user experience

Today, we have more choices than ever for software products. The competition for our time and attention is fierce, and we tend to invest in only the products that we love. But product love can be elusive. User expectations have been recalibrated by the likes of Gmail, Facebook, and Instagram, yet many of the applications we build fall well short of these lovable experiences. Join Todd Olson in this keynote as he explores what it takes to create products your users love, where the end goal is not the minimum viable product, but the minimum lovable product. Creating and lovable product isn’t the responsibility of only the product owner or product manager, but the entire team. It starts with user empathy as the point of departure, followed by deep exploration into motivation, goals, and behaviors, toward the destination of products that anticipate and fulfill unarticulated needs.

When Isabel Evans learned to drive a car, she also learned how to check, clean, and change spark plugs, mend the fan belt with a stocking, and indicate speed and direction changes with arm and hand signals. Now, we don’t expect to have to do any of those things; we just drive the car. That’s how test tools and automation could be. Just drive and concentrate on the journey of delivering software continuously—concentrate on engineering the solutions, not on the automation. To be effective engineers, we need the support of a powerful toolset that we understand. Is that what we have? Or do we still have shelfware sitting around expensively doing nothing, because we don’t know how to "clean the spark plugs"? Can we remove the difficulties and make using test automation a better experience, just like driving a car?

On a human level, we crave outcomes and impact. But in software product development, there is something addictive about the "build more and more features" approach that often leaves people frustrated and unsatisfied. Developers understand the challenges of working in output-focused environments and the adverse effects this has on productivity, morale, and business impact. Join John Cutler as he discusses these "feature factories," why they exist, how they impact your business, and how you can shift the focus to outcomes and impact. John thoroughly makes the case that churning out features is no longer a competitive advantage and can in fact harm your business and disengage your team. Instead, he will show you how to move your organization beyond the feature factory and toward an outcome-based way of working that increases employee engagement and customer satisfaction.

All testers have users with unique needs. Are these needs included in your requirements? Lisa denDekker-Redemann says that was not always the case at UPS. Were we testing the mobile systems that our crew members use like we should? Sometimes to get it right, we have to go out into the...