Better Software - September 2008 - (Page ADP12) PRE-CONFERENCE TuTORIALS TuESDAy, NOvEMBER 11, 8:30-12:00 Tg getting Agile with Scrum Mike Cohn, Mountain Goat Software NEW HALF-DAY TUTORIALS A Certified Scrum trainer, Mike Cohn is the founder of Mountain Goat Software, a process and project management consultancy and training firm. He is the author of Agile Estimating and Planning and User Stories Applied for Agile Software Development, as well as books on Java and C++ programming. With more than twenty years of experience, Mike has previously been a technology executive in companies of various sizes—from startup to Fortune 40. A frequent magazine contributor and conference speaker, Mike is a founding member of the Scrum Alliance and the Agile Alliance. He can be reached at mike@mountaingoatsoftware.com. Since its origin on Japanese new product development projects in the 1980s, Scrum has become recognized as one of the best project management frameworks for handling rapidly changing and evolving development projects. With more than 30,000 Certified ScrumMasters, Scrum is one of the leading agile software development successes. It is especially valuable for product development projects with significant technology uncertainty or changing requirements. Through teaching, interactive discussions, and hands-on exercises, Mike Cohn covers the basics of what you need to know to get started with Scrum. learn about all the key aspects of Scrum, including product and sprint backlog, the sprint planning meeting, the sprint review, conducting a sprint retrospective, activities that occur during sprints, measuring and monitoring progress, and scaling Scrum to work with large and distributed teams. Find out about the roles and responsibilities of the ScrumMaster, the product owner, and each member of the Scrum team. Equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, product managers and anyone else interested in improving product delivery, this session will help you and your team “get agile.” TH Leading Successful Pollyanna Pixton, Accelinnova Projects in Changing Environments There’s no doubt about it—agile has gone mainstream. Short delivery iterations give organizations the means to incorporate change safely, reach go/no-go decisions early, and discover realistic team velocities. Managers can better determine if market windows can be reached, thus placing successful products in customers’ hands. But what if the ground beneath the project team is changing rapidly even as it is trying to make progress? Pollyanna Pixton shares a collaboration model and iterative delivery process that will help you succeed, even in unstable conditions. She presents her ideas on creating an open environment, identifying the talent the team needs, managing risks, and creating team ownership to ensure great results. Among the skills you need are a collaborative, transparent leadership style; an approach to positively influence outcomes; collaborative communication; and then the knowledge of when to stand back and let things happen. leave this session with some keys to successfully lead agile project teams—even in the midst of chaos. An international collaborative leadership expert, Pollyanna Pixton developed the models for collaboration and collaborative leadership through her thirty-five years of working in and consulting with corporations and organizations. She helps companies create workplaces where talent and innovation are unleashed—making them more productive, efficient, and profitable. Pollyanna is a founding partner of Accelinnova, president of Evolutionary Systems, director of the Institute for Collaborative Leadership, and co-author of the forthcoming book, Stand Back and Deliver: Tools For leading Agility due out early 2009. She co-founded the Agile Project Leadership Network (APLN) and chaired APLN Leadership Summits in London, Minneapolis, and Orlando. Contact her at ppixton@accelinnova.com. Rob Myers has more than twenty years of professional experience in software development, including projects for industry leaders in medical, aerospace, and financial services. In the late 1990s, Rob became an eXtreme Programming coach and traveled throughout the U.S. and abroad assisting teams with agile practices and object-oriented design techniques. He teaches Test-Driven Development, Design Patterns Explained, Implementing Scrum for Your Team, LeanAgile Testing, and other courses. Rob brings to each classroom his passion for Lean software development, team development, and sane work environments. Johanna Rothman consults, speaks, and writes on managing high-technology product development. She has helped engineering organizations, IT organizations, and startups hire technical people, manage projects, and release successful products faster. Johanna is the author of the Jolt Productivity Award winner Manage It! Your guide to Modern, Pragmatic Project Management and Hiring the Best Knowledge Workers, Techies & Nerds: The Secrets and Science of Hiring Technical People, and co-author with Esther Derby of the pragmatic Behind Closed Doors: