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Streamline Test Planning with Business Process Models Test-QA professionals and business-systems analysts have always lived in two separate worlds, with test planning and design segregated from the task of creating business process models. However, a business process modeling (BPM) diagram–which visually shows the break down of activities into individual tasks–for the test project can help Test-QA managers see how to organize multiple tasks and create an end-to-end test project flow. Because the BPM effort eliminates many unnecessary steps and inefficiencies, test planning is streamlined and the entire test project is more efficient. Filip Szymanski examines how Test-QA teams can use BPMs as a guide to identify discrete testing components, gain access to already optimized data, ensure there is enough detail in the business process diagrams, and optimize a business process scenario.
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Filip Szymanski, Hewlett Packard
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Agile Development Practices East 2010: Resistance as a Resource As a developer or tester, you are a creative, intelligent, and insightful member of your team. Whether you know it or not, you also are a change agent. When you have an apparently good idea about how to improve, you may sometimes hear "We tried that before, and it didn't work" or "We've never done it that way here" or "No real user would ever do something like that!" What you're meeting is resistance. So, what do you do? Dale Emery explores an approach to resolve resistance and help you and your organization move to a higher plane as a learning organization. Whatever else it may be, resistance is information-about others' values and beliefs, about the organization, about the change you are proposing, and about you as a change agent. Find out how to turn resistance from a frustration into a resource that translates into actions to improve yourself, your organization, and its products.
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Dale Emery, DHE
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Critical Success Factors for Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) A good analyst or tester knows what questions to ask to quickly bring clarity to a murky subject. When they first hear about Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD), a core practice on agile projects, their initial questions often are "Can examples really capture functional requirements?", "Where do user stories come from?", and "Will the analyst and tester roles become extinct?" When Jennitta Andrea worked on her first agile project in 2000, she asked all of these questions and more. As a hands-on practitioner and keen observer of teams and processes on more than a dozen agile projects since then, Jennitta has discovered that success comes from knowing how ATDD fits within an ecosystem of roles, practices, and tools. Learn what Acceptance Test-Driven Development is, the critical success factors for ATDD, and the details of several key success factors.
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Jennitta Andrea, The Andrea Group, Inc.
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The Twain Shall Meet: Incorporating User Experience Design in Agile Development Traditional user experience (UX) design methodologies are often seen as too slow and not flexible enough for use in agile software development. Scott Plewes explodes this myth by showing how to avoid dogmatic practices that undermine the value of UX design. Learn how to involve users, experience designers, and other UX design assets directly into your agile development process-without giving up the value of sprints, Scrums, minimalist documentation, or anything else that makes a well-oiled agile process work. Scott describes how and when to incorporate user feedback into the agile development process. Learn to determine which user requirements can potentially shift and which are likely to be more stable. Discover what type of user interface documentation is appropriate for your product and process as you explore how to get timely UX design information to developers and other team members.
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Scott Plewes, Macadamian Technologies
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The Value of Value Story Cards Many agile team members never reach their potential because they have no way to link their company's values with their day-to-day development work. The use of value story cards (VSCs), which provide executive management a tool to set high-level direction and tie it to the team's activities, is one step toward solving that problem. Jared Richardson describes VSCs, how to use them within your team, and how they can become a transformational tool. By defining three to five VSCs-such as "Move into this market space" or "Lower customer-reported bugs"-executives set the company direction.
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Jared Richardson, Logos Technologies
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Agile Program Management: Architecture, Risks, and Constraints Once you move to large agile development programs with multiple projects and sub-projects, how do you make progress and keep an architecturally coherent product? How do you create a product backlog and then manage working off the backlog among several or many project teams? How do you address the risks of having multiple project teams? How do you create an architecture that works for the product without retreating to a waterfall approach? In this class, Johanna Rothman describes a framework for analyzing your program's context so you can select from among several approaches for managing the architecture, handling backlogs, working across project teams, and more. She describes the roles of Chief Product Owner and the Program Manager and then discusses how they participate with the teams to ensure they know what they need to deliver and how to see overall program progress.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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Products and People over Process and Dogma If people in your organization are spending time "going agile," "being agile," or "doing agile" instead of simply using agile methods that work in your context, this session is for you. Ten years into the agile movement, the original ideals around lightweight process are putting on some pounds and calcifying in dangerous ways. David Hussman challenges you to stop focusing on improving your process and start focusing on improving your product-that thing your process produces-and your people-you know, the ones who do the work. Come ready to think, question, and rethink your use of agile practices and what may have become dogmatic processes. Explore the places where meaningful and lasting agility thrives, where agile practices are powerful tools, and where people don't talk about being agile.
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Pairing in Software Development Two people working at one computer collaborating on the same deliverable-sounds like double the work and double the costs doesn't it? Not so. Based on empirical studies, pair programming, properly implemented, has been shown to result in higher quality code, better program design, reduced risk, and improved knowledge management-all without a significant productivity hit. Laurie Williams describes the benefits and the resistance she's seen with teams that utilize pair programming and discusses "partner picking principles" in which the right engineers collaborate based on the task at hand. Beyond pair programming, your team can employ pairing throughout the software development lifecycle with similar value and results. Some highly productive software development teams pair all day, every day and on all development tasks.
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Laurie Williams, North Carolina State University
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Between BDUF and Anarchy: Finding Modeling's Sweet Spot "Big Design Up Front" isn't usually the best way to develop systems. Neither is anarchy, where developers code first and ask questions later. Somewhere between these two extremes lies the "sweet spot," a place where just enough up-front design is followed by incremental design to support individual iterations. Modeling, the representation of a business problem or its solution at different levels of abstraction, is a powerful tool in finding the sweet spot. Tom Nedwek discusses modeling approaches across the solution-delivery spectrum-describing a high-level business process, deciding what the system should accomplish, and designing how that solution will be implemented. Tom provides you with practical design and modeling guidance in each step of the lifecycle, sharing his experiences integrating modeling into multiple companies' development methodologies.
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Tom Nedwek, Avanade
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Serious Games: Product Planning and Prioritization Using Innovation Games Perhaps the most vital aspect of building great software is finding the 20 percent of features that represent the 80 percent of functionality your customers really need. The planning and prioritization of these features can truly set a team-and a company-apart from their competitors. Cory Foy presents approaches from Innovation Games® designed around feature discovery and product prioritization. Try your hand at prioritization using the Prune the Product Tree game. Have the opportunity to influence the future direction of a product by aligning existing and new features along branches (functional areas) and canopies (time). During the game, you'll gain insights into the prioritization process and uncover the vital role of the observer for capturing unspoken conversations. See how new market segments appear during the game and learn how to use additional games to filter the results during post-processing.
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Cory Foy, Cory Foy, LLC
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