Conference Presentations

Can We Do Agile? Barriers to Agile Adoption
Slideshow

“Can we do agile?” is a question often asked by individuals enviously looking at the impressive results reported by other organizations that adopted agile practices. What they are usually concerned about are the commonly perceived barriers to agile adoption: large scale, legacy...
Steve Adolph, Blue Agility
Planning, Architecting, Implementing, and Measuring Automation
Slideshow

In automation, we often use several different tools that are not well integrated. These tools have been developed or acquired over time with little consideration of an overall plan or architecture, and without considering the need for integration. As a result, both efficiency and...
Mike Sowers, Software Quality Engineering
Contextually-Driven System Architecture Reviews
Slideshow

When the World Trade Center collapsed, the telephone switching systems in the basement correctly diagnosed which lines were still working and continued to connect calls for several days using backup power. One factor contributing to this remarkable product reliability was the AT&T/Bell...
Michael Dedolph, Levi Deal Consulting
Right-sized Architecture: Integrity for Emerging Designs
Slideshow

In agile projects, design ideally "emerges" over the course of development. However, if teams primarily focus on independent user stories, they risk losing sight of the product's vision and the integrity of well-thought-out architecture. Ken Kubo shares techniques he's used to improve the chances that a product's design will emerge into a cohesive and coherent architecture that serves its customers for many years. Join Ken to find out how you can incorporate contextual design principles and simple, visual techniques as part of his "A-Little-Before-Its-Time Design" framework. You can add these practices into your agile workflow to maintain a shared team understanding of your product's vision and the system's emerging design. Ken believes that you can only realize all the promises of agile development with a clearly and constantly communicated product vision and a set of architecture goals.
Ken Kubo, Northrop Grumman Corporation
The Why and How of Usability and User Experience (UX) Testing
Slideshow

Although usability and user experience may seem synonymous, they are separate and much different concepts. While usability is well defined in standards, UX has no agreed upon definition because it relates to a more nebulous attribute-user satisfaction. Both are, however, key ingredients for successful system deployment. Because they don’t know how to measure and evaluate UX, many teams ignore this important attribute until the end of development. Philip Lew discusses how to model both usability and UX by breaking each attribute down into measurable characteristics-learnability, user effectiveness, user efficiency, content quality, user errors, and more. Phil shows you how to derive measurements and metrics that your development and team can employ to benchmark, analyze, and improve both usability and UX.
Philip Lew, XBOSoft
Massive Continuous Integration and Light-speed Iterations
Slideshow

Continuous integration (CI) has become a buzzword, with most engineering organizations claiming they've adopted the practice. However, the sad truth is that unreliable tests, long feedback loops, and poor configuration management block their efforts and minimize CI's potential benefits. Jesse Dowdle shares how AtTask radically redesigned its engineering pipeline and, through massive CI scaling, drove three days of testing to just minutes. Learn the pros and cons of different CI systems and how to integrate them with the cloud. Watch a live demo of AtTask's internal test and CI systems, which they’ve designed to make "Every commit a potential release candidate"-meaning that every commit is an iteration. Arm yourself with the talking points to sell massive CI to executives.
Jesse Dowdle, AtTask, Inc.
Back to the Basics: Principles for Constructing Quality Software
Slideshow

Using an analogy to the building codes followed by architects and contractors in the construction of buildings, Rick Spiewak explores the fundamental principles for developing and delivering high quality, mission-critical systems. Just as buildings are constructed using different materials and techniques, we use a variety of languages, methodologies, and tools to develop software. Although there is no formal "building code" for software, software projects should consider-and judiciously apply-the recognized "best" practices of static analysis, automated unit testing, code re-use, and peer reviews. Rick takes you on a deep dive into each of these techniques where you'll learn about their advantages, disadvantages, costs, challenges, and more.
Rick Spiewak, The MITRE Corporation
It's a Phone First! How to Test Your Five-star Mobile Apps
Slideshow

Mobile application development shares many similarities-and some stark differences-with traditional web-based development. To build, test, and deploy five-star mobile applications, your organization needs-from inception-a focused test strategy to drive quality. Employing the wrong approaches and tools can leave your business sponsors and clients wondering what went wrong. Will Hurley outlines the current mobile landscape and explains what can and cannot be controlled in the mobile lifecycle. He explores the current landscape and limitations on tools for testing mobile apps, and offers guidance on what-and what not to-automate. With Will's guidance, you’ll learn how to establish a mobile lifecycle test strategy that is both leading edge and practical.
Will Hurley, Will Hurley - Quality and Security Services
Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2012: Patterns of "Big" Scrum

Software development organizations adopting Scrum have struggled to apply it to big projects with multiple teams. Dan Rawsthorne is frequently asked, “What does ‘big’ Scrum look like?” Because no two organizations are alike, this simple question does not have a simple answer. However, Dan has discovered patterns that are common in organizations that successfully implement “big” scrum. The first pattern he explores-Product Owner Team-allows the organization to handle agility up and down the hierarchy. Dan also discusses the Cross-cutting Teams pattern that handles issues-architecture, usability, integration, performance, and evaluation-that the formal hierarchy can’t resolve. Finally, Dan discusses the BuddyUp pattern to describe the best way to work with subject matter experts from dispersed parts of the organization.
Dan Rawsthorne, Consultant
Agile Architecture Practices for Large Scale Agile Development

Although “agile architecture” may sound like an oxymoron to you, the reality is that a simple, elegant architecture is a key enabler of any successful system, particularly large scale ones. Scott Ambler describes agile architecture practices-at both the project and enterprise level-that form a middle ground between the extremes of big architecture up-front and outright hacking. Scott discusses agile modeling practices-initial architecture envisioning, proving an architecture with working code, and just-in-time model storming-that enable agile teams to benefit from architectural modeling without suffering the drawbacks of detailed design documentation. Beyond architecture, Scott introduces agile design techniques-continuous integration (CI), test-driven development (TDD), and refactoring-that build on and provide feedback to an emergent architecture.
Theresa Quatrani, IBM Rational

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