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Automating Builds: Bringing Quality and Testing Forward Many software teams do not have continuous visibility into the ongoing quality of their software releases. Although agile practices emphasize the value of bringing testing forward in the development process, many teams lack the infrastructure required to make this a reality. Testers often depend on development or operations to produce, install, or deploy builds. Zach Nies discusses how build automation provides an effective platform to bring quality and testing earlier into the development process. Zach shows how automated deployments give testers many more opportunities to do meaningful testing during each release iteration. At the same time, testers will greatly enhance the quality feedback loop for the entire organization. During this class, participants will work through an exercise to provide insights into ways to improve their development process and infrastructure.
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Zach Nies, Rally Software Development
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Artful Making for Agile Teams The phrase "working together" is based on a team collaboration metaphor. However, Stacia Broderick and Lee Devin have found that most teams don't actually collaborate-rather, they consist of modular parts that are steeped in competition and oriented to reward the "stars." Stacia and Lee use a metaphor drawn from theatre art, a form of group work that requires collaboration, encourages interdependency, eschews competition, and emphasizes the project rather than any particular member of the group. Going from simply "working together" to "innovating collaboratively" requires a quantum shift in our thinking about teamwork. This is not a "techniques" workshop--in the kind of work they advocate, there are no quick fixes. However, Stacia and Lee introduce a frame of mind that's necessary if a person or group wants to break out of the box of conventional teamwork.
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Stacia Broderick, Agile Evolution, Inc
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Do The Right Thing: Adapting Requirements Practices to Agile Projects Break out of the cookie-cutter mentality that some agile teams take toward requirements. Join Ellen Gottesdiener to explore what requirements models you should use to supplement (or replace) user stories for large projects. Ellen looks at the factors to consider when deciding on a requirements approach, including your project’s size and technology characteristics and your team’s domain expertise. Find out when to engage the product owner in requirements work and discover ways to leverage the role of business analyst in agile projects. Explore new ways to adapt your existing documentation for product and project needs while enhancing requirements to drive development on large agile projects. Gain an appreciation and understanding of ways to adapt requirements practices to fit various agile project situations so you can do the right things for your project.
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Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting, Inc.
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Decision Making in Agile Teams: The Key to High Performance Agile teams are encouraged to act collaboratively and make decisions as a team. And yet, some decisions must occur outside of the full team's consensus. For example, business or product owners ultimately must set their value and priority decisions even though they need to negotiate with the delivery team. Jean Tabaka explores the variety of decision modes and roles that are required for agile teams while they still maintain a high degree of trust and safety. Learn why agile teams rely so heavily on good decision-making. Discover consensus-driven decision making--what it is and when it can be applied. Find out about other decision modes available to effective agile teams and the roles involved in making great decisions. Jean shares some practical tips on how agile teams can keep their meetings decisions- and results-focused.
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Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
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Customer Advocacy: The Key to Testing Success Testing professionals are often viewed as the pessimists of the software world. Some people think testers will do anything to prevent an application’s release into production. In reality, testers should be pro-active protectors of the organization and a strong voice for its customers-lines of business, end-users of the applications, system designers, developers, and the operations group responsible for application support. Theresa Lanowitz believes that testers should be customer advocates, representing all constituents in each and every stage of the application development lifecycle. As such, testers help ensure delivery of quality products that meet the needs of all. To be a successful customer advocate, you must understand and balance the complex web of requirements, constraints, roles, skills, and abilities of all stakeholders.
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Theresa Lanowitz, voke, Inc.
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Taking Personal Ownership for Software Development Success The responsibility for building effective software teams is more than just a management task. Indeed, in some situations, management could easily rationalize that there is limited business value in improving team effectiveness. Our current reliance on processes, methodologies, and tools is misguided in that it largely looks outward rather than inward for solutions. There is a better way! Jim Brosseau examines the challenges and barriers we face with typical approaches when attempting to build effective teams. He explains how each of us can take responsibility for personal and team success and describes a meaningful progression of steps to achieve this goal. In doing so, Jim helps you look beyond the traditional team building approaches to explore personal motives, attitudes, skills, and interpersonal relationships-all fair game as potential opportunities for improvement.
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Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc.
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Are They All Neurotic? The Psychology of the Software Engineer In recent years, psychologists have come to a nearly unanimous consensus on the number and nature of human personality dimensions. A recent large scale study involving several hundred software engineers and "regular" people (non-engineers) revealed that the personalities of developers, testers, and managers tend to be different from each other and from the general population as a whole. So, how can you use this information in your job? Rather than administering a personality assessment as part of the hiring process, it is much more effective to use it to understand your existing team members and to help then maximize their productivity and value to the business. James McCaffrey demonstrates how to quickly and easily create, administer, and interpret personality profiles of your team members.
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James McCaffrey, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.
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The Principles and Practices of Scrum Scrum is best defined as an agile, lightweight process used to manage software and product development using iterative, incremental practices. Rob Myers gives a brief explanation of the philosophy behind Scrum, the Scrum method, and the roles and responsibilities of the players in a Scrum project. Scrum can be wrapped around different software engineering methodologies, including Extreme Programming (XP), Rational Unified Process (RUP), spiral development, and others. Scrum practices enhance the benefits of agile development with a simple project management process. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces development time while facilitating adaptive systems development based on empirical data. Join Rob to learn how Scrum works, why it works, and why Scrum is becoming such a popular project management method.
- Why Scrum works better than more traditional project management methods
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Rob Myers, Net Objectives
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Developing a Software Product Line Today's tools and techniques for software development tend to focus on individual products. However, customer demands require most companies to offer a software product line portfolio-a collection of related products with variations in features and functions-rather than just a single product. This situation has led to the emergence of development methods, tools, and techniques focused specifically on the challenges of software product line development. Charles Krueger explores this latest generation of software development methods that are yielding an order-of-magnitude improvement in time-to-market, engineering cost, product quality, and portfolio scalability. Charles shares the best methods from recent industry case studies, including model-driven, aspect-oriented, minimally-invasive, and agile strategies. Learn innovative, proven software product line development methods, as well as practical approaches for getting started.
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Charles Krueger, BigLever Software
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Better Software Conference 2007: Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment or attendant nerves. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to quickly present your single, biggest, bang-for-the-buck idea. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Use this as your opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time.
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Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
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