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Agile Development & Better Software West 2011: Agile Testing: Challenges Beyond the Easy Contexts Don't let anyone tell you differently: Agile testing is hard! First, we have to get over the misconception that you don't need testers within agile teams. Then, we have to integrate testers with the developers and engender a holistic quality approach. And those are only the challenges when the going is easy! In more difficult contexts, testing in agile environments is-well, even more difficult. Bob Galen explores how to handle testing in difficult contexts-lack of test automation capabilities, agile in highly regulated environments, testing when your team is spread globally and real-time interactions are nearly impossible, and more. He describes contexts and approaches for blending existing, traditional testing techniques with their agile counterparts. With real-world examples, Bob describes how teams have achieved a good working balance between the two-for example, in test planning and quality metrics reporting.
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Bob Galen, iContact
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Cautionary Tales from Failed Scrum Adoptions Although Scrum has become an integral software project management tool in many organizations, not all adoptions have gone well-or as well as they could have. By examining the business, technology, and cultural issues that block successful Scrum adoption, Rob Sabourin offers you the knowledge and tools you need to get the most out of your Scrum practices. Explore with Rob the organizational issues that he's encountered-inability to overcome corporate inertia and internal resistance to change-and bring your own experiences to share. In addition to organization issues, some teams fail due to internal issues-the absentee product owner that allows teams to run amok, lack of tester involvement in sprint planning, failing to understand product priorities, and more. Learn how wedging old metrics programs into new Scrum frameworks distorts management's perception of progress and productivity.
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com
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Virtual Tour of an Embedded Agile Team Embedded systems development often includes special challenges: software tightly coupled to rapidly evolving hardware, an end customer with whom you cannot interact, a long period of infrastructure building before any business-value features are delivered, expectations of ultra-high reliability, and more. These challenges have convinced many embedded developers that agile is not for them. Nancy Van Schooenderwoert takes you on a virtual tour of an actual agile team developing software and firmware for a safety-critical embedded system. Follow their first iteration and examine what worked and what didn't. Through this virtual visit, Nancy explains how "plain vanilla" agile practices leave a gap, and she shares her teams' solution to the problem-agile practices tuned to the embedded world. Agile principles need not be watered down or compromised when you are faced with the challenges of embedded systems development.
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Nancy Van Schooenderwoert, Lean Agile Partners, Inc.
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Writing Excellent Executable Requirements Many teams build software that does not behave as their customers and users want-and expect. To build the right software the first time, teams need more than written user stories or even detailed specs. Adding "executable requirements" to your specifications toolbox is a way to ensure that the software does what users expect and need day-one. Until now, writing executable requirements mostly has been considered a dark art. Eric Landes shares methods of building executable requirements-automated acceptance tests-that deliver immediate value for your customers. Eric describes ways to create these “excellent” requirements even in difficult situations-collaborating over different time zones, refining vague needs, and product owners speaking with different voices.
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Eric Landes, Press Ganey
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Growing and Nurturing Coaching for Sustained Agility Where agile thrives, great coaching is present. Whether formal or informal, coaching is a key ingredient for successful and lasting agility. Unfortunately, many people call themselves coaches yet they fail to do any real, helpful coaching. David Hussman presents tactics for growing coaching in your organization. He begins by focusing on finding coaching candidates-what skills and attributes they need-and then engaging them to grow their coaching capabilities. From there, David walks through pragmatic coaching tools that foster appropriate ceremony and meaningful coaching opportunities. He teaches you how to develop a process that helps teams draw on their experience while overcoming their unique constraints. Leave with new ideas for helping with backlogs, working out estimation challenges, keeping stand up meetings lively, and getting developers to stop just talking about testing and really start doing it.
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David Hussman, DevJam
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Beyond a Scrum of Scrums: Scaling Up Agile with Kanban Backlogs, story point planning, sprints, and retrospectives-Scrum describes processes that work well at the team level. But more is needed to integrate multiple scrum teams that must work closely together. Although the traditional response is to hold daily Scrum of Scrum meetings, planning and executing multi-team, multi-sprint efforts require more coordination and defined practices than a Scrum of Scrums offers. Gil Irizarry describes how his organization combined the best of Scrum and Kanban to manage large development efforts. They evolved better estimation techniques for the bigger picture and learned why and how to establish different classes of service for projects. Discover where continuous integration and deployments fit into the picture and some of the missteps encountered before employing Scrum and Kanban together.
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Gil Irizarry, Constant Contact Software
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Continuous Integration: Do It Continuously No matter when it happens, integrating components is difficult. Tail-end integration, often called "big bang," is the hardest; it often leads "the hidden project"-you know, the one that occurs after everything is supposedly "done," when the team finally corrects all the integration defects. Steven “Doc” List describes how agile teams can use continuous integration to significantly reduce-if not eliminate-that hidden project. As Doc leads you through a fun and challenging simulation using LEGOs of all things, you'll experience the value of continuous integration up close and personal. After the exercise, Doc explores what you learned and how it applies to software in an agile development context. He compares and contrasts the traditional, big bang integration approach with the smoother, incremental, continuous integration process.
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Steven List, ThoughtWorks Inc
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The Art of User Storytelling Agilists employ user stories as a way to capture user requirements and drive the planning process for iterative and incremental delivery of software. Traditionalists with experience in "big requirements up front" often struggle with the brevity of user stories and how to best communicate requirements. Fadi Stephan compares and contrasts user stories, use cases, and traditional requirements development approaches and explains the benefits of user stories. After explaining the basic concepts, he quickly progresses to discuss attributes of a good user story along with different techniques for user role modeling. Fadi shows you how to manage risk and dependencies by properly sizing user stories. Learn what size is the right size and how to deal with constraints, assumptions, and non-functional requirements. Understand the different criteria used to decide when to split or merge stories.
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Fadi Stephan, Excella Consulting
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Getting Executive Management on the Agile Bus Much of the focus on agile transitions is on the team. However, the business side of an organization and the managers that lead it are not particularly interested in the mechanisms of agile teams and processes. They want faster time to market, schedule flexibility, predictability, visibility, better quality, and useful metrics. In other words, they want to know about things that help them get to success and that show when they've achieved it. Alan Shalloway describes agile development from an executive's point of view. Rather than focusing on the "how" of agile, he talks about the "why." Alan highlights ways for you to communicate to executive management how agile teams enable what they are trying to accomplish. Find out how improving time-to-delivery can drive higher quality into software development while driving waste out of the development organization.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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The Secrets of Scrum Success: What the Books Don't Tell You You've heard the hype about Scrum: 300% increases in productivity, huge reductions in defects, happy employees, and delighted customers. You wonder-is this really possible just by holding daily stand-up meetings and having something potentially shippable at the end of each sprint? Mitch Lacey shares the mostly untold secrets that make these kinds of results not only possible but likely. He explains critical Scrum practices-promiscuous pairing, refactoring, continuous integration, and more-and reveals why it's crucial to define what "done" really means for your team and stakeholders. Discover what the books don't tell you but you've begun to suspect: Just following the rules is not enough. If you are doing Scrum already and are struggling to move beyond your initial set of practices, or if you're making some progress and want to accelerate your results, make sure to attend this session.
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Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey and Associates, Inc.
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