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Five Core Metrics to Guide the Testing Endgame By its very nature, the endgame of software projects is a hostile environment. Typical dynamics include release pressure, continuous bug discovery, additional requirements, exhausted development teams, frenzied project managers, and "crunch mode"-a politically correct term for unpaid overtime. Although testing teams are usually in the thick of this battle, they usually do not do enough to help guide the project in this critical stage. To improve the overall endgame experience, testers can help entire team’s focus with a few key defects metrics. Robert Galen discusses ways to track these five key defect metrics: found vs. fixed; high priority defects found; project keywords; defect transition progress; and functional distribution of errors. Join Robert to increase the likelihood of delivering your projects on time-and surviving yet another endgame.
- Help traffic the action for the incoming defect stream during the endgame
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Robert Galen, RGCG, LLC
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Deploy a Peerless Peer Review Process Peer review programs are like parachutes-proper deployment is essential; otherwise, they inevitably will crash. When effectively implemented, peer reviews have a significant return on investment and result in greater product reliability. Lee Sheiner shares the key features for making peer reviews a value-added practice at Georgia Tech Research Institute, including: selecting the proper type of review for each work product, identifying the right reviewers, focusing on early defect detection, using supporting tools, fostering an environment conducive to reviews, managing the review materials, and much more. Learn from Lee the ways they have crosspollinated peer review methods across the organization and how successful peer reviews encourage project groups to "gel" and become highly productive teams.
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Lee Sheiner, Georgia Tech Research Institute
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The Value-added Manager: Five Pragmatic Practices What do great managers do that others don't? Great managers focus their efforts, increase their productivity, and develop their people. In this session, Esther Derby describes five pragmatic practices that managers can apply to improve both work results and worker satisfaction-give both positive and corrective feedback weekly, consciously decide what not to do, limit multitasking, develop people, and meet with staff individually and as a group every week. Esther says these ideas are not rocket science. If you apply these five practices consistently you will improve the value of your team to the organization-and keep your sanity, too.
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Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates Inc
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Don't Wait, Innovate! Our test teams often struggle for so long ... to do so much ... with so little, and they usually manage to just squeak by. In the next cycle when asked to do even more with even less, they are likely to fail. Working harder and smarter isn't enough-the rules of the game must change. Innovation is the currency of success. Using his experiences from several years of success (and a few months of failure) in driving innovation, Heath Newburn will show you how-through innovation-you can drastically increase your team's value and your contributions to your organization. Uncover the secrets to managing change and learn: how to systematically create innovation and foster creativity, how to generate ideas and use your whole team to identify and build on the best of those ideas, how to implement a plan for success, and how to overcome the inevitable obstacles with the six secrets "they" don't want you to know.
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Heath Newburn, IBM Global Services
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STARWEST 2005: Interpersonal Skills for Working with Business Stakeholders As a professional test manager or test engineer, you must keep up with the latest test techniques, management practices, and systems technologies. But that is not enough. You also must interact with-and more importantly learn to influence-executive managers and other non-technical project stakeholders. Even today in many companies, testing and test management are not well understood and are under-appreciated by non-technical people. Now is the time for you to take action and do more than simply "get along" in your organization. Join Robert Sabourin for a lively session on developing your interpersonal skills, including the skills of communication, persuasion, problem solving, and teamwork. Discover new ways to work harmoniously with non-technical people while efficiently and effectively getting your important testing job done.
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com Inc
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Project Driven vs. People Driven Technical Management Technical managers often find that their time is taken up by tasks that have the greatest urgency and those that seem to offer the most benefit. All too often our time is focused on project details to the detriment of building and retaining an excellent development team. Martin King's presentation illustrates people- and project-centered styles of management and the consequences of each. Learn the benefits of people-centered leadership and how to shift your style in this direction. Martin explores the issues of honest feedback, conflict resolution, recognition, rewards, performance appraisals, and life balance. By meeting the needs of the people on your team, you will likely be rewarded with hard working, loyal, and productive employees who want to achieve the goals of your current project-and who will be around for the next one.
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Marty King, Hospira, Inc.
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Life Rafts for a Drowning Project When time is of the essence and stress is high, it's easy to find your team drowning under the weight of impossible deadlines and spiraling requirements. Unfortunately, more projects go under due to poor management than for any other reason-and common responses to problems often make the situation worse, rather than better. The original sin of the software industry is the “tight, but doable” project schedule, caused by everything from market pressures to management perversity. Peter Clark shares the practical strategies he has used to return sanity to projects that seem hopelessly behind schedule and out of control. Learn to deal with and avoid mandatory overtime, task thrashing, distractions, scope creep, and more. By focusing on what is possible, you can re-energize the team and do the best job you can with the resources you have.
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Peter Clark, Jervis B. Webb Co
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Cut the Cards When You Play for Money: Overcoming Resistance to Risk Management In most organizations, the project game is not going particularly well-we continue high stakes wagers on business projects, but lose more often than we win. Sometimes the losses are staggering. Risk management practices have received increasing attention recently as a way to improve the odds, but there are limits to what risk management can do for an organization in the absence of committed executive sponsors. This session explores strategies for overcoming resistance to risk management and encourages thoughtful engagement between project managers and sponsoring executives as they consider hedging their bets with more effective approaches to risk.
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Payson Hall, Catalysis Group Inc
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Cultivating High-Performing Teams A high performance, self-governing team is a prerequisite for delivering better software products more quickly. Unfortunately, developing such a team is neither simple nor linear. It requires exceptional leadership to build and maintain a team on which everyone is focused on accomplishing a common goal. While high-performing teams may appear "headless," managing a collected group of experts requires a role typically more associated with a relationship manager than a project manager. Based on her consulting experiences and on Dr. David Kolb's five-phase leadership model, Bobbi Underbakke discusses the skills and techniques software managers and project leaders must have to maximize their team's capabilities and speed. Learn innovative ways to guide, motivate, and inspire your team rather than trying to monitor and control them.
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Bobbi Underbakke, Adaptive Team Collaboration, Inc.
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Lipstick on a Pig - How Illusion Leads to Crisis in Real World Projects Change, ambiguity, and risk are key issues whether you are running a software project, managing a development team, or leading an entire organization. We learn it over and over again. It's not a matter of "if" change will happen-it's a matter of "when." When a crisis inevitably arrives, how do you respond? As Jerry Weinberg observed in The Secrets of Consulting, "It may look like a crisis, but it's only the end of an illusion." Andy Kaufman looks at key project illusions that threaten success as we lead projects and people in the realm of software development. Whether you're a project team member or a senior executive, Andy provides practical tips you can immediately apply in your organization.
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Andy Kaufman, Institute for Leadership Excellence and Development
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