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Optimal Project Performance: Factors that Influence Project Duration Speedy delivery is almost always a primary project goal or a significant project constraint. To shorten project duration without sacrificing quality or budget, you need to know where to focus the team’s efforts. Mining the QSM database containing many quantitative metrics and numerous qualitative attributes, Paul Below shares the factors that have the greatest influence on project duration. While he’s at it, Paul debunks a couple of myths. For example, many managers consider team skill to be important in determining duration of software projects-not so. The most important factors are certain types of tooling, architecture, testing efficiency, and management/leadership skills, which Paul explores in depth. Learn a technique for normalizing your projects for size by computing the standardized residual of duration.
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Paul Below, QSM, Inc.
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Why Self-reflection Matters! All of us have experienced situations when we receive feedback. Some we readily accept; some we quickly reject. In a community that should be dedicated to constantly inspecting and adapting, why do we reject some feedback immediately? Tricia Broderick believes that self-reflection is the key to processing feedback in a positive light. In this interactive session, you’ll work with Tricia and other delegates to experience enriching discomfort, practice deep reflection, and ascertain why we can be so quick to dismiss feedback. Gain an understanding of how discomfort and self-reflection can be an IT professional's best friends. Leave with an expanded understanding of self-reflection that includes taking greater responsibility for personal development and tweaking your improvement-seeking process. If you are looking to get out of your comfort zone and grow as an individual and team member, this session is for you.
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Tricia Broderick, TechSmith Corporation
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Lean Product Management: When Phase/Gate Is the Wrong Choice More than 70 percent of new software products fail or perform below expectations. Achieving product-market fit is essential-and doing it quickly and within budget increases your chances of success. However, the methods you should use depend on the problems you are trying to solve. The predominant phase-gate model used today is not always the right choice or fastest path to market. As an alternative, lean product management approaches focus attention on applying the right process at the project level. Greg Cohen describes the four product-market fit challenge types, how to identify the challenge type your project faces, and how to adjust your process accordingly.
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Greg Cohen, 280 Group
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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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Leaping into the Cloud: Risks and Mitigation Strategies The cloud has rapidly gone from “that thing I should know something about” to the “centerpiece of our five-year corporate IT strategy.” However, cloud computing is still in its infancy. The marketing materials ignore or gloss over the many risks present today in the cloud-data loss, security leaks, gaps in availability, migration costs, and more. Ken Johnston and Seth Eliot share new research on the successful migrations of corporate IT and web-based companies to the cloud. They lay out the risks to consider and explore the rewards the cloud has to offer when companies employ sound architecture and design approaches. Discover the foibles of poor architecture and design and how to mitigate these challenges through a novel Test Oriented Architecture (TOA) framework.
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Ken Johnston, Microsoft Corporation
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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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