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Moving to an Agile Testing Environment: What Went Right, What Went Wrong About a year ago, Ray Arell called his software staff together and declared, "Hey! We are going agile!" Ray read an agile project management book on a long flight to India, and, like all good reactionary development managers, he was sold! Now-two years later-their agile/Scrum process has taken shape; however, its adoption was not without strain on development, test, and other QA practices. Join Ray as he takes you on a retrospective of what went right and, more importantly, what went wrong as they evolved to a new development/test process. He introduces the software validation strategies developed and adapted for Scrum, explains what makes up a flexible validation plan, and discusses their iterative test method. Learn how they use customer personas to help test teams understand expectations for quality in each sprint and employ exploratory testing in the Scrum development flow.
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Ray Arell, Intel Corporation
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Agile, Lean, and the Project Management Office PMOs usually think they are out of business when agile rolls into town. But the reality is that the PMO can play a pivotal role in successful agile adoption in large organizations. Jean Tabaka shares her knowledge about how to engage your PMO for agile adoption by using three primary Lean Principles: "Eliminate Waste," "See the Whole," and "Amplify Learning." Jean gives examples of how PMO members can act as the "systems thinkers" for their organizations, pulling successes from the engineering group and instilling them into the entire enterprise. Learn the role of the PMO within agile-how the PMO pulls standards versus pushing them; how the PMO provides product backlog prioritization guidance regarding architecture and governance; how the PMO serves its agile community by facilitating release planning across teams; and how the PMO creates and maintains product councils.
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Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development
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Becoming a Lean-Agile Enterprise Many companies have adopted agile by using Scrum on one or more of their projects. Unfortunately, they may be missing the point that agility should be aimed at the enterprise, not merely at the team. Agile enterprises can respond quickly to changing market conditions, competitive pressures, and changing technical environments, thus bringing their innovations to market faster. However, creating an agile enterprise is much more than simply getting teams to adopt Scrum. Alan Shalloway discusses how to use lean thinking to determine where to start using agile methods as well as how to adopt agile throughout the entire enterprise.
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Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
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The Agile PMP: Teaching and Old Dog New Tricks Agile methods emphasize trust, empowerment, and collaboration-moving us away from command and control project management to harness the passion, creativity, and enthusiasm of the team. In established organizations, success with agile practices hinges on how well traditional project managers adopt new ways of thinking about project structure and control. Building on the principles of the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK®), Mike explores how PMPs with experience in traditional development can adapt their styles and practices to become effective agile project leaders. Mike tackles the hidden assumptions behind the PMBOK and explores agile approaches for managing time, cost, and scope. Taking an in-depth look at PMI Processes and Knowledge areas, he also explores ways to adapt them to agile projects.
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Michael Cottmeyer, VersionOne, Inc.
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Using Agile to Increase Value in Lean Times The proof is now in, and it shows that implementing agile is the best way to get critical, revenue-generating applications to market faster and at less cost. How much money and how many jobs could your organization save? Richard Leavitt and Michel Mah document the financial returns agile project teams are experiencing compared to their traditional counterparts and provide you with a business case toolkit for your senior executives considering agile practices. Rally Software Development commissioned research firm QSM Associates to benchmark twenty-nine agile development projects against their database of 7,500 software projects. The Agile Impact Report compares the performance of agile development projects against plan-driven and waterfall industry averages for time-to-market, productivity, and quality.
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Richard Leavitt, Rally Software Development
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Agile Adoption - Challenges and Strategies for New Teams In coaching diverse teams on their roads to agile adoption, Rachel Weston has had the opportunity to witness and assist with the different challenges and pitfalls they experience. While each team is unique, a constant and focused "inspect-and-adapt" process has allowed them to identify their current pain points and develop personalized plans for handling them. Rachel examines some of the most common challenges and pitfalls including useless and frustrating daily stand-ups, team over-commitment, backlogs not prepared for planning, difficulties in role transitions, and more.
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Rachel Weston, Rally Software Development
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Better Software Conference & EXPO 2009: When to Step Up, When to Step Back Leaders can stifle progress when they unnecessarily interfere with team processes. However, as a leader, you don't want your project to go over the cliff and fail miserably or deliver the wrong results either. There are times when leaders should stand back and let the team work things out for themselves-and other times when leaders should step up and really lead. How do you know which is which? Pollyanna Pixton focuses on collaboration as the key and teaches you how and when to step back and unleash the hidden talent in your organization and teams. Learn how to create an open environment that fosters innovation and creativity and how to let your team members take ownership and hold themselves accountable. Equally important, develop the techniques to step up and lead to keep the project on track without impeding the flow of ideas.
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Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova
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In Defense of Waterfall: Deconstructing the Agile Manifesto A long history of failed software projects using traditional waterfall methodologies was one inspiration for agile development methods. Regarded as novel and even radical a decade ago, agile methods are now widely adopted. Ken Katz's personal experiences do not lead him to support the proposition that waterfall is doomed to the discard pile of development methods. He has a solid track record of managing projects successfully with waterfall. Ken critically analyzes the Agile Manifesto and its principles, demonstrating that they are based on assumptions that, in certain circumstances, are just as invalid as the generally discredited assumptions underlying waterfall. He describes when waterfall methods are most appropriate and how to use some agile concepts to improve waterfall.
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Kenneth Katz, DST Output
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Table-Driven Requirements with the FIT Testing Tool Eliciting and articulating customer requirements-clearly and precisely-is difficult to say the least. Inaccuracies often creep in when translating requirements from business ideas into software models. Working with many clients, Alan Shalloway found that creating a large number of tables with examples-however time consuming the tables are to create-adds to the clarity and precision of requirements. He found, too, that if you can use the same example table as tests, then the time is well spent. Alan presents table-driven requirements as an approach to defining both functional and test specifications. Examine business rules, user interface flows, user-observable states, and other forms of useful tables. Learn how to employ the Framework for Integrated Testing (FIT) to turn table-driven requirements into table-driven tests.
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Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
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Transitioning Your Software Process to Agile Agile software development presents an appealing array of possibilities for building better software-customer focused development, high team communication, frequent releases of production-ready software, and early lifecycle testing. Unfortunately, many organizations who have attempted to develop software using agile methods have not been very successful at transitioning to an agile process. Often, the organization attempts to change too much of its software process too quickly. Jeffery Payne describes an approach to incrementally improve the agility of your organization's software process while continuing to achieve your software delivery goals. Jeffery describes high value agile management and agile development methods-including daily stand-ups, continuous integration, pair programming, and test-driven development-and then prioritizes these approaches by their impact on the organization.
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Jeffery Payne, Coveros, Inc.
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