Conference Presentations

Leveraging Core Values for Healthier, More Productive Teams
Slideshow

Although all teams require a healthy level of interaction, high-performing teams' interactions are all based on trust, respect, and shared goals. Such teams find ways to overcome the fear of conflict, and quickly identify and resolve issues that are getting in the way. Scott Ross shares how, when the Omnyx software R&D department determined their culture was hindering performance, they crafted a core values statement that has served them well for the past three years. Scott describes the ways they proactively and intentionally use their value statement to drive the culture they seek and discusses the results they have achieved. Take back the list of resources that Scott uses daily to help himself and others see how their actions add to and take away from their core values.

Scott Ross, Omnyx
Red Beads: A New Tool for Managing Software Projects
Slideshow

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.

Howard Deiner, Deinersoft, Inc.
Cloud Computing: Powering the Future of Development and Testing
Slideshow

Developers and testers are under constant pressure to operate more efficiently, cut costs, and deliver on time. Without access to scalable, flexible, and cost effective computing resources, these challenges are magnified. Brett Goodwin explains how to create scalable dev/test environments in the cloud, and shares best practices for reducing cycle time and decreasing project costs. Learn how scalable, cloud-based data centers can run software without complicated re-writes; enable rapid defect resolution with snapshots and clones; and provide global collaboration for multiple product and release teams. Brett presents a case study of Cushman and Wakefield, the world's largest privately held real estate services firm, which struggled with an on-premises development and testing environment.

Brian White, Skytap, Inc.
Reduce Release Cycle Time: Nine Months to a Week - Nice!
Slideshow

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.

Mathew Bissett, UK Government
The Missing Integration at Best Buy: Agile, Test Management, and Test Execution

What can you do when test tools from proprietary vendors don’t seem to support your organization’s processes and open source tools are too narrowly focused? Best Buy, the world's largest electronics retailer, faced this very situation. With hundreds of agile development projects running concurrently, they needed an integrated test management and test execution tool set that would scale up easily. Frank Cohen describes how he helped Best Buy integrate open source functional and load test tools, vendor-supplied test management tools, and repository tools with their agile software development methodology. Now, with this integrated solution, business managers, testers, developers, and IT Ops managers click the “Start” button to perform a thorough set of automated tests, verify the results, and produce an informative dashboard of results.

Frank Cohen, PushToTest
Static Testing Comes to Agile: A Simplified Inspection Process that Works

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.

Anne Hungate, Nationwide Insurance
Agile Defect Management: Focus on Prevention

Efficient agile organizations focus on defect prevention rather than downstream defect discovery because discovering defects during or after testing adds to development costs. Delaying discovery and repair of defects can make an agile team feel like they are operating in a mini-waterfall. Sharing his experience with Scrum/Kanban teams, David Jellison describes how grouping defects into two major categories-work-in-process defects and escaping defects-reduces development costs and improves reliability in the field. Dave illustrates how to manage problem discovery early and minimize the existence of escaping defects. Treating escaping defects as the exception rather than the norm results in a much smaller defect backlog and increased customer satisfaction.

David Jellison, Constant Contact
Making the Most of Test Automation on an Agile Project

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.

Alexander Andelkovic, Spotify
Journey to Agility: Leading the Transformation

How far can you take agile within an organization? Is it enough to just focus on agile development practices such as Scrum and XP or is something more needed? Agile is much more than just a development methodology. Beyond product development, it can become an organizational strategy for increased success. Skip Angel shares an example of one company's journey from no knowledge of agile to an organization of high agility. He answers many of your questions about transformation that can help your company on its journey to agility, especially how to get started. Skip describes the preconditions a company must be ready to accept-significant organizational changes and the major activities and events that happen during the transformation process. Agile changes organizations in terms of who they are, how they think, and what they can achieve.

Skip Angel, BigVisible Solutions
Implementing Agile in an FDA-regulated Environment

While many industries have adopted agile, the medical device industry, which develops products for life-critical applications-where quality and reliability are clearly a top-priority, remains largely stuck under the “waterfall.” Medical device firms must comply with FDA regulations that overwhelmingly suggest a controlled, phase-gated approach to software development. Unfortunately, many companies and development organizations interpret FDA regulations to require a steep waterfall. Many industry long-timers incorrectly see agile as an undisciplined style of software development. Neeraj Mainkar demonstrates how those in regulated industries can overcome these and other hurdles. At Neuronetics, he helped implement key elements of agile while fully complying with FDA regulations.

Neeraj Mainkar, Neuronetics

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