Secrets of great Management. Johanna is a host of the Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) conference. Dan North has been working with software for twenty years, starting with playing Star Wars at a games company in the late 1980s. After graduating, he did real work, programming C on UNIX. Dan has worked in digital imaging, investment banking, ISPs, telcos, and car leasing. His sense of timing is demonstrated by his writing billing software for WorldCom in the late 1990s, consulting on sub-prime mortgage systems, and writing a trading platform for collateralized debt obligations (the product of choice for the credit meltdown). Since 2002, Dan has been a consultant with ThoughtWorks (thoughtworks.com) where he advocates simple, pragmatic common sense. He likes to talk about SOA, lean software development, NLP, and behavior-driven development (BDD). Dan occasionally blogs at http://dannorth.net. Gerard Meszaros is a software development consultant with twenty-five years of experience in software and nearly a decade of experience applying agile methods. A leader in test automation patterns, refactoring of software and tests, and design for testability, Gerard has applied automated unit and acceptance testing on projects ranging from full-on eXtreme Programming to traditional waterfall development. He is an expert in implementing and customizing agile methods, such as Scrum and eXtreme Programming, and is a proponent of including usability practices on agile projects. A frequent presenter at major conferences, Gerard authored xUnit Test Patterns—Refactoring Test Code which recently recently won a Jolt Productivity Award. TI Measuring and Rob Myers, Net Objectives using your Team’s Velocity NEW “velocity” is an oft-misunderstood agile term. Developers worry they’re being evaluated based on this quantity. Managers want to know how to increase it. The team’s definition of velocity—explicit or implicit—affects the way the team estimates stories, plans iterations, and tracks progress. The definition of velocity must be consistent and agreed upon by everyone or planning efforts will quickly unravel. Using money as a metaphor, Rob Myers illustrates how to successfully employ velocity in your iteration planning. In a hands-on simulation, you’ll experience an agile iteration planning session that concretely demonstrates how velocity really works. learn about estimation techniques, such as “planning poker,” and try out a valuable, rapid-estimation technique based on story-complexity. See how Big visible Charts reveal the team’s progress through iterations and releases. Discuss what you need to do to plan for vacations, meetings, sick days, and surprises. Rob explores the “Four variables” of software development and what to do when the answer to the question, “Are we on schedule?” is “No.” TJ Hiring for an Agile Team: Candidates Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group Who Fit NEW Even candidates who have experience on agile teams may not be experienced working the same way your team works. And, because not everyone is using the same—or any—agile approaches, some people who are not using the same approaches as your team may be perfect—or not. How do you decide? If you’ve tried to hire technical people, you know you can’t rely on their résumé describing “agile experience” to be a predictor of success. Nor can a résumé that doesn’t specifically cite “agile experience” be a predictor of failure. Will the candidate be just right for your open position—even if technical skill is not an issue? Hiring for your team doesn’t have to be frustrating. Instead, you can reframe your interviewer role to be that of a detective. You need to define your team’s culture in advance and determine during the interview process whether or not a candidate fits into that culture. In this hands-on session, you will practice defining the essential technical and non-technical skills for your teams, identify your cultural issues, and practice interviewing so that your next hire will be successful. Behavior-Driven Development: Writing Software that Matters NEW TK Dan North, ThoughtWorks Behavior-driven development (BDD) is a new approach in the evolution of agile software delivery. With its roots in test-driven development, domain-driven design, and automated acceptance testing, BDD focuses on the ways an application is expected to work—its behavior. By constantly reflecting on the varied points of view of different stakeholders, BDD helps ensure that product owners and the development team are in-sync on what is really needed and what to work on next. In this highly interactive session, Dan North introduces the principles behind BDD and describes how it works in practice. He provides an overview of the methodology of BDD: understanding your domain and who your stakeholders are, identifying and exploring requirements, automating acceptance criteria, and delivering working and tested software. Dan then lo http://thoughtworks.com http://dannorth.net http://WWW.SQE.COM/ADPREG
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