Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2011

PRESENTATIONS

Managing Across the Miles: The Keys to Leading Offshore Test Teams

Is your company experiencing difficulty and frustration with its offshore project teams? Are your teams not consistently performing well? Are the results not what was expected? Gerie Owen shares her experiences in managing offshore test teams through each phase of the project cycle-from selecting the team and executing the project through presenting and documenting its results. Gerie explains how to assess the team’s knowledge and skill level.

Gerie Owen, NSTAR, Inc.

Mission Critical Agility

Whether it is controlling interplanetary spacecraft, managing medical records, or "merely" staying in business, it seems that more of us are facing the pressure of building and managing mission-critical systems and teams. Although it's tempting to think that reliability is all that matters, we're also forced to adapt to constantly advancing technologies, shifting priorities, and relentless competitive pressures.

Jeff Norris, NASA
Mobile Applications Security

Mobile applications enable millions of users to have more fun, be more productive, and interact with their world in more ways than ever before. Mobile architectures run the gamut from simple web-based applications optimized for mobile displays to custom-built handset-specific applications that can interact directly with the mobile operating system. This diversity of architectures presents a huge challenge to ensure that applications meet security requirements, such as confidentiality and integrity.

Scott Matsumoto, Cigital
No Silver Bullet? Silver Buckshot May Work

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.

Gregory Pope, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

No Silver Bullet? Silver Buckshot May Work

b

Gregory Pope, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Nonfunctional Requirements: Forgotten, Neglected, Misunderstood

Nonfunctional requirements-interfaces, design and implementation constraints, and quality attributes such as performance, usability, robustness, and more-are essential to build the right product, right. Yet analysts, developers, and business customers often struggle with when and how to define and document these requirements.

Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting, Inc.

Performance Engineering for MASSIVE Systems

Dealing with a single system is challenging enough, but the game changes dramatically on a multi-system, distributed platform. MASSIVE platforms can consist of more than fifty distributed systems and components, integrated to process millions of transactions per day-from millions of users-while processing hundreds of terabytes of data. The ramifications of one component or system not scaling to support this load might cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue for a single system disruption.

Mark Lustig, Collaborative Consulting
Project Estimation: The Scientific Way

At its core, estimating is a personal process. When estimating a task, your brain combines past experiences, confidence, and intuition to create a best guess. Paul Pagel explores estimating techniques that can turn your guesses into more accurate estimates on which you and your organization can rely. Join Paul and dive into estimating techniques you can use to go beyond gut instinct: PERT calculations, range estimates, normalized team estimates, and risk-based assessment estimation techniques.

Paul Pagel, 8th Light
Project Governance vs. Agile Flexibility

Organizations use project governance to control a project’s activities-scope, cost, schedule, activities, personnel, quality, and authority. Most traditional governance processes assume we fix the scope of the project upfront, and it remains constant throughout the project. In contrast, agile methodologies focus on delivering the greatest value to the customer at the lowest cost, often resulting in scope changes as the project proceeds. This difference can cause friction between project managers and the agile team.

Mario Moreira, CA Technologies

Risk Analysis for Test Managers

Risks are endemic in every step of every software project. A well-established key to project success is to proactively identify, understand, and mitigate these risks. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality where test managers and testers can significantly influence the project outcome. Julie Gardiner demonstrates how to evaluate and mitigate product risk from a testing perspective.

Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants

Pages

AgileConnection is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.