Better Software Conference & Expo 2008 brochure

MOndaY pRe-cOnfeRence TuTORiaLs MOndaY, june 9, 8:0–12:00 (MORning haLf-daY) influence strategies for practitioners HALF DAY Mh Linda Rising, Independent Consultant You’ve tried and tried to convince people of your position. You’ve laid out your logical arguments on impressive PowerPoint slides—but you are still not able to sway them. Cognitive scientists understand that the approach you are taking is rarely successful. Often you must speak to others’ subconscious motivators rather than their rational, analytic side. Linda Rising shares influence strategies that you can use to more effectively convince others to see things your way. These strategies take advantage of a number of hardwired traits: “liking”—we like people who are like us; “reciprocity”—we repay in kind; “social proof”—we follow the lead of others similar to us; “consistency”—we align ourselves with our previous commitments; “authority”—we defer to authority figures; and “scarcity”—we want more of something when there is less to be had. Learn how to build on these traits as a way of bringing others to your side. Use this valuable toolkit in addition to the logical left-brain techniques on which we depend. Linda Rising has a Ph.D. from Arizona State University in the field of object-based design metrics and a background that includes university teaching and industry work in telecommunications, avionics, and strategic weapons systems. An internationally known presenter on topics related to patterns, retrospectives, and the change process, Linda is the author of Design Patterns in Communications, The Pattern Almanac 2000, A Patterns Handbook, and co-author with Mary Lynn Manns of Fearless Change: Patterns for Introducing New Ideas. Find more information about Linda at www.lindarising.org. DAY Mi HALF user story Mapping Jeff Patton, Independent Consultant Is your agile project buried under a mountain of user stories? As you add stories, does your vision of the product you’re building grow hazier? As story count increases, do business stakeholders become more frustrated with prioritization? Do you find it difficult to communicate the big picture of what your system does? User story mapping is a simple approach to gathering and organizing user stories. A story map will help you prioritize stories into sensible releases that maximize value by placing emphasis on the users of the software and what they can accomplish when the software is released. In a fun and fast-paced tutorial, Jeff Patton reviews the basics of good agile stories and describes approaches for gathering and combining user stories into a story map. Leverage story maps for planning incremental releases and for breaking down large stories into smaller pieces of work. For the past twelve years, jeff patton has designed and developed software on a wide variety of projects from on-line aircraft parts ordering to electronic medical records. A winner of the Agile Alliance’s 2007 Gordon Pask Award for contributions to agile development, Jeff has focused on agile approaches since working on an early Extreme Programming team in 2000. He specializes in the application of user centered design techniques to improve agile requirements, planning, and products. Some of Jeff’s recent writing on the subject can be found at www.agileproductdesign.com. Jeff’s forthcoming book gives tactical advice to those seeking to deliver useful, usable, and valuable software. With more than eighteen years of experience in the IT industry julie gardiner has spent time as an analyst programmer, Oracle DBA, and project manager. She has first hand experience as a test analyst, test team leader, test consultant, and test manager. At Grove Consultants Julie provides consultancy and training in all aspects of testing, specializing in risk-based testing, agile testing, test management, and people issues. She is a certified SCRUM master. Julie won best presentation at STAREAST 2007 and 2005; best presentation at BCS SIGiST 2005; and best tutorial at EuroSTAR 2006. Risk-Based Testing: a systematic approach HALF DAY Mj Julie Gardiner, Grove Consultants Risks are endemic in every phase of every project. One key to project success is to identify, understand, and manage these risks effectively. However, risk management is not the sole domain of the project manager, particularly with regard to product quality. It is here that the effective tester can significantly influence the project outcome. Shortened time scales, particularly in the latter stages of projects, are a frustration with which most of us are familiar. Julie Gardiner explains how risk-based testing can shape the quality of the delivered product in spite of such time constraints. Join Julie as she reveals how you can apply product risk management to a variety of organizational, technology, project, and skills challenges. Receive practical advice—gained through interactive exercises—on how to apply risk management techniques throughout the testing lifecycle, from planning through execution and reporting. Take back a practical process and the tools you need to apply risk analysis to testing in your organization. One