agile

Conference Presentations

Agile Measures that Matter: What Are You Really Learning?

“Speed” describes how fast an object is moving and let’s us compute the distance it has traveled. “Velocity” is different-it defines both speed and direction. So why do I meet so many teams who talk about their velocity but lack direction? Once you can track speed and distance, the real challenge becomes envisioning, validating, and measuring direction and purpose. David Hussman explores what teams typically measure and track in agile projects today, and compares these to what is most important to the business and to the project’s success. Come ready to question what you are measuring and how it is helping you improve. Join David to learn how to use data in more meaningful ways, discover new ways to measure velocity, and identify new tools to help ensure you are doing more of what is really needed. Come away with the answer to the key question: How do your teams know that they are building the right things for the business?

David Hussman, DevJam
Integrating Systems Thinking into Enterprise Agile

While Scrum and XP have become very popular in agile development shops, most companies adopting them run into problems beyond just a few teams. These challenges often fall into a common set of patterns, which points to a lack of systems thinking-the process of understanding how things influence one another within a larger whole. Alan Shalloway shares his ideas on how the agile community can move beyond its team-centric approach to adopt a more holistic, systems-based approach. Systems thinking creates new opportunities to create substantially larger development teams-Alan calls them “pan-teams.” These teams work interdependently with a common vision and context. Pan-teams enhance the motivations for the teams and individuals to collaborate as a normal part of their daily work thus reducing the amount of forced collaboration.

Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Application Lifecycle Management Imperatives

Ever growing software development needs and faster delivery cycles coupled with flat or shrinking IT budgets have brought many organizations to new agile and lean practices. Together, these disruptions are causing a sea of change in the application lifecycle management (ALM) landscape. Although management tools aren’t an explicit focus for most development teams, choosing the right tools for enterprise development is an important factor in keeping everyone productive. Monica Luke discusses the five key imperatives for ALM implementations: in-context collaboration, accelerating time to delivery with real-time planning, improving quality with lifecycle traceability, refining predictability with development intelligence, and reducing costs through continuous improvement. For each imperative, Monica offers concrete examples and lessons learned from real-world implementations. Don’t get lost in the weeds with an ALM tool.

Monica Luke, IBM Rational Software
Mobile Cloud Agile
Video

Trends vs. Testing. Mobile Testing. Cloud Testing. The New Testing: A Wider Resource Orchestration. 

Aspire Systems
Agile Testing: What Would Deming Do?

Through his quality practices, Edwards Deming transformed Japanese industry in the 1950s and later American industry, proving that building quality intrinsically into a product dramatically lowers costs. Although agile development brings the software industry into closer alignment with Deming, we often continue to rely on end-of-process inspection and rework to ensure quality. A fresh look at Deming’s principles will help testers make a powerful impact on the success of the software projects and the organization. Mark Strange reviews how agile testing differs from traditional software testing, explores what test teams should be measuring (more than defect counts), and shares statistical techniques to help identify problems and bottlenecks in your testing process.

Mark Strange, Wood Cliff Consulting
STAREAST 2012: Session-based Exploratory Testing on Agile Projects

One of the challenges associated with testing in agile projects is selecting test techniques that “fit” the dynamic nature of agile practices. How much functional and non-functional testing should you do? What is the appropriate mix of unit, integration, regression, and system testing? And how do you balance these decisions in an environment that fosters continuous change and shifting priorities? Bob Galen has discovered that session-based exploratory testing (SBET) thrives in agile projects and supports risk-based testing throughout the development project. SBET excels at handling dynamic change while also finding the more significant technical- and business value-impacting defects. Join in and learn how to leverage SBET for test design and as a general purpose agile testing technique.

Bob Galen, iContact Corp
STAREAST 2012: The Tester's Role in Agile Planning

If testers sit passively through agile planning, important testing activities will be missed or glossed over. Testing late in the sprint becomes a bottleneck, quickly diminishing the advantages of agile development. However, testers can actively advocate for customers’ concerns while helping the team implement robust solutions. Rob Sabourin shows how testers contribute to the estimation, task definition, clarification, and the scoping work required to implement user stories. Testers apply their elicitation skills to understand what users need, collecting great examples that explore typical, alternate, and error scenarios. Rob shares many examples of how agile stories can be broken into a variety of test-related tasks for implementing infrastructure, data, non-functional attributes, privacy, security, robustness, exploration, regression, and business rules.

Rob Sabourin, AmiBug.com
You Can't Spell Agile Testing without "ET"

Do you ever get that creeping feeling there is more to agile testing than automating it? Have you wondered how you should test quality considerations beyond the story cards? Have you tried to use exploratory testing to bridge this gap, yet struggled with how to do it systematically in an agile context? If so, then what you need is a refreshing aromatic blend of exploratory and agile approaches. Lanette Creamer and Matt Barcomb share their ideas, experiences, and approaches on how agile teams can visualize and achieve quality at and beyond the story level. Learn what exploratory charters are and how to turn them into adaptive test ideas. Discover how agile teams can integrate exploratory testing techniques in an iterative incremental way, dynamically syncing with changes in the product.

Lanette Creamer, Spark Quality, LLC
Agile Testing Practices

On agile teams, testing is an ongoing activity-not a phase or a role. Even today many agile development teams struggle with this concept. Janet Gregory explains how testing activities are included throughout the agile process and the highest value activities a tester can add to the team. Sharing her extensive work experience, Janet describes the importance of collaboration and simplicity in activities such as automation, acceptance test-driven development, and exploratory testing. Janet uses the agile testing quadrants model to provide a framework for identifying testing needs at all levels-user story, product feature, and project. As Janet presents this overview of agile testing practices, you’ll have an opportunity through discussions and exercises to understand how agile practices fit together.

Janet Gregory, DragonFire, Inc.
Using Agile Principles to Run Your Organization

As agile methods have become increasingly popular for managing projects and portfolios of projects, it's natural to wonder what other management challenges agile can tackle. Forward thinking organizations have begun applying agile principles to their business operations as a way of increasing agility, speed, and customer satisfaction. Jeff Payne describes those agile practices that have been successfully applied to business operations and the impact they’ve have on the bottom line. Learn how to apply aspects of SCRUM, Kanban, and even eXtreme Programming to your business operations. Examine a real world case study of a company built around agile methods. Take home tips and ideas on how to move your organization toward Agile.

Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.

Pages

CMCrossroads is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.