The Latest

A Year of “Testing” the Cloud for Development and Test[presentation]
Slideshow

Jim Trentadue describes the first year his organization used the cloud for its non-production needs: development, testing, training, and production support. Jim begins by describing the components of a cloud environment and how it differs from a traditional physical server structure.

Jim Trentadue, New York Life
Speed Grooming Requirements with SAFe[presentation]
Slideshow

Want your sprint/iteration planning to take less than fifteen minutes (excluding tasking)? The key is in the story writing we do during backlog grooming. Although the Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) has little to say about story writing, this "speed grooming" practice makes iteration planning..

André Dhondt, Rally Software Development
Pivoting Your Testers to Become Agile[presentation]
Slideshow

Many organizations struggle with transforming from the old-style specialized silos of skills into agile teams with generalized specialists. Without this pivot, we get sub-optimal agile/Scrum environments. Howard Deiner describes what can go wrong when integrating testers properly into an...

Howard Deiner, BigVisible Solutions
Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2013: Avoiding Overdesign and Underdesign[presentation]
Slideshow

The question of how much design to do up-front on a project is an engaging one.  Too much design often results in overkill, complexity, and wasted effort. Too little design results in insufficient system structures that require later rework, additional complexity, and wasted effort.

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
How Experian Revolutionized Product Strategy and Management with Big Data[presentation]
Slideshow

Agile discussions often focus on stories, backlogs, development, and testing. At Experian they also brought product strategy management and strategy into the agile fold to ensure their teams were in lock-step with customer requirements and priorities. That resulted in the delivery of...

Jeff Hassemer, Experian
An Automation Culture: The Key to Agile Success[presentation]
Slideshow

For organizations developing large-scale applications, transitioning to agile is challenging enough. But if your organization has not yet adopted an automation culture, brace yourself for a big surprise because automation is essential to agile success. From the safety nets provided by...

Geoff Meyer, Dell, Inc.
Managing Multiple Teams at Scale with Scrum and Lean[presentation]
Slideshow

Scrum has become very popular in agile development shops, but most organizations that adopt Scrum run into challenges when they expand beyond a few teams. Ken Paugh believes that you can overcome the challenging patterns of scaling Scrum by focusing on lean-flow.

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Test-Driven Development for Developers: Plain and Simple[presentation]
Slideshow

Test-driven development (TDD) is not an easy discipline to establish. However, it provides considerable return on investment for the effort. Rob Myers describes the costs of TDD (the introduction of test-maintenance overhead) and its benefits (greatly improved quality, productivity, and...

Rob Myers, Agile Institute
Organizing a Self-Organizing Team[presentation]
Slideshow

Your organization is embracing agile. When it comes to adopting the process, your team seems to be doing all the right things. Yet deep down, something still doesn’t seem quite right. As their leader, it could be that you haven’t figured it out either. Perhaps your team is lacking some...

John Lynch, Clashmore Software Solutions
How to (Effectively) Measure Quality across Software Deliverables[presentation]
Slideshow

How do you properly compare the quality of two or more software deliverables without an accurate normalizing metric? The answer: You can’t. Example: If project A has one-hundred defects and project B has fifty defects, do you automatically assume project B is a higher quality deliverable?

David Herron, DCG
Large Agile Transformations: A Roadmap for Lasting Change[presentation]
Slideshow

Agile methods have gained the attention of leaders as a way to speed time to market and increase motivation. Businesses are looking to agile as a way to achieve organizational change so teams deliver more value faster, and where people’s pride and joy of work are enhanced.

Ole Jepsen, goAgile & Jenni Jepsen, goAgile
The Mindset of Managing Uncertainty: The Key to Agile Success[presentation]
Slideshow

The speed of global change and the advancement of technology will continue to increase the uncertainty in our work. Those with an Agile Mindset can manage uncertainty through continuous value-based discovery; those with a Fixed Mindset try to “freeze” things early to decrease uncertainty.

Ahmed Sidky, SCG Inc.
Program Management: Collaborating across the Organization[presentation]
Slideshow

To be most effective when managing a large program, the component projects should limit their batch size, create networks of people, and report status in a way that works for the entire program. For those of you who are not quite ready for agile, Johanna Rothman explains how to use staged...

Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group Inc.
Better Software Conference East 2013: Data Collection and Analysis for Better Requirements[presentation]
Slideshow

According to studies, 64 percent of features in systems are rarely—or never—used. How does this happen? Today, the work of eliciting the customers' true needs, which often remains elusive, can be enhanced using data-driven requirements techniques. Brandon Carlson describes why traditional...

Brandon Carlson, Lean TECHniques, Inc.
Agile Development Conference East 2013: The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow[presentation]
Slideshow

The Kanban Pizza Game is a hands-on simulation designed to teach the core elements of a kanban system—visualize the workflow, limit your work-in-process (WIP), manage flow, make process policies explicit, and improve collaboratively. Join Brad Swanson as the proprietor of your very own...

Brad Swanson, agile42

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