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Better Software Conference 2006: Lightning Talks: A Potpourri of 5-Minute Presentations Lightning Talks are nine five-minute talks in a fifty-minute time period. Lightning Talks represent a much smaller investment of time than track speaking and offer the chance to try conference speaking without the heavy commitment. Lightning Talks are an opportunity to quickly present your single, biggest, bang-for-the-buck idea. Maybe you just want to ask a question, invite people to help you with your project, boast about something you did, or tell a short cautionary story. These things are all interesting and worth talking about, but there might not be enough to say about them to fill up a full track presentation. Use this as your opportunity to give a first time talk or to present a new topic for the first time.
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Julie Gardiner, QST Consultants Ltd.
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Better Software Conference 2006: Agile Development and Its Impact on Productivity Agile development projects are different. Sure, they still have high-level business requirements, but they usually lack system descriptions, technical design documents, and system architectures. The projects tend to be smaller than those employing more traditional methods, and much of the testing occurs concurrently with development. The teams tend to be very small and often in one room, more like a group of friends than a typical development team. How do these and other differences affect productivity and the resulting products? Based on his research and personal experiences, David Garmus discusses the differences between Agile and traditional methodologies and offers specific ways to measure these differences to help you decide: Is Agile development right for your next project?
- The quantitative and qualitative differences between Agile and more traditional projects
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David Garmus, The David Consulting Group
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Leadership - The Forgotten Element of Agile Development We often hear about the difficulties and failures surrounding Agile methodologies. Articles describe everything from team and execution issues to the inadequacy of Agile methods on large projects and failures in large organizations. The root cause of these issues is often not a flaw in Agile methodologies but rather a lack of Agile leadership. A commonly held belief is that Agile teams are self-motivated and that leadership is almost evil. Quite the opposite is true. To succeed, Agile methodologies demand greater leadership skills at all levels. Learn from Michael Portwood about the differences between traditional and Agile leadership skills. Take away an Agile leadership model for team members, managers, and executives and proven techniques to foster and grow leadership skills development in your Agile organization.
- Why leadership and management are diametrically opposed
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Michael Portwood, Spectra Intelligent Marketing, Inc
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When the Customer Does Not Know Best Failure to really understand business requirements, technical specifications, and schedule dependencies has embarrassed more than a few test teams. Before you assign the first test engineer to a project, sit down face-to-face with the customer and keep asking questions until you fully understand the scope of the system or application under test, how they will use it, and what success looks like through their eyes. A full needs analysis is the best preparation for designing a test strategy that will deliver exactly the data your customer needs to decide when they can ship or go live with their software. John Scarborough explores the critical areas of inquiry for conducting a needs analysis, using examples from projects he has worked on over the last five years. Learn to exercise deliberate, critical thinking while following a proven, systematic approach for conducting analyses.
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John Scarborough, Aztec Software Inc
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Unintended Consequences of a Capability Maturity Mismatch--Evidence from a Quality Audit In this presentation Michael Harris describes the findings of a quality assurance audit (PPQA) of the offshore outsourcing arm of a major U.S. software development company in late 2005. As the executive in charge of much of the development and as a member of the PPQA audit team, the Michael has a singular perspective on the expectations and the reality of the project. This presentation explores one particular aspect of the audit findings-the manifestations of the different CMMI® maturity levels of the onshore and offshore organizations. Take away suggestions for taking advantage of this mismatch situation instead of suffering from it.
- Review a quality assurance audit (PPQA)
- Explore the different CMMI® maturity levels of onshore and offshore organizations
- Take advantage of mismatched outsourcing situations
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Michael Harris, David Consulting Group
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Patterns, Influence Strategies, and Stone Age Legacies Struggling to help your team or organization become more innovative? Have great ideas but can't seem to get them off the ground? We all try to influence others, whether we want to move our department to a better development method or suggest a Friday night movie for the family. We discover new ideas to take back to our workplace but then struggle to make something happen. How can we successfully influence change? From her latest book Fearless Change:
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Linda Rising, Specialist
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CMMI Level 5: How Our Test Organization Got There Achieving CMMI® Level 5 Capability as an independent test organization takes a tremendous effort. However, achieving CMMI® Level 5 or a lower level compliance is not out of your reach. Join Kristen Bevans as she describes how the IBM Global Test Organization team successfully completed a formal SEI CMMI® Level 5 SCAMPI Class A appraisal as an independent test organization. The appraisal used the Continuous Representation of the SEI CMMI-SE/SW/IPPD/SS V1.1 Model achieving CMMI® Level 5 in the project planning, project monitoring and control, risk management, and verification process areas. Discover how to develop your CMMI® core team, establish the scope, plan the effort, prepare for an appraisal, and conduct the appraisal with SCAMPI methods. Kristen shares her thoughts on what they would do differently-and what they would do the same-if they had it to do over again.
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Kristen Bevans, IBM - Global Testing Organization
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Test Then Code with Agile Inspections It is well known that the earlier in the development lifecycle a fault is found, the less costly it is to resolve. Whether you use traditional or agile development practices, you have an opportunity to implement Agile Inspections for finding faults before the code is even written. An Agile Inspection is a lightweight process that brings the skills and outlook of professional testers into the design of software. A good precursor to formal test planning, an Agile Inspection is a way to inform developers-in a way that makes sense to them-of how you are going to test. It offers the best chance to increase the testability of software at the lowest cost. Find out from Richard Durham the prerequisites for adopting Agile Inspections, what to look for in an inspection, how to communicate findings, and approaches to encourage buy-in from management and developers.
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Richard Durham, Citrix Systems Ltd
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Agile Software Development: What's in it for Testers? Agile software development methods change the ways teams work together to build software systems. Testers often are wary of what these changes will mean to them. However, experience shows that testers stand to benefit significantly from agile practices. In fact, testers who are willing to embrace agility with the rest of their project team can expect greater influence, productivity, confidence, and career growth potential. Looking at the technical, management, and social aspects of agile development, Alan Ridlehoover describes how agile methods differ from traditional software development practices. He describes what changes and what stays the same for the testing and test management roles within a project. Discover how testers can benefit when their organizations adopt agile processes and the common pitfalls many testers encounter in making the transition.
- How agile development and traditional methods differ
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Alan Ridlehoover, Microsoft
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Testing: The Big Picture If all testers put all their many skills in a pot, surely everyone would come away with something new to try out. Every tester can learn something from other testers. But can a tester learn something from a ski-instructor? There is much to gain by examining and sharing industry best practices, but often much more can be gained by looking at problem solving techniques from beyond the boundaries of the Testing/QA department. Presented as a series of analogies, Brian Bryson covers the critical success factors for organizations challenged with the development and deployment of quality software applications. He takes strategies and lessons from within and beyond the QA industry to provide you with a new perspective on addressing the challenges of quality assurance.
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Brian Bryson, IBM Rational Software
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