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Software Development Productivity: A New Way of Thinking Just as John Steinbeck was able to identify the complex system of tides, eddies, and other currents that bring nutrients to support life in the Pacific Ocean, you need to do the same for the complex human system that builds software products. Ray Arell argues that development productivity can increase only when you enable developers to grow and master the craftsmanship around their work. Describing a systems model of software productivity, Ray explores the elements necessary to “feed” the system and achieve the highest potential productivity. To help you diagnose systems issues, Ray demonstrates a visual tool-casual loop diagrams-that shows you how to identify and address the impediments that slow teams and degrade job satisfaction. He uses the same tool to show how agile and lean methods establish key reinforcing loops that improve productivity.
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Ray Arell, Intel Corporation
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Developer-driven Quality: Putting Developers in the Drivers' Seat Although many software development teams rely on their QA/Test departments to uncover critical product defects near the end of development, we all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. It’s better to find and fix defects earlier in the software development process to save time and money in the long run! Colby Litnak explores key concepts that encourage and empower developers to take primary responsibility for producing quality software. As with a souped-up race car, developers need specially designed tools and practices when they are at the wheel: fail-fast frameworks, one-click test execution, automated defect prevention principles, automatic notifications of untested code, hurtful test failures, and much more. Discover the principles developers must embrace to produce high quality code the first time-before it goes to QA/Test.
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Colby Litnak, MasterControl, Inc.
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ALM in the Cloud: Bringing Code to the Cloud and Back Again The deployment destination for today’s applications is going through its biggest transition since the rise of the application server. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and other cloud service offerings are putting pressure on every stakeholder in the application lifecycle, forcing us to modernize both our skill sets and tool stacks. Mik Kersten describes the key cloud technology trends and demonstrates how the coming wave of cloud-friendly application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and practices will become the defining factor for productivity and ultimate success. Discover the new challenges developers face when deploying and debugging multi-tenanted applications on hosted infrastructures. Learn how continuous integration loops require testers to learn new tools that connect them directly to running applications.
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Mik Kersten, Tasktop Technologies
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When the Pressure Is On: A Risk-based Approach to Project Management Teams everywhere have experienced tight deadlines for software development projects. In such time-constrained situations, how can you systematically determine where to focus the team’s efforts? How do you determine the right level of requirements documentation? How do you decide how much testing will be necessary so that you are not doing too little-or too much? Reán Young shows how a risk-based approach to these and many other issues helps you identify project strategy options and set priorities. Based on a combination of business and technical factors, you’ll learn to evaluate risks in each area of the application, and devise a plan to ensure that the most critical features will be developed, tested, and delivered before the deadline.
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Rean Young, Kroger Company
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Ten Tips to Get Requirements Right and Make Stakeholders Happy Have you ever delivered an application with functionality that was not what the stakeholders really wanted-or needed? Have you ever discovered that you were listening to the wrong people? Has your team ever developed a really beautiful application that no one uses? A truly successful project delivers what is most important to the business, the sponsor, and the key stakeholders. Carol Askew shares ten requirement-related tips she uses at her large healthcare organization. For example, to keep her projects on track, Carol developed specific requirements checkpoints to review throughout the software development lifecycle. She describes what to look for in project initiation documents, requirements elicitation sessions, user stories, scope issues, and project schedules. Take back ideas that you can use right away to help achieve success in your own projects.
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Carol Askew, Intermountain Healthcare
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Seven Habits of Highly Successful Project Managers It is easy to find a million ways that software development and project managers can let down their teams and their projects. Ken Whitaker has identified seven pragmatic leadership tips and techniques you can use to build and sustain a great team that consistently delivers great software. Specifically, Ken discusses how to keep project management jargon and bureaucracy to a minimum, what your role as a project manager really is, how to take action to lead rather than just manage, how to mitigate losing your best performers to competitors, how to design in quality from project inception, how to realistically set schedule expectations, and some great ways for simplifying your communication to stakeholders. You'll find this presentation to be useful, exciting, and motivating. These habits are powerful-yet so simple you can put them into practice immediately.
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Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
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Context-driven Leadership: How to Ride a Bull through a China Shop Software development projects are just different. They’re often high-risk ventures with extremely complex interrelationships, filled with uncertainties, dependent on scarce knowledge workers, and much more. So, the leadership style and skills needed to be successful are quite different from those needed in simple, stable projects that run through organizations. Kent McDonald introduces his Context Leadership Model, an important managers’ tool that uses the project characteristics of uncertainty and complexity to provide guidance for project leadership and governance. Kent demonstrates how to assess the characteristics of a project, how to choose the project leadership approach based on those characteristics, and how to tailor it for unique situations.
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Kent McDonald, Knowledge Bridge Partners
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The Paths to Innovation There are many paths to innovation. At one extreme, many large companies create research labs, staff them with world-class Ph.D.s, and set them working for years to solve complex technical problems. At the other end is the proverbial "two entrepreneurs in the garage" working on a shoe-string budget. Between these extremes are all sorts of organizational structures, team sizes, budgets, and time horizons to encourage innovation. Patrick Copeland introduces basic models for innovation-top-down, democratic, and his personal favorite “eXtreme”-and describes how Google's core beliefs, culture, organization, and infrastructure have successfully encouraged and enabled democratic innovation throughout its growth. From the now famous “twenty-percent time” offer to engineers to its culture of trust, Google is famous for its innovation and out-of-box thinking and execution.
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Patrick Copeland, Google, Inc.
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Influence v. Authority: Using Your Personal Power to Get Things Done How often have you been in a situation where you could see the solution and yet did not have the authority to make a change? You tried persuasion; you tried selling your ideas; you might have even tried friendly manipulation to get your way. And nothing worked. Here’s a new plan. We can learn to develop and use personal power and influence to effect positive changes in our companies. Johanna Rothman describes how we can be specific about the result we want, look for what’s in it for everyone, and consider short- and long-term options to foster change while acting congruently and authentically. Although it’s not easy to do, with preparation and persistence you can transform yourself into a person with personal influence. When you’re influential, you build your power and, by extension, your informal authority in the organization.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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Kata: Discover the Art of Practice to Master New Practices Kata is a Japanese word describing detailed, choreographed patterns of movements one masters through practice. Unfortunately, in software development we use the term "practice" very loosely. Tom Perry shares the latest research into how performing deliberate practice-actually practicing a new skill to become proficient-works. As a representative example, Tom explores the techniques you can use to practice and hone your agile team leadership skills. Through individual exercises and collaborative games, learn how to refine and improve your leadership skills. Take back an understanding of what the impact of practicing new skills has on the performance of individuals and teams while you gain hands-on experience with different models of practice. As a bonus, you'll have a set of exercises to form your own deliberate practice for improving your leadership ability.
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Tom Perry, Visa Inc.
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