iteration at a Time: The Life of an agile Tester HALF DAY MK Lisa Crispin, ePlan Services, Inc. Has your organization recently implemented agile development practices? Or are they considering doing so? As test manager, tester, or someone involved in testing on a daily basis, you may have questions. What do testers do during the first part of an iteration—before anything’s ready to test? Where does user acceptance testing fit into an agile release cycle? How can testing possibly keep up with two-week development cycles? During eight years of working on and with a variety of agile teams, Lisa Crispin has determined which practices and skills help agile testers succeed. Learn what testers do during release or “theme” planning when the team determines the work it will do for several upcoming iterations. Follow a tester’s activities through the start, middle, and end of one two-week development iteration. Discover the new roles testers must embrace to help ensure a successful release, including the end-game, user acceptance testing, packaging, documentation, and training. In this interactive session, hands-on exercises, real-life examples, and group discussions give you the practical testing-related skills necessary to succeed with agile development. Laptop required A tester on agile teams since 2000, Lisa crispin currently works as a tester at ePlan Services Inc., developing Web-based financial applications using XP and Scrum. She leads tutorials and workshops on agile testing at conferences in the US and Europe. Lisa regularly contributes articles about agile testing to publications such as Better Software magazine, IEEE Software, and Methods and Tools. Lisa co-authored Testing Extreme Programming with Tip House, and is co-writing Agile Testing: The Tester Role in Agile Development with Janet Gregory. For more about Lisa’s work, visit her Web sites: http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net and http://www.agiletester.ca. functional programming Makes a comeback HALF DAY ML Chuck Allison, Utah Valley University Functional Programming (FP), which treats computational algorithms as mathematical functions, is arguably the oldest programming paradigm—it was developed well before computers were invented. With the fast pace of our industry today, you’d think FP would be old news. Ironically, popular programming languages are now rediscovering its power and simplicity. C++ has function objects and adapters; C# has delegates and lambda expressions; Java is adding closures; ML and the new D language have all of these. A few newer, dynamically-typed languages including Python and Ruby have always had FP capabilities. What exactly is functional programming? What is its timeless appeal? How can you use FP to improve your designs and code? In this hands-on workshop, Chuck Allison helps you examine functional programming’s constructs and idioms, how they work in today’s languages, and how they can increase your programming effectiveness while making your code more expressive and easier to read and understand. To take full advantage of this hands-on session, bring a laptop installed with the Python (www.python.org) and ML (www.smlnj.org/) languages. Visual Studio (C# and C++) and D (www.digitalmars.com) are optional. Before becoming a professor of computer science at Utah Valley University, chuck allison developed software for more than twenty years. He is a contributing editor for Better Software magazine and editor of The C++ Source, an online journal. He spent most of the 1990s as an active member of the C++ Standards Committee and is author of Thinking In C++, Volume 2, with Bruce Eckel. Chuck offers onsite training in C++, Python, and Design Patterns. Whenever he finds a little down time, Chuck plays classical guitar or bikes the country roads of central Utah. Contact him at chuck@ freshsources.com. ending deadly Meetings: The Keys to success HALF DAY MM David Spann, Agile Adaptive Management, Inc. Do you hate meetings? Have you attended a release planning meeting when most of the “right” people were not in attendance? Or when the meeting ends, no one really understands what the next steps are and who is responsible for them? Have you ever been in a meeting where everyone is pointing fingers at everyone else so you have to have yet another meeting to sort out who is right and who is wrong? Are some meetings simply a waste of your time—with everyone leaving more confused than when they arrived? If any of these descriptions fit your situation or if you just want your meetings to be more focused and productive, this tutorial is for you. David Spann presents key practices to help groups define and then focus on their purpose for meeting, debate the merits of possible solutions, and leave with specific actions. Make sure that your next meeting is productive—issues are resolved quickly and http://www.lindarising.org http://www.agileproductdesign.com http://lisa.crispin.home.att.net http://www.agiletester.ca http://www.python.org http://freshsources.com http://www.smlnj.org/ http://www.digitalmars.com 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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