people management

Conference Presentations

Agile Pathologies: People Problems in Agile Shops

For agile adoptions that fail, you may not be sure of what went wrong or exactly where but you know something is broken somewhere. And with success, you often do not know what went right. Rajeev Singh shares his experiences regarding emotional and behavioral problems on teams trying to embrace agile values and practices. Join with your peers and hear Rajeev's tales of timid managers, ineffective product owners, poor agile coaches, and self-organizing teams that attempt to "run the asylum." He offers case studies of times when agile adoption has put organizations’ strengths and will to the test. Rajeev will help you develop an acute awareness of your organization's pathologies and offer specific paths to resolve these issues. If your agile team or teams are having "people problems" and sometimes seem to be in chaos, this session is for you.

Rajeev Singh, ThoughtWorks Inc
Test Specialist on Agile Teams: A New Paradigm for Testers

As a tester on an agile team, are you still creating lots of scripted test cases the old way? Are you still caught in the classic waterfall-always behind-while the rest of the team is doing Scrum and looking forward? Then, change course and work with your team to become a test specialist, coordinating testing rather than only doing testing. Henrik Andersson describes his experiences on a Scrum team and their transition to his test specialist role. To orchestrate such a change, they needed new tools and approaches. So, Henrik gives a short introduction to behavior-driven development. For developing automated unit tests, he describes how their team learned to write tests in English-like Gherkin notation. Then, he demonstrates Developers’ Exploratory Testing, in which the entire team tests together and shares joint responsibility for the quality of the software.

Henrik Andersson, Jayway - Test
Get It All Done: A Story of Personal Productivity

You procrastinate. You worry that you may be making the wrong choice. You spend time on the irrelevant. You don't select the most important tasks from your many "to do's." You can't get things done on time. Join James Martin as he shares his experience with analysis paralysis, procrastination, and failure to deliver what others expect. After a look at why we procrastinate, James turns his attention to his personal story of a "bubble" of super productivity in which he delivered more relevant work in a two-week period than he believed possible. Along with the techniques and tips you would expect from a productivity boosting experience report, James explains the state of mind that will help you distinguish important from trivial tasks, reduce waste in your work, and discover the most important thing to do next. You can get It all done in record time-and with less angst than you ever dreamed possible.

James Martin, RiverGlide
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. Because your offshore team members often are new to you, it is critical to recognize and handle training issues as early as possible. With the challenges of time zones, language, and cultural differences, Gerie addresses the critical issues of providing explicit direction and expressing clear expectations.

Gerie Owen, NSTAR, Inc.
When to Ship: Determining Application Readiness

When do you ship an application and expose it to your customers and users? The answer seems simple-you ship it when it's ready. However, there are many possible definitions of "ready." According to Peter Varhol, customers, users, and development teams must all agree on what this term means-before work begins on the project. Otherwise, you may be tempted to deploy an application before its product goals are met. Peter Varhol presents different approaches to determining when an application has the required quality to be ready to ship. He describes how to determine and track quality measures, so that the team actively works toward getting the application ready to deploy and knows what needs to be done to ensure fitness for deployment. Learn what factors on which to base your ready-to-ship decision so that the project team and the business will know whether to continue working or declare, "Ready."

Peter Varhol, Seapine Software Inc
Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference East 2011: Seven Deadly Habits of Ineffective Software Managers

As if releasing a quality software project on time were not difficult enough, ineffective management practices when dealing with planning, people, and process issues can be deadly to a project. Presenting as a series of anti-pattern case studies, Ken Whitaker describes the most common deadly habits-and ways to avoid them. These seven killer habits are: mishandling employee incentives; attempting to make key decisions by consensus; ignoring processes and releasing too early; delegating absolute control to a project manager; taking too long to negotiate a project’s scope; releasing an “almost tested” product to market; and hiring someone who is not quite qualified-but whom everyone likes. Whether you are an experienced manager struggling with some of these issues or a new software manager, you’ll take away invaluable tips and techniques for correcting these software management habits-or better yet, avoiding them altogether.

Ken Whitaker, Leading Software Maniacs
STAREAST 2012 Keynote: What Managers Think They Know about Test Automation—But Don’t
Video

Managers play a critical role in the success or failure of test automation. Although most testers and some test managers have a realistic view of what automation can and cannot do, many senior managers have firm ideas about automation that are misguided—or downright wrong.

Dorothy Graham, Independent Test Consultant
STAREAST 2012 Keynote: Bridging the Gap: Leading Change in a Community of Testers
Video

When Keith Klain took over Barclays Capital Global Test Center, he found an organization focused entirely on managing projects, managing processes, and managing stakeholders—the last most unsuccessfully.

Keith Klain, Barclays Capital Global Test Center
STAREAST 2012 Keynote: Evaluating Testing: The Qualitative Way
Video

Testers and managers have wrestled with the problem of evaluating software products and testing efforts, often using approaches derived from manufacturing, construction, and physical sciences. These approaches have been partially successful because software products aren't physical products.

Michael Bolton, DevelopSense Inc.
Better Testing through Cultural Change

Even though you employ the best testing processes, techniques, people, and tools, the overall effectiveness of your testing effort will always be bounded by your organization's commitment to quality. Cliff Morehead describes techniques he uses for assessing an organization's quality culture and shares approaches for influencing positive cultural change. Organizations have two major dimensions that determine if change takes hold: the driving force-top-down versus bottom-up-and the quality focus-externally oriented versus internally oriented. Cliff discusses specific tactics you can use to increase the effectiveness of your test improvement efforts for different organization types, with a focus on how front-line team members can influence their organization's culture. Take back the lessons Cliff has learned from his experiences in improving testing-what has worked for him and what hasn't.

Clifford Morehead, ThoughtWorks Inc

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