People & Teams

Conference Presentations

STARWEST 2018 Testing Outside of the Box
Slideshow

The cognitive skills of testing are being threatened by two major forces: the assumption that automation can replace all other forms of testing, and the acceptance of lower quality by consumers. You might be feeling like you’re living on an eroding island, but there is a way to adapt and even thrive using your testing skills. Your project still needs to have someone who will question assumptions, examine design, create experiments, analyze data, and report meaningful metrics. It needs your social skill to connect teams who work in silos, bring customer insights to light, and track risks that no one seems to make time to think about. For twenty-two years, Jon was a tester, test manager, test trainer, and test consultant. Now he’s a senior program manager and uses his testing skills differently. What’s your experience? Jon will ask you a few questions via an anonymous polling app and show the results during the session.

Jon Bach
STARWEST 2018 The Life of a Tester, from Once Upon a Time to Happily Ever After
Slideshow

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Jennifer Bonine
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Unlocking Retrospectives
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Retrospectives empower teams to learn and improve. But many teams fail to reach their true learning potential. Ryan was part of a team that held retrospectives for a year and a half to fix one line of code. Through the story of this team, he will show you how they turned their retrospectives from a meeting with meaningless action items to one that accomplished a meaningful improvement. Ryan will explore the resistance that was met and how it was overcome. He will show how to shift to a hypothesis-driven retrospective that to guides specific improvements and learning goals. His team made significant changes to their retrospectives and were rewarded with a radical improvement. Breaking through their retrospective impediments and finally embracing a learning mindset empower Ryan's team to fix the legacy line of code that had held the team back for over year.

Ryan Latta
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Removing Impediments and Cultivating a Culture of Feedback
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As agilists, we know the importance of open, candid feedback for agile teams to be continuously improving. This talk will share how impediments, such as unconscious biases and a person’s level of self-confidence, can impact the feedback and learning cycle. Participants will learn why there are positive and negative reactions when feedback is given, the difference between a defensive (fixed) and accepting (growth) mindset, how age, self-confidence and gender biases influence an individual’s mindset and other impediments that can impact a team member’s ability to provide candid feedback.

Joanna Vahlsing
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 I Manage an Agile Team. Am I Obsolete?
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Agile and Scrum Teams are self-organizing and self-managing. As a line manager, what's left to do? Traditionally, managers are responsible for the output of their teams. Sometimes they're even responsible for the for a team's delivery that they do not have direct oversight. This model is flawed. People are complex, a team of people is a complex system. May as well try to manage the weather. To get a handle on the complexity of teams, managers need to act differently in how they lead others. In other words, managers of agile teams will fail if they do not shift their thinking from management to leadership. We can't manage the complexity but we can help people navigate it. Just as we can't stop it from raining, we help teams find umbrellas and take supportive actions when things begin to flood.

Robert Pieper
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Collaborative Curiosity
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Let's try an experiment. Rather than trying to figure out what you need or want to hear from a keynote, we propose your taking over as the product owner and driving the discussion? Join Ryan Ripley and Faye Thompson as they take your most pressing, real-time questions and craft them into an inspiring keynote that is relevant to you and your needs. They will take on all agile topics: How does a team optimize their learning? How do you make it safe to explore, experiment and fail? What should you do when your teams aren’t “buying” self-direction and accountability. What do you do when those pesky senior leaders aren’t cooperating? Does DevOps magically improve our capacity? Why is scaling so hard and how does SAFe solve it? And anything else that’s on your mind. Bring your questions, as we celebrate your curiosity about what it takes to become truly agile yourself, in your teams, and in your organization.

Ryan Ripley
STAREAST 2018 Influencing Stakeholders Using Fact-based Information
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With all the open source tools available on the market it can be overwhelming as to which ones might meet your needs and which ones will work best in your environment to create a high performing team and metrics dashboard. Join Jennifer as she explains the relationship of data, your environment, and how a hub and spoke model can link all your different data sets and tools together. She identifies opportunities for applying test data analytics across the engineering and test landscape, ranging from high-value test cases to dynamically generated regression test suites. She will review ways to collaborate and show results in a way that clearly demonstrates progress and how to present a visual metrics dashboard to your leadership and stakeholders in the organization.

Jennifer Bonine
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Waterfall to Scrum: It Only Goes Up from Here
Slideshow

You’re a project manager using a waterfall methodology, but the team is not making progress on the work and deadlines are not being met. The requirements aren’t clear, scope keeps changing, deadlines won’t budge, and you can’t get more resources on the project. You were doomed from the start! A common solution to this situation is to adopt Scrum, but that can be difficult as well. Join Toiya Jones-Current as she narrates her personal journey and the baby steps she took to successfully switch from waterfall to Scrum and the transition her project team went through to deliver iteratively and consistently. You'll take back valuable insights into how to keep your team focused on delivering the highest business value every sprint and release. You’ll also explore facilitation techniques to help your team improve its communication and calibration with stakeholders.

Toiya Jones-Current
Agile Dev West 2018, Better Software West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Three-Minute Improv Games to Improve Your Teams
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The problem with many agile teams is that they simply never become a team. This often manifests itself as team members feeling unsafe or not quite trusting each other. This workshop will show you how the same techniques improv theater troupes use to improve collaboration, creativity, and communication can be used to help agile teams, too. The three-minute improv warm-up games Wayde Stallmann will lead you through in this session—including improv's famous "yes, and" technique—will help you learn to establish trust, improve collaboration, and learn how to provide a safe environment for your team to bond. You also will get a flier explaining the top twenty improv games, allowing you to leave with actionable material to use immediately upon returning to work so that you can help your team reach its full potential.

Wayde Stallmann
Better Software West 2018, Agile Dev West 2018, DevOps West 2018 Brewing Great Agile Team Dynamics: No More "Bitter Beer Face" Communications
Slideshow

Ever find yourself making a sour face after talking to a coworker? Wishing your team meetings felt more like an engaging social hour? There is hope. Those everyday conflicts where something seems “off” after a conversation are often related to differences in communication styles. When team members understand themselves and others, there’s less conflict, more collaboration, and better working relationships. The DiSC model can help you understand why your team behaves the way it does and how to build trust for a more agile team. In this interactive session, agile coaches Allison Pollard and Barry Forrest will introduce the DiSC model to explain the four behavior types that are the ingredients in any team, then explore the characteristics of these ingredients and how they react with one another.

Allison Pollard

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