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Mistakes Agile Teams Make The road to hell is paved with good intentions-with a special section reserved for those who have tried to "go agile". Agile adoption can fail because a number of common, large-scale, organizational issues. A lack of executive-level support can squash promising improvements among the day-to-day producers. Sometimes the organization is in such disarray that delivering perfect features perfectly wouldn't keep customers satisfied. While these are real and important, J. B. Rainsberger suggests you'll find it more productive to focus on issues over which you have real influence. J. B. describes a few relatively simple mistakes, the warning signs to look for, and how to solve the problems. Hear useful stories from an experienced agile coach that include, "If I'd only known then what I know now ..." You'll laugh, you'll cry, and with luck, you'll catch a problem or two before it blows up on you.
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JB Rainsberger, Diaspar Software Services
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"With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility" - Empowering the Agile Team Managers at many levels are often afraid to let go of the reins for fear of losing control of the project (and their position of power). V. Lee Henson explains the benefits of letting go and outlines the expectations of a responsible, empowered agile team. Through presentation of multiple real-world scenarios and years of project management experience, Lee will show that often our own human nature is the greatest impediment to being a better manager. Lee focuses on the attributes of an effective agile manager/leader, the expectations and attributes of an empowered agile team, the pitfalls and warning signs of a "damaged" team, and the rewards an organization can expect from adhering to basic agile principles. You will leave with the tools to help any agile team become more empowered.
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V. Lee Henson, VersionOne, Inc.
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Beware of Your Brain Cognitive scientists tell us that we are more productive and happier when our behavior matches our brain's hardwiring-when what we do and why we do it matches the way we have evolved to survive over tens of thousands of years. One problematic behavior humans have is that we are hardwired to instantly decide who we trust. And we generally aren't aware of these decisions-it just happens. Linda Rising explains that this hardwired "trust evaluation" can get in the way of working well with others. Pairing, the daily stand up, and close communication with the customer and others outside the team go a long way to overcome our instant evaluation of others. As Linda helps you gain a better understanding of this mechanism in your behavior and what agile processes can do to help, you are more likely to build better interpersonal relationships.
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Linda Rising, Independent Consultant
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Are We There Yet? Defining "Done" "Are you done yet?" The answer to this question may sink your career, your team, and your project. If you respond with a "yes," you may be forced to take on additional work you can't handle. If you say "no," you may be branded as someone who can't get things done. Mitch Lacey notes that this innocent question is asked countless times on almost every software project. Establishing an upfront, common understanding of "done" can save teams and businesses countless hours of rework, process-thrash, unclear communication, and hidden work. Mitch describes what a "done list" is, how it adds value, and the value it communicates to stakeholders. Mitch takes you through an exercise on how to establish a common understanding of done and provides an exercise that you can use with your project teams.
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Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey & Associates, Inc.
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Overcoming the Pitfalls of Transitioning to Agile If you've been trying to change your organization so that your projects are more agile, you may have encountered several problems-one is that it's difficult to have product management, senior management, and functional managers work together to lead in a way that makes sense for your agile project. You're also probably working with other parts of a large program that isn't agile; you have a geographically distributed team; your management wants to know at the beginning when the project will end; or you might have a project team that does not share a common vision of what "done" means. Johanna Rothman explores common organization, management, team, and individual team member issues. She offers suggestions for making the changes more acceptable and helping people work with you in a way that enables your projects to succeed.
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Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.
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STARWEST 2008: What Price Truth? When a Tester is Asked to Lie As testers and test managers, our job is to tell the truth about the current state of the software on our projects. Unfortunately, in the high-stakes business of software development, often there is pressure--subtle or overt-to distort our messages. When projects are late or product reliability is poor, managers' and developers' reputations-and perhaps even their jobs-may be on the line. Fiona Charles discusses the importance to testers of refusing to compromise the truth, recognizing a potential cover-up before it occurs, knowing the legal position around securing project information, and developing a strategy to maintain integrity and still get out alive.
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Fiona Charles, Quality Intelligence Inc.
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Has the Time for the Adversarial Organization Passed? The concept of an independent test organization is considered a "best practice" by many experts in the industry. Is this degree of autonomy actually a good thing in the real world today? In such a structure, some testers can only play "Battleship" with the delivered software, shouting gleefully when they find a defect. On their first tours of Toyota's factories, American automakers were astonished to find no "rework area." Toyota engineers didn't subscribe to the approach of inserting defects on the production line only to remove them later in the quality control and rework area. Yet this is exactly what the independent test group excels at! Is it time to discard this organizational model and focus on working together with developers to prevent defects in the first place? Gerard Meszaros examines the sacred concept of independent test teams based on experiences from the agile software movement and Lean production systems.
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Gerard Meszaros, Independent Consultant
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An Alternative to Consensus: Accelerating Effective Decisions Software development teams don't always need, want, or have time to make decisions via group consensus. And project leaders often already feel over-burdened with the multiple decisions they have to make on their own. But there is a middle path-an alternative to consensus-in which shared responsibility for decision-making provides for input from many and one voice to represent the team and make the final choice. In this decision-making process, a team member volunteers to be the decision-maker on a particular issue with only one mandatory rule-seek guidance. The greater the impact the decision will have on the organization, the wider the quest for advice must be-all the way to the board of directors, if appropriate. Join Michele Sliger to learn how this approach to decision-making might be right for your organization.
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Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting, Inc.
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Maximizing ROI on New Technology Acquisition IT departments and software technologists must invariably navigate many challenges when planning to acquire new tools, invest in new technology, fund new technology projects, and introduce process changes. How do you get the most out of these investments without upsetting existing mission-critical processes or projects? Subsequently, how do you rapidly turn your new technology into a successful release that augments your product suite? Chris Ronak shares his experiences and offers his recommendations on how to best integrate newly acquired technology into mainstream development processes and projects. A strategic acquisition must provide missing functionality that enhances your existing product suite or technical framework-and it must be implemented without hindering or stopping progress on other business-critical projects.
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Chris Ronak, Divestco Inc
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Real Software QA With the ever-increasing demand for software products, it is imperative for organizations to move away from trying to "test in" software quality and move toward adopting a comprehensive, total-life cycle software quality management approach. Such an approach is the basis of real software quality assurance (QA)-all the planned and systematic actions necessary to provide confidence that a system will perform satisfactorily in production. In contrast to software quality control (QC), which consists of detection activities such as testing that are product focused, software QA is process focused. Software QA includes defining, establishing, and monitoring the control practices that ensure policies, systems, and processes are effective and efficient across the entire software development life cycle. Linda Westfall focuses on defining the elements and techniques of a comprehensive software QA program.
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Linda Westfall, The Westfall Team
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