Application Lifecycle Management

Conference Presentations

Form Follows Function: The Architecture of a Congruent Organization
Slideshow

One principle architects employ when designing buildings is "form follows function." That is, the layout of a building should be based upon its intended function. In software, the same principle helps us create an integrated design that focuses on fulfilling the intent of the system. Ken Pugh explores congruency-the state in which all actions work toward a common goal. For example, as Ken sees it, if you form and promote integrated teams of developers, testers, and business analysts, then personnel evaluations should be focused on team results rather than on each individual’s performance. If you embrace the principle of delivering business value as quickly as possible, the entire organization should focus on that goal and not the more typical 100% resource utilization objective. If you choose to have agile teams, then they should be co-located for easy communication, rather than scattered across buildings or the world.
Ken Pugh, Net Objectives
Embracing Uncertainty: A Most Difficult Leap of Faith
Slideshow

For the past couple of years, Dan North has been working with and studying teams who are dramatically more productive than any he's ever seen. In weeks they produce results that take other teams months. One of the central behaviors Dan has observed is their ability to embrace uncertainty, holding multiple contradictory opinions at the same time and deferring commitment until there is a good reason. Embracing uncertainty lies at the heart of agile delivery and is one of the primary reasons organizations struggle with agile adoption. We are desperately uncomfortable with uncertainty, so much so that we will replace it with anything-even things we know to be wrong. Dan claims we have turned our back on the original Agile Manifesto, and explains why understanding risk and embracing uncertainty are fundamental to agile delivery-and why we find it so scary.
Dan North, Lean Technology Specialist
Creating a Professional Credo: Aligning Career, Goals, and Personal Happiness

In a world where technology is rapidly changing, development practices are quickly evolving, and teams are frequently reorganized, how can you remain steady and true to yourself? Even though things are changing around you, you can build a solid framework of personal beliefs to guide you throughout your professional career. To develop a credo-from the Latin “I believe”-is to take a personal journey through your professional life and the ideas that shaped it, ultimately creating your own statement of core beliefs. This credo forms a stable foundation for personal plans and actions. Marlena Compton shares the framework she’s used to build her professional credo. She examines manifestos and mission statements that have influenced her beliefs about building software and how she uses her credo as a basis to form concrete goals and take action.
Marlena Compton, Mozilla
Developer-driven Quality: Putting Developers in the Drivers' Seat

Although many software development teams rely on their QA/Test departments to uncover critical product defects near the end of development, we all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. It’s better to find and fix defects earlier in the software development process to save time and money in the long run! Colby Litnak explores key concepts that encourage and empower developers to take primary responsibility for producing quality software. As with a souped-up race car, developers need specially designed tools and practices when they are at the wheel: fail-fast frameworks, one-click test execution, automated defect prevention principles, automatic notifications of untested code, hurtful test failures, and much more. Discover the principles developers must embrace to produce high quality code the first time-before it goes to QA/Test.
Colby Litnak, MasterControl, Inc.
ALM in the Cloud: Bringing Code to the Cloud and Back Again

The deployment destination for today’s applications is going through its biggest transition since the rise of the application server. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and other cloud service offerings are putting pressure on every stakeholder in the application lifecycle, forcing us to modernize both our skill sets and tool stacks. Mik Kersten describes the key cloud technology trends and demonstrates how the coming wave of cloud-friendly application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and practices will become the defining factor for productivity and ultimate success. Discover the new challenges developers face when deploying and debugging multi-tenanted applications on hosted infrastructures. Learn how continuous integration loops require testers to learn new tools that connect them directly to running applications.
Mik Kersten, Tasktop Technologies
Selecting the Right Mobile Testing Solution: Practical Considerations and Proven Practices

Because the mobile market is extremely dynamic, maintaining consistent application quality is always difficult. Managing the risk exposures with mobile apps and embedded software requires comprehensive testing of a wide variety of platforms operating on multiple networks. Testers have to contend with short development cycles that require continuous QA efforts. Three key building blocks are required to overcome these obstacles: device-agnostic automation, access to a large selection of handsets and tablets, and ways to seamlessly apply your existing testing tools, skills, and knowledge to mobile. From his experience working with enterprises going mobile, Eran Yaniv shares the do's and don'ts for selecting an enterprise-grade mobile testing and automation platform, and offers his analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches.
Eran Yaniv, Perfecto Mobile
Sustainable Software Quality-at Warp Speed

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.
Richard Hensley, McKesson Health Solutions
Accelerating the Software Development Lifecycle Using Service Virtualization
Video

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.
Peter Cole, IBM Rational
ClouT 3i Infotech's Testing Platform Enterprise
Video

Infotech is a global Information Technology company committed to Empowering Business Transformation. Our Independent Testing and Compliance Business [ITCB] became the world's first true testing platform in 2011 -- ClouT™
John Caymans, Hitachi Data Systems
Performance Testing Earlier in the Software Development Lifecycle

Historically, performance testing has been relegated to simply adding a few weeks to the back end of a project to run a series of prescripted tests. The problem with this approach is that issues that performance test engineers uncover late in the project are often too costly to remediate, placing the entire effort at risk. Agile development methodologies can further complicate the issue due to their ever-changing landscape and often a lack of focus on performance testing. Eric Gee shares innovative ideas and techniques on how testers can engage as meaningful partners earlier in the software development lifecycle. Eric explores the benefits of partnering with software engineers in unit testing under load, testing at the component level, and other novel approaches you can use for early performance testing. If you are concerned about finding performance problems late in development, this session is for you.
Eric Gee, Raymond James & Associates

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