed Principle" and "The Dependency Inversion Principle" that helps software developers keep their system designs decoupled and flexible. These principles, sometimes known as "Dependency Management" principles, describe how software should be partitioned into cohesive chunks and how to control the coupling between those chunks. These dependency management principles are what underlie all the Design Patterns. |
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| Learn more about Robert C. Martin |
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| Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don’t want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves—and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? Pollyanna Pixton focuses on collaboration as the key and teaches you how and when to step back and unleash the hidden talent in your organization and teams. Learn how to create an open environment that fosters innovation and creativity and how to let your team members take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Equally important, develop the techniques to step up and lead to keep the project on track without impeding the flow of ideas. Come away with tools to both motivate and guide teams and organizations effectively—and learn to master the balancing act of leadership. |
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| Learn more about Pollyanna Pixton |
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| Some books make adopting the principles of the Agile Manifesto seem simple and straightforward. Unfortunately, it is not, especially when organizational policies and procedures prevent necessary change. Ahmed Sidky (aka Dr. Agile) shares the step-by-step process for designing a roadmap tailored to becoming agile—despite the constraints surrounding you. This roadmap includes the three main phases of most adoption initiatives: getting ready, piloting, and spreading agile practices. 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. In the “spreading agile” phase, Ahmed presents five steps to help you adopt agile values in an iterative manner. If you’re just starting out your agile transition or in a transition stage, Ahmed will equip you with practical techniques and strategies to move from your existing process to an agile process without starting from scratch. |
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| Learn more about Ahmed Sidky |
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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. |
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| Learn more about Rob Myers |
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