Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2010

PRESENTATIONS

Measurement Problems that Plague Us

Measurement problems in software organizations are many: challenges with effort tracking; difficulties motivating the workforce to comply; resource management in multitasking and matrix organizations; attempts to "standardize" project status reporting or dashboards that run amuck; the misconceptions that fester and hinder defect collection and analysis throughout the life cycle; and management’s failure to truly understand and actually use measurement data and information to make decisions.
Beth Layman, Layman & Layman
Moving Agile Beyond Software

Agility is not a goal for its own sake. More than a great way to build software, agile principles are a way to build a great company that predictably delivers products through alignment and visibility across all parts of the business. What does an agile enterprise look like? How does it treat its employees? What are agile enterprises doing that other companies won't or can't do?
Ryan Martens, Rally Software Development
Nonfunctional Requirements: The Forgotten Needs

Nonfunctional requirements are an essential part of a holistic understanding of system requirements; yet many teams struggle with them. Some neglect nonfunctional requirements during requirements analysis, considering them as less important or supplemental. Or they specify them incompletely and with un-testable attributes. Analysts, developers, and business customers often struggle with when and how to define and document nonfunctional requirements.
Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting, Inc.
Performance and Security Testing in Agile Development

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.
Tracy DeDore, Hewlett-Packard
Redirecting the Doomed Project

It is nearly impossible to work in software development and not end up on a project which one day ends as a death march. These projects are characterized by being extremely overdue, significantly over budget, and, at the same time, critical to company success. Death marches can happen regardless of development methodology because the contributing factors often include dramatic scope change, lack of vision, and unrealistic deadlines-factors that are methodology neutral.
Bob Hartman, Agile For All
Refactoring: What You Need to Do It Right

As certain as evolving requirements lead to code changes, code changes lead to code degradation. Therefore, code refactoring is critical to the long-term viability of all software products. Kevin Sawicki shares tips and tricks for refactoring to help developers identify code that needs refactoring, preserve the correct code history during refactoring sessions, and ensure that appropriate unit tests cover the refactored code.
Kevin Sawicki, Perforce Software
Risk Identification, Analysis, and Mitigation in Agile Environments

Although risk identification, analysis, and mitigation are critically important parts of any software project effort, agile projects require non-traditional techniques that are much quicker and easier to use than classical risk techniques. James McCaffrey focuses-not on theory-but on realistic risk analysis methods agile teams can readily implement with lightweight tools.
James McCaffrey, Volt VTE
Scaling Agile Adoption Beyond the Development Team

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.
Michael Cottmeyer, Pillar Technology
Scrum: The Basics

Too many software projects spend too much time and money delivering too little, too late. Projects drag on for months, either thrashing from the chaos of ever-changing requirements or rigidly rejecting legitimate changes. If they deliver at all, they deliver products with too few features and too many bugs. Customers blame developers for not meeting their commitments. Developers blame customers for not knowing what they want. Dale Emery presents the better way-Scrum-a simple approach for managing complex projects.
Dale Emery, DHE
Security Guidelines for Agile Development

Some security experts would have you believe that it is "impossible" to implement secure development practices using agile development methodologies. Admittedly, the use of agile does pose some challenges to traditional security development lifecycle (SDL) processes-challenges such as meteorically short release cycles, infinitely long product lifetimes as in the case of cloud applications, and a general You-Ain't-Gonna-Need-It planning mentality within agile.
Bryan Sullivan, Microsoft

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