agile

Conference Presentations

Better Software Conference West 2010: Making a Long Story Short: Splitting User Stories

When a single user story mixes both high- and low-value functionality or contains too many or unrelated customer needs, the flow of value slows. You must wait for the whole story to be finished before benefiting from its highest value parts. Even worse, it makes higher-value parts of the next story wait on lower-value parts of this one. Large stories can increase project risk because the core part of a story often contains proportionally more of its risk. While agile methods support incremental development, large stories can force a particular overall path even when the team would be better off taking advantage of earlier feedback and moving in a different direction. Join Bill Wake as he examines user story bundling and unbundling, splitting and merging. He shares concrete techniques for story splitting and explores high-level, user-experience, nonfunctional, and complex storylines.

Bill Wake, Industrial Logic, Inc.
Coaching Agility--Producing Value

If you are an agile coach and your team or organization is struggling to adopt agile methods or is backsliding, this class is for you. David Hussman shares coaching techniques you can use to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations and the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering, and product planning tools. He shares his coaching experiences that you can adapt to help your teams establish a strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching within your organization. You'll learn to step back from prescriptive practices and use the agile principles and values to amplify existing strengths and address challenges. Whether you are new to agile methods or a seasoned player, David helps you grow your coaching skills and your ability to discover and deliver sustainable, real value.

David Hussman, DevJam
Enterprise Agile Adoption: Barriers, Paths, and Cultures

While agile adoption continues to grow rapidly in the software product development world, it has not been as widely adopted within enterprise IT departments. Even within a single company, different software organizations can have widely varied views on adopting agile concepts. Some groups are fanatical about the “A-word”; others are skeptical and dismissive. Using Medtronic as a case study, Mike Stuedemann examines the barriers to agile adoption within large, multinational corporations. He shares his experiences at Medtronic to illustrate the varied adoption paths that teams can employ to realize the benefits of agile within the enterprise. Mike learned that many of the supposed barriers to enterprise agile adoption were myths; others were real and really difficult to overcome.

Mike Stuedemann, Medtronic
Performance and Security Testing in Agile Development

While most organizations are starting to come to terms with the process aspects of agile, they still face challenges when identifying how to modify their testing practices to be more flexible. This is particularly true for security and performance testing where many organizations hold on to a waterfall-style approach, leaving these critical aspects to the end of the release and often leaving the application open to vulnerabilities. Based on her many customer experiences, Tracy DeDore shares the practices she recommends for nonfunctional testing: writing testable user stories, planning for testing beginning at sprint 0, and introducing "hardening" sprints that help users and developers incorporate security and performance testing into agile processes.

Tracy DeDore, Hewlett-Packard
Cards, Conversation, Confirmation: Interviewing Skills for Agile Requirements

Valuable products start with understanding the needs of the customers-what they want and how they will use the product. Agile projects commonly capture customer needs as user stories-notes written on cards as a reminder to have an in-depth conversation when development begins. Most customers aren't born with the ability to communicate clearly and unambiguously-whether in stories or conversations-with fully formed requirements statements. Developers must learn to ask the right questions, draw out pertinent information, and understand the customer’s world. In this interactive session, Esther Derby presents four types of questions-context-free, open, closed, and multiple choice-and explores with participants when to use them, when not to use them, and ways to move forward when questions lead to a dead-end. Learn the signals that tell you when to probe for more information and recognize the deadliest sin of customer conversation.

Esther Derby, Esther Derby Associates, Inc.
Being There: War Stories from Collocated and Distributed Teams

Since the early days of agile, we've known that face-to-face communication is optimal. In fact, one of the twelve principles in the Agile Manifesto is, “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” So, what are the real differences between collocated and distributed teams with the advent of “closeness” technologies-Web-based meetings, shared project whiteboards, Skype, Wikis, video conferencing, and more? Through a series of stories about teams he’s worked closely with over the past few years, Michael Feathers explores the issues surrounding team collocation. Whether you are lucky enough to have your entire agile team together or are required to work apart most or all of the time, you'll discover new ways to encourage collaboration and build personal relationships. In the end, you'll arrive at your personal understanding of what "being there" means.

Michael Feathers, Object Mentor
Moving Agile Beyond Software

Agility is not a goal for its own sake. More than a great way to build software, agile principles are a way to build a great company that predictably delivers products through alignment and visibility across all parts of the business. What does an agile enterprise look like? How does it treat its employees? What are agile enterprises doing that other companies won't or can't do? Based on his experiences working with dozens of companies that are moving agile principles and practices beyond development, Ryan Martens answers these intriguing questions. Learn how agile businesses develop a relentless focus on value delivery and develop strong teams of problem solvers. These thriving businesses make most of their daily decisions correctly and never stop reaching higher.

Ryan Martens, Rally Software Development
You Can Always Get What You Want

Agile, waterfall, iterative, staged, gated, phased-none of it really matters if all you create are a few early "wins", mediocre solutions, and quick fixes. Many organizations twist the time pressure screws so tightly that creative thinking can only be done after work or surreptitiously during the five-minute coffee break or the fifteen-minute lunch at your desk. We often are told that “good enough” software is what the company needs. Although “good enough” is acceptable when the systems we create neither differentiate us from our competitors nor are critical to our mission, why do we waste precious resources creating those kinds of systems? Tim Lister knows that there is hope because many organizations do create superior systems-systems that set them above their competitors and wow their customers. What are these organizations doing to yield innovative, superior results from their software development?

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
You Can Always Get What You Want

Agile, waterfall, iterative, staged, gated, phased-none of it really matters if all you create are a few early "wins", mediocre solutions, and quick fixes. Many organizations twist the time pressure screws so tightly that creative thinking can only be done after work or surreptitiously during the five-minute coffee break or the fifteen-minute lunch at your desk. We often are told that "good enough" software is what the company needs. Although "good enough" is acceptable when the systems we create neither differentiate us from our competitors nor are critical to our mission, why do we waste precious resources creating those kinds of systems? Tim Lister knows that there is hope because many organizations do create superior systems-systems that set them above their competitors and wow their customers. What are these organizations doing to yield innovative, superior results from their software development?

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild
Taming Bug Reports and Defects: The Agile Way

Software defects bug everyone. If your organization is like most and you have a large queue of defects waiting to be fixed, this session is for you. It's probably not realistic to think we'll get around to fixing all of these bugs; so, we need to consider another approach. Lisa Crispin explains how agile teams address defects and how you can apply an agile approach to defects whether or not your development approach is "agile." Explore with Lisa ways to deal with a giant pile-or database-of old bug reports and which of the many, available defect tracking systems to consider-if you need one at all. See examples of alternatives to traditional bug reporting and how to shift your team's mindset toward preventing bugs in the first place. Get new ideas for taming your backlog of defects and discover ways your team can work together to minimize or eliminate bug reports all together.

Lisa Crispin, ePlan Services, Inc.

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