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| If your organization is on the road to—or investigating—agile development, you should expect challenges and problems. For agile to succeed, stakeholders including senior managers, product managers, and even functional managers must change what they do and how they interact with development. If any of the following are familiar—or you worry about them—this class is for you. Management asks at the beginning of a project when it will end. The project team members don’t agree on the meaning of “done.” Your stand-up meetings become sit-down-forever meetings. Management thinks multitasking is a good idea. Unpaid overtime is a necessary evil in your projects. You have unranked requirement backlogs. Johanna Rothman explores these and other dysfunctional organization, management, team, and team member issues. Learn new approaches for making your agile transition smoother and more complete. Help the project team and all stakeholders understand their new roles and responsibilities and work with you in a way that helps your projects succeed. |
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| Learn more about Johanna Rothman |
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| Since the early days of agile, we've known that face-to-face communication is optimal. In fact, one of the twelve principles in the Agile Manifesto is, “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” So, what are the real differences between collocated and distributed teams with the advent of “closeness” technologies—Web-based meetings, shared project whiteboards, Skype, Wikis, video conferencing, and more? Through a series of stories about teams he’s worked closely with over the past few years, Michael Feathers explores the issues surrounding team collocation. Whether you are lucky enough to have your entire agile team together or are required to work apart most or all of the time, you’ll discover new ways to encourage collaboration and build personal relationships. In the end, you’ll arrive at your personal understanding of what “being there” means. |
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| Learn more about Michael Feathers |
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| Valuable products start with understanding the needs of the customers—what they want and how they will use the product. Agile projects commonly capture customer needs as user stories—notes written on cards as a reminder to have an in-depth conversation when development begins. Most customers aren’t born with the ability to communicate clearly and unambiguously—whether in stories or conversations—with fully formed requirements statements. Developers must learn to ask the right questions, draw out pertinent information, and understand the customer’s world. In this interactive session, Esther Derby presents four types of questions—context-free, open, closed, and multiple choice—and explores with participants when to use them, when not to use them, and ways to move forward when questions lead to a dead-end. Learn the signals that tell you when to probe for more information and recognize the deadliest sin of customer conversation. Practice what you’ve learned during the class and return to work with new interviewing and elicitation tools. |
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| Learn more about Esther Derby |
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| While most organizations are starting to come to terms with the process aspects of agile, they still face challenges when identifying how to modify their testing practices to be more flexible. This is particularly true for security and performance testing where many organizations hold on to a waterfall-style approach, leaving these critical aspects to the end of the release and often leaving the application open to vulnerabilities. Based on her many customer experiences, Tracy DeDore shares the practices she recommends for nonfunctional testing: writing testable user stories, planning for testing beginning at sprint 0, and introducing “hardening” sprints that help users and developers incorporate security and performance testing into agile processes. Find out how building test automation suites, component frameworks for performance and security testing, and leveraging “headless” testing can all help teams ensure the business achieves its goals without sacrificing performance or security. |
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| Learn more about Tracy DeDore |
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| While agile adoption continues to grow rapidly in the software product development world, it has not been as widely adopted within enterprise IT departments. Even within a single company, different software organizations can have widely varied views on adopting agile concepts. Some groups are fanatical about the “A-word”; others are skeptical and dismissive. Using Medtronic as a case study, Mike Stuedemann examines the barriers to agile adoption within large, multinational corporations. He shares his experiences at Medtronic to illustrate the varied adoption paths that teams can employ to realize the benefits of agile within the enterprise. Mike learned that many of the supposed barriers to enterprise agile adoption were myths; others were real and really difficult to overcome. Leave with the ability to refute many of the common arguments used to block agile adoption and gain a better understanding of approaches that can be used to implement it within the enterprise. |
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Learn more about Mike Stuedemann
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| If you are an agile coach and your team or organization is struggling to adopt agile methods or is backsliding, this class is for you. David Hussman shares coaching techniques you can use to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations and the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering, and product planning tools. He shares his coaching experiences that you can adapt to help your teams establish a strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching within your organization. You’ll learn to step back from prescriptive practices and use the agile principles and values to amplify existing strengths and address challenges. Whether you are new to agile methods or a seasoned player, David helps you grow your coaching skills and your ability to discover and deliver sustainable, real value. |
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| Learn more about David Hussman |
