Better Software Conference & Expo 2008 brochure

cOncuRRenT cLasses WednesdaY, june 11, 10:00 W1 ManaGinG proJeCts anD teaMs W5 testinG What’s the deal with “Best practices”—Revisiting the idea Dan North, Thoughtworks We talk about “best practices” as though they exist—an ideal way to manage a team, develop software, and test applications. All we have to do is discover what best practices are. At best, this is naïve, and at worst it’s an irresponsible way to approach anything, especially software development. Learning theory— specifically the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition—provides the missing context for practices in general and best practices in particular. Dan North describes how people really learn and acquire skills and helps you discover where and how to use the ideas offered by best practices. See how the arbitrary imposition of best practices is inherently risky and can have a detrimental effect on productivity and morale. Dan explains why the term “best practices” is flawed and suggests more useful ways of sharing experience and evolving what we do. Lessons Learned in programmer Testing James Newkirk, Microsoft It has been more than six years since the first release of NUnit 2.0, an open source unit testing tool. In that time literally millions of tests have been written using the tool. Many of these tests have become and continue to be invaluable resources for their teams. Unfortunately, many other NUnit-based tests have not been maintained and are now viewed as having been a waste of effort from the beginning. What separates tests that are used, maintained, and highly valued from tests that are quickly discarded? James Newkirk describes seven key ideas that are proven to increase the readability of NUnit tests and make them much easier to maintain. Learn about the impact of test fixture size and dependency injection on unit testing. James demonstrates how to use the attributes [ExpectedException], [Setup], and [TearDown] to make tests more readable. Incorporating these and the other lessons can make the difference between tests that become a burden to the team and tests that become practical, growing resources. W2 aGile ManaGeMent flow, pull, innovate: The secrets to agile adoption Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development Jean Tabaka provides straightforward guidance on how teams can begin their agile journey and learn to mature and scale into more and more discipline. The five-step approach emphasizes a path based on the principles of Lean Thinking—Flow, Pull, and Innovate. Each of the five steps outlines specific practices for growth as well as pitfalls and roadblocks to navigate and avoid. Step 1: The team learns to work in a continuous flow. Step 2: The team matures by pulling ready items from the backlog. Step 3: A group of teams adopts and scales up the individual team practices. Step 4: The scaling continues to cover multiple projects. Step 5: The practices are adopted throughout the entire organization. You can apply the disciplines discussed in this class to a single co-located team, a team of teams, or an entire organization eager to take advantage of both agile and lean approaches. Join Jean and learn to achieve the greatest innovations with a much lower risk of failure. W6 reQUireMents Beyond user stories: Managing Requirements by Business need Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives The use of stories in agile projects is commonplace. However, teams in many organizations have discovered limitations in the user story’s narrow view in complex projects. Attempts to coordinate related stories through “epics” and “themes” may help the details of managing the problem but generally leave the enterprise view unaddressed—particularly when multiple teams are working together. From his experiences on large agile projects, Alan Shalloway found that combining small pieces together to get a bigger view does not work as well as starting with the bigger view and segmenting it. With agile methods, you must go beyond stories and start with what is known as the “Minimally Releasable Feature” (MRF). The MRF creates the bigger picture of what constitutes business value and enables the management of small stories within this bigger picture. Thus you get the best of both worlds—the efficiency of agile methods aligned with the needs of the enterprise. Alan helps you expand the typical use of stories to keep the bigger business needs in mind while building the smaller pieces that the stories describe. W aGile DeVelopMent agile in the non-agile enterprise: hurdling Obstacles Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting Agile is entering the mainstream as a software development practice and leading wider organizational change in many companies. However, in large organizations, it’s not practical just to “flip a switch” and have your entire software department “go agile” all at once. In that situation, agile and non-agile teams must work together during the transition. Agile teams must continue to interface with their company’s business processes, while management must streamline traditional processes and activities. Agile teams face many obstacles in their quest for cooperative development—resistance to change; differing culture and value systems; changes to measurement, evaluation, and reward systems; and new contracting terms. Join Michele Sliger as she explains how to clear these and other common hurdles facing agile teams working in a traditional organization. Michele discusses the organizational issues that you must address as part of an enterprise-wide agile rollout. W7 speCial topiCs agile death Marches: fast, expensive, deadly Ken Schwaber, Advanced Development Methods, Inc. Traditional projects often culminate in death marches—when the developers ruin their lives while cutting quality in a vain attempt to hit dates. With the advent of agile processes, some teams have adopted this deadly practice in almost every software release iteration in which they participate, turning what was a periodic professional hazard into a complete disaster. The consequences of death marches can be seen throughout the industry as the ability of an organization to compete lessens and the consequences come home to roost. Join Ken Schwaber to look at the cause of the iterative and incremental death marches that agile practices “gone wrong” can engender. Ken considers the consequences for agile teams and the industries they serve. Learn to identity and defeat death marches before they start and prevent a death spiral in your current or next project. W4 proCess iMproVeMent More than the process police: cMMi® process and product Quality assurance Will McKnight, Next Level Consultants For organizations to succeed in process improvement efforts, they must determine whether newly introduced processes are, in fact, being adopted by managers and practitioners. The Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®) identifies this verification activity as Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA). If you think PPQA is simply “process police,” you’re not getting all that you should out of your CMMI® practices. Done right, PPQA can be a driving agent for change in your organization. Unfortunately, all too often PPQA ends up little more than a post-mortem review of what was done wrong. That approach, which offers little opportunity to change behavior, not only lowers the value of the process but also hampers change management efforts. Will McKnight demonstrates the potential of an efficient PPQA process. Take back a full functional PPQA process to help transform your process police into valuable, proactive change agents. 18 To regisTer call 888-268-8770 or 904-278-0524 or visiT www.sqe.com/bscereg http://www.sqe.com/bscereg

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Better Software Conference & Expo 2008 brochure

Better Software Conference & Expo Brochure Contents Conference At-A-Glance Special Events Conference Speakers 49 In-Depth Pre-Conference Tutorials 4 Keynote Presentations 42 Concurrent Classes Event Location and Las Vegas Highlights What Our Delegates are Saying Sponsors and Exhibitors Registration Information

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