Warning! Warning! Managing software projects may be accompanied by continued bouts of nausea-brought on by unmet expectations, process churn, late deliveries, and worse. In their attempt to conquer these problems, many managers stiffen their resolve, create stricter schedules, and install rigid processes to guide development from inception to production. Howard Deiner demonstrates that better results come from fundamental changes in the way managers and the organization approach problems. Drawing on W. Edward Deming’s "14 Obligations of Management," Howard reprises (with volunteers from the audience) Deming's famous Red Bead Experiment on its 30th anniversary and draws conclusions about how our approach to problem-solving affects our day-to-day work. Expect to get up on your feet and have a lot of fun "working" in a simulation of a modern workday environment, leading and managing the development efforts.

Picture this scene from three years ago: Employing the corporately mandated processes, a software engineering team is delivering system updates about once every nine months. When their senior user suddenly demands the next delivery in twenty-two weeks-half the current cycle duration-the team realize that they must quickly change development practices. Mathew Bissett describes how Her Majesty's Government did precisely that-and much, much more. First, they reduced delivery cycles from unpredictable dates every nine months to predictable releases every six weeks. Then, they cut releases cycle time to once every week. By identifying and mitigating risks early in the work intake process, enforcing quality gates, executing multiple test levels concurrently-and more-they dramatically increased throughput with the same or better quality. Today, these new processes provide their teams the best balance of structure versus agility.

Costs soar when defects are not discovered until system testing-or worse, in production. Inspections can drive down delivery times, drive out defects, and help align business and IT expectations. The benefits of inspections are known and documented, although adding these quality steps can appear to slow down an agile team. Can there be harmony between prevention processes and agile practices? Anne Hungate takes you through the experiences she and her team gained bringing static testing practices into their transition from waterfall to agile. They streamlined and simplified the inspection process while still capturing critical data to prevent problems from escaping to production. Anne shares the practical steps to overcoming the organizational and cultural barriers that keep teams from realizing the benefits of inspections.

In today’s competitive marketplace, the ability to rapidly release new product features is vital. As we move from traditional release cycles of months and years to cycles of days and weeks, test automation approaches need rethinking. Alexander Andelkovic describes the challenges of implementing and integrating rapid test automation on an agile project. Traditional test automation tries to maintain an ever-growing regression test suite and struggles to implement automated tests of new functionality. Manual testers often lack the necessary skills to implement automated tests in a short-cycle development environment. Alexander describes a process to save time by having manual testers implement their own tests daily using a simple, model-based test automation framework that requires only basic modeling and scripting skills. Automated tests can be implemented earlier, providing valuable feedback to the project.