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Taking Personal Ownership for Software Development Success The responsibility for building effective software teams is more than just a management task. Indeed, in some situations, management could easily rationalize that there is limited business value in improving team effectiveness. Our current reliance on processes, methodologies, and tools is misguided in that it largely looks outward rather than inward for solutions. There is a better way! Jim Brosseau examines the challenges and barriers we face with typical approaches when attempting to build effective teams. He explains how each of us can take responsibility for personal and team success and describes a meaningful progression of steps to achieve this goal. In doing so, Jim helps you look beyond the traditional team building approaches to explore personal motives, attitudes, skills, and interpersonal relationships-all fair game as potential opportunities for improvement.
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Jim Brosseau, Clarrus Consulting Group, Inc.
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Are They All Neurotic? The Psychology of the Software Engineer In recent years, psychologists have come to a nearly unanimous consensus on the number and nature of human personality dimensions. A recent large scale study involving several hundred software engineers and "regular" people (non-engineers) revealed that the personalities of developers, testers, and managers tend to be different from each other and from the general population as a whole. So, how can you use this information in your job? Rather than administering a personality assessment as part of the hiring process, it is much more effective to use it to understand your existing team members and to help then maximize their productivity and value to the business. James McCaffrey demonstrates how to quickly and easily create, administer, and interpret personality profiles of your team members.
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James McCaffrey, Volt Information Sciences, Inc.
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The Principles and Practices of Scrum Scrum is best defined as an agile, lightweight process used to manage software and product development using iterative, incremental practices. Rob Myers gives a brief explanation of the philosophy behind Scrum, the Scrum method, and the roles and responsibilities of the players in a Scrum project. Scrum can be wrapped around different software engineering methodologies, including Extreme Programming (XP), Rational Unified Process (RUP), spiral development, and others. Scrum practices enhance the benefits of agile development with a simple project management process. Scrum significantly increases productivity and reduces development time while facilitating adaptive systems development based on empirical data. Join Rob to learn how Scrum works, why it works, and why Scrum is becoming such a popular project management method.
- Why Scrum works better than more traditional project management methods
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Rob Myers, Net Objectives
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Developing a Software Product Line Today's tools and techniques for software development tend to focus on individual products. However, customer demands require most companies to offer a software product line portfolio-a collection of related products with variations in features and functions-rather than just a single product. This situation has led to the emergence of development methods, tools, and techniques focused specifically on the challenges of software product line development. Charles Krueger explores this latest generation of software development methods that are yielding an order-of-magnitude improvement in time-to-market, engineering cost, product quality, and portfolio scalability. Charles shares the best methods from recent industry case studies, including model-driven, aspect-oriented, minimally-invasive, and agile strategies. Learn innovative, proven software product line development methods, as well as practical approaches for getting started.
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Charles Krueger, BigLever Software
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Better Software Conference 2007: Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment or attendant nerves. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to quickly present your single, biggest, bang-for-the-buck idea. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Use this as your opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time.
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Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild, Inc.
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Continuous Integration to Improve Software Quality The practice of continuous integration facilitates early visibility into the development process by regularly incorporating new modules into the build much earlier than the classic "big bang" integration approach. Continuous integration helps reduce the time between when a defect is coded and when it is discovered, thereby making it faster and easier to repair. Software teams see their build process as much more than a simple compile and link process because the build exposes new bugs immediately. In addition, builds can be augmented with a set of "software inspectors" that report on aspects of software quality including code complexity, duplication, dependences, and adherence to standards. Andrew Glover describes the practice of continuous integration and the tools available for both Java and .NET platforms. Learn how to interpret the data provided by software inspectors and how to make improvement actions based on that data.
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Andrew Glover, Stelligent
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First to Market or First to Fail: A General Systems View Marketers often emphasize the enormous advantage of being first-to-market, but is being first really an advantage? Looking at some of the spectacular successes of products, brands, and technologies, you will see that, contrary to popular belief, so-called first-to-market products like Netscape Navigator, PalmPilot, and iPod were actually later arrivals that became more successful than the originals. Why did they succeed when their predecessors didn't, and why were they so widely perceived as revolutionary? Michael Bolton shows how general systems thinking can help us identify factors that govern the success or failure of an innovative product, service, or strategy. By taking a general systems view, you will understand that the notion of "first" depends on the features or attributes that we choose to observe or ignore.
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Michael Bolton, DevelopSense
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Building Better Teams through Better Interviewing As manager of a software team, you often rely on your staff for assistance when conducting technical interviews to fill positions in your organization. However, even the most technically competent people may not necessarily be good interviewers. Some reasons include lack of interest, thinking that they "can just tell" if a candidate is a good fit, or simply not knowing the fundamentals of interviewing. All these issues must be addressed to improve the interviewing skills of your staff. Michael Kahn discusses the direct and indirect costs of a bad hire and why your staff should take interviewing seriously. He focuses on pre-interview planning-what should be done beforehand to achieve a successful interview. Learn to design effective questions for assessing not only the technical skills of software professionals but also their ability to fit socially within your team.
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Michael Kahn, MK
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ITIL and You: The Perfect Match ITIL (IT Infrastructure Library) is a flexible framework for implementing IT Service Management within an organization. Since its introduction in the 1990s, ITIL has mostly been applied within IT operations and excluded from software development; however, more and more IT departments are now asking development to join in. ITIL offers an extensive set of management procedures that are intended to support businesses in achieving higher value for their money and improving quality across the breadth of the IT infrastructure. Join Michael Giacometti to learn what ITIL is and why it is gaining in popularity. Find out how implementing ITIL processes can significantly improve both your time to market and the quality of your software. Michael explains what to do to gain better information about your development and new ways to control investments and quality.
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Michael Giacometti, Sungard
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Coaching: The New Leadership Imperative The days of plan-driven command-and-control technical management are gone. Flexible software development and the adoption of agile methods are driving factors. Add to this the fact that the I-decide-You-obey paradigm never worked very well anyway. Today, a coaching model is replacing command-and-control within more self-directed teams. This shift drastically changes the skills required of today's leaders, many of whom are struggling with questions such as: If I don't make the decisions, what is my job? Is my position really needed? Am I needed? How can I adapt? Robert Galen explores the key changes required to improve the coaching abilities of managers and project leaders. Taking lessons from agile methods, proven coaching models, and a few gratuitous sports analogies, Robert offers valuable advice for any leader looking to become a better coach who can enable the team to perform at the highest possible level.
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Robert Galen, RGCG, LLC
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