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Agile Offshore Development: An Oxymoron? Companies that master Agile development in a multi-shore environment can benefit from reduced calendar time to implement new features, early development feedback to make course corrections, and increased development team responsiveness to changing market requirements. Multi-shore Agile development teams face unique challenges compared with co-located teams-large time zone differences, lack of proximity, cultural differences, and more. With experience driving multi-shore Agile development with several enterprise software companies, Roger Nessier describes ways that he has addressed these challenges. He discusses sprint planning with distributed teams, how to structure and assign work, and tools for communicating in real-time to create an Agile global development environment. Learn about the benefits and limitations of using Scrum management practices for offshore development and what it takes to be successful.
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Roger Nessier, Symphony Services
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Successful Software Managment: Fifteen Lessons Learned We normally think about process improvement as something applied to projects. But process improvement is also for people-and even for managers. Join Johanna Rothman as she shares lessons she's learned and management improvements she's made during her years in management. Like many other technical managers, Johanna became a manager by rising through the technical ranks. And, like many other managers, she had plenty of technical training and mentoring but had to learn management skills the hard way-through trial and error. Johanna describes fifteen lessons she has learned as a manager and offers tips and techniques to help you avoid difficult situations. Learn how to motivate your team and raise their level of work-and how to manage yourself.
- What is the software manager's real job
- How to create an effective work environment
- How to help people do their best work
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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Managing Upward: Getting Approvals for the Tools You Need Executive management does not like to spend money (on others); however, to build better software you may need to purchase better tools. Although skilled in producing code and running software tests, many development and QA managers do not have much experience preparing proposals and driving requests for funding through the management approval process. To gain their enthusiastic approval, you need insight into the executive heart and mind to better frame your proposal. Learn the decision-making process of executive managers, the facts they need to make a decision, and why they are reluctant to spend money even if it is in the budget. Build the case for your proposal in terms that match the business objectives of the CEO, CTO, CFO, and others with decision-making authority. Take away a template for a proposal along with examples of successful proposals, including visuals, data, competitive analysis, and much more.
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Doug Smith, Aberro Software
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Validation: What It Means in an FDA Regulated Environment Even though formal validation may not be required in unregulated environments, many mission-critical applications could benefit from performing some of the same activities required for FDA regulated systems. Validation provides documented evidence showing, with a high degree of assurance, that a system will consistently meet its predetermined requirements. FDA validation is required if the use of the computer system could potentially impact product quality, safety, or efficacy, or if the system is used to support a regulatory submission function. Learn how validation is accomplished by looking at a series of qualification exercises typically prescribed in a Validation Protocol. Take back with you templates for a typical Validation Protocol, including the System Development Review, Installation Qualification, Operational Qualification, Performance Qualification, and Revalidation.
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Chrys Kyee, Genentech Inc
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Testing SOA Middleware: Automating What You Can't See SOA projects employing Web services have multiple back-end integration points, volatile data, and no direct, visible user interface. Together, these factors make SOA applications complicated to test. Most companies opt for indirect manual testing because they see no other option. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Using real-world case studies as examples, Jon Howarth reveals step-by-step the data driven model Wells Fargo employs to automate its SOA regression testing. Learn about the problems their QA groups encountered and the solution that drove down costs and cycle times while increasing quality. Find out how to staff and train your team to support the solution and see example metrics to measure its effectiveness. Learn how to combine vendor tools to optimize your SOA automated testing into an integrated test framework.
- An automated testing strategy for SOA applications
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Jon Howarth, Wells Fargo
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Industry Benchmarks: Insights and Pitfalls Software and technology managers often quote industry benchmarks such as The Standish Group's CHAOS report on software project failures; other organizations use this data to judge their internal operations. Although these external benchmarks can provide insights into your company's software development performance, you need to balance the picture with internal information to make an objective evaluation. Jim Brosseau takes a deeper look at common benchmarks, including the CHAOS report, published SEI benchmark data, and more. He describes the pros and cons of these commonly used industry benchmarks with key insights into often-quoted statistics. Take away an approach that Jim has used successfully with companies to help them gain an understanding of the relationship between the demographics, practices, and performance in their groups and how these relate to external benchmarks.
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Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc.
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Successful Outsourcing with the Crawl-Walk-Run Strategy Large organizations may have the resources for expensive, big-bang offshore outsourcing projects. But what should small- and medium-sized organizations do when tasked with outsourcing? Based on his experiences, Uttiya Dasgupta describes a usable and inexpensive process for planning an offshore outsourcing strategy for small- to medium-sized development organizations. This crawl-walk-run strategy starts with very small projects and moves to increasingly more complex ones, supported by adequate preparation for each stage. Beginning with a vision of the "run" stage, teams plan the first stages to test out processes and ensure the cultural and technology fit between the internal and outsourced organizations. Uttiya shares his insights for successful offshore outsourcing projects and, especially, the signs and metrics that tell you when you are ready to move from crawling to walking-to running.
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Uttiya Dasgupta, Omnispan LLC
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Process Improvement - Can I Make a Difference? Although some organizations already have formal processes in place, many do not. Most process improvement begins with one person or one department deciding to do something rather than accepting the status quo. With the right attitude, some simple tools, and a proven method for improvement, you can make a difference for yourself, your department, and ultimately, your organization. Stephanie Penland has helped numerous small and large organizations with process improvement. Sharing her experiences-both successes and failures-Stephanie describes her real-world approach for process improvement. Find new ways to overcome obstacles and obtain buy-in from the top down. Learn what it takes to get a process improvement program off the ground. Take back with you a sample of a successful process improvement plan.
- The benefits of process improvement and ways to measure success
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Stephanie Penland, SAS Institute Inc
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Managing Distributed Teams Globalization, open source software, and cheap communications have forever changed the structure of software development project teams. Project managers face a new set of challenges with geographically distributed work teams. Unclear expectations, language and idiom differences, lack of direct supervision, and a lack of accountability are just a few of the issues that project managers must overcome. As the leader of a development team with members and customers all over the world, Keith Casey is intimately familiar with the character of distributed teams. He explains why you need a coherent strategy-and that means more than email, instant messaging, conference calls, and software tools-for effectively executing a distributed development project. Join Keith for a discussion of the strategies you can use to avoid the disasters awaiting those who ignore the needs of a distributed team.
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Keith Casey, CaseySoftware, LLC
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Beat the Odds in Vega$: Measurement Theory Applied to Development and Testing James McCaffrey describes in detail how to use measurement theory to create a simple software system that predicts with 87 percent accuracy the results of NFL professional football game scores. So, what does this have to do with a conference about developing better software? You can apply the same measurement theory principles embedded in this program to more accurately predict or compare results of software development, testing, and management. Using the information James presents, you can extend the system to predict the scores in other sports and apply the principles to a wide range of software engineering problems such as predicting the Web site usage in a new system, evaluating the overall quality of similar systems, and much more.
- Why the statistical approach does not work for making some accurate predictions
- Measurement theory to predict and compare
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James McCaffrey, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.
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