development

Businesses demand high levels of product quality, development productivity, planning reliability, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And yet, people and organizations often ignore all those goals and focus on building systems with as many features as possible delivered by a specific due date. When the work is complete, retrospectives surface the dissatisfaction concerning missed dates, poor quality, technical debt, and more. Richard Hensley describes his last three years at McKesson, where they have delivered 103 production releases with no significant defects, fulfilled sixteen multi-million dollar contracts, maintained high employee morale, and trained 5,000 users. Employing the Kanban approach for change management, McKesson implemented new tools selected from RUP, XP, Scrum, and lean-daily focused planning, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, TDD, information radiators, user stories, etc.

Remove software and service dependencies enabling continuous integration and testing across the development lifecycle. Stand up test environments faster and at a lower cost accelerating development and test cycles. Balance quality and speed - deliver high quality software faster.

The ability to influence others is an invaluable tool, especially for those in software. We had the opportunity to speak with Linda ahead of her upcoming presentation titled "Influence Strategies for Software Professionals" which she'll give at the Better Software Conference East.

During Greg Pope’s forty years in the industry, many great processes and new tools have been promoted by incredibly gifted people. It seems that someone is always promising a cure all-the proverbial “silver bullet”-for software woes. Still, the most common request Greg gets from software developers and managers is to “look at our development process and tell us how to make it better.” Greg’s goals for this presentation are for us to understand what “better” really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group’s practices better. He examines valuable ideas that seem to reincarnate themselves periodically and explores the challenges of today’s modern software.