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| When a single user story mixes both high- and low-value functionality or contains too many or unrelated customer needs, the flow of value slows. You must wait for the whole story to be finished before benefiting from its highest value parts. Even worse, it makes higher-value parts of the next story wait on lower-value parts of this one. Large stories can increase project risk because the core part of a story often contains proportionally more of its risk. While agile methods support incremental development, large stories can force a particular overall path even when the team would be better off taking advantage of earlier feedback and moving in a different direction. Join Bill Wake as he examines user story bundling and unbundling, splitting and merging. He shares concrete techniques for story splitting and explores high-level, user-experience, nonfunctional, and complex storylines. Take away a toolkit of at least twenty ways you can split your user stories to increase value flow and customer satisfaction. |
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| Learn more about Bill Wake |
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| Abby Fichtner, Microsoft, and Nate Oster, CodeSquads LLC |
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The best software development teams find ways for programmers and testers to work closely together to build quality into their software. These teams recognize that programmers and testers each bring their own unique strengths and perspectives to the table. Only by building upon this combination can we reach our full potential to consistently deliver quality. To do this, we first have to unlearn the anti-patterns that traditional development taught us. In this interactive workshop, learn how to use Concurrent Testing to overcome these common "testing smells" by having programmers and testers working together, rather than against each other, throughout development iterations. Play games to demonstrate just how powerfully dysfunctional systems can act against your best efforts and how agile techniques can help you escape the cycle of poor quality and late delivery. Discover how to do this on your own teams as Abby Fichtner and Nate Oster walk through a day in the life of concurrent testing for this programmer-tester pair.
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Learn more about Abby Fichtner and Nate Oster
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| Given the success of agile at the development team level, managers are exploring the possibility of implementing agile methodologies across the entire product lifecycle organization—beyond software development. Managers who have launched such adoption efforts are uncovering many myths, misperceptions, and obstacles that derail their efforts before they really get started. Product delivery organizations fail to become agile because they don’t really understand what makes agile teams work. Mike Cottmeyer describes an agile adoption roadmap that begins with an individual team and then demonstrates how multiple teams can work together to deliver more complex projects and portfolios. He expands the agile concept beyond the development team and shows how organizations can optimize their value stream across the enterprise. At each step of the adoption process, Mike demonstrates how to choose the policies, practices, and metrics that create learning and drive sustainable organizational change. |
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| Learn more about Mike Cottmeyer |
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| Agility focuses on delivering business value to the customers as rapidly as possible. So, how does the team assure the business that it’s delivering the most value possible in the right priority? It’s more than prioritizing user stories or estimating development effort with story points. Through presentation and interactive exercises, Ken Pugh explains how to estimate and track business value throughout an agile project. He presents two methods for quickly estimating business value for features and stories, and shows the relationship between business value estimates and story point estimates. Ken illustrates how to chart business value for iteration reviews and demonstrates what estimates really mean in both dollars and time. On a larger scale, Ken shows business value as a portfolio management tool for prioritizing feature development across many projects. Learn to use business value to focus your customers and developers on the most important requirements first. |
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| Learn more about Ken Pugh |
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| Have you noticed that similar stories appear over and over again as you develop a system? According to Dan Rawsthorne, stories—those small chunks of work that make up your backlog and provide demonstrable value to the project—can be categorized by purpose: production, analysis, cleanup, infrastructure/environment, business support, or other. Within each of these categories are different “story-o-types”—patterns that define the commonalities among the stories themselves. Dan defines and describes some of the most common story-o-types, explains why they are useful, and demonstrates the concept with examples including “Alternate Path” and “Clean-Up Interface” for the production category, “Talk to Stakeholders” and “Exploratory Testing” for the analysis category, among others. For each story-o-type, Dan provides sample tasks and canonical “doneness” criteria that make planning and backlog grooming easier and more consistent. By employing story-o-types in developing your stories, your team will produce more consistent, higher quality requirements that are easier to work with. |
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| Learn more about Dan Rawsthorne |
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| We can apply agile development practices to test automation like any other software development project. The good news is … using agile practices for test automation projects addresses some of the classic problems of test automation: when and what to build, increasing automation execution to achieve extended return-on-investment, and test automation teams “going dark” for long periods of time. Sharing a case study, Monica Luke demonstrates how adopting agile principles increases the test automation team’s visibility and productivity while providing higher value automation. She addresses the special challenges of building automation in real-time while the product is also under development and explores GUI test automation issues. Learn how to incorporate stakeholder feedback, time-boxed iterations, demos, and other agile concepts into your test automation initiatives. Also, Monica discusses the additional challenges she has faced working with product development teams that have not adopted agile practices. |
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| Learn more about Monica Luke |
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