Better Software - September 2008 - (Page ADP20) CONCuRRENT CLASSES THuRSDAy, NOvEMBER 13, 12:45 p.m. T8 PEOPLE & TEAMS T12 TESTINg “With great Power Comes great Responsibility”—Empowering the Agile Team V. Lee Henson, VersionOne Managers at many levels are often afraid to let go of the reins for fear of losing control of the project (and their position of power). v. lee Henson explains the benefits of letting go and outlines the expectations of a responsible, empowered agile team. Through presentation of multiple real-world scenarios and years of project management experience, lee will show that often our own human nature is the greatest impediment to being a better manager. lee focuses on the attributes of an effective agile manager/leader, the expectations and attributes of an empowered agile team, the pitfalls and warning signs of a “damaged” team, and the rewards an organization can expect from adhering to basic agile principles. You will leave with the tools to help any agile team become more empowered. Agile usability Testing John De Goes, N-BRAIN, Inc. Agile development has become mainstream in the past few years, and for thousands of companies around the world, it has succeeded in reducing risk and delivering more value for less money. Yet, with the emphasis on pleasing the customer and the philosophy of doing the simplest thing that could possibly work, there’s one area where agile development has fallen short of more traditional methodologies—creating highly usable software. Practices such as test-driven development and continuous integration show little concern for the end-user experience. John De goes explains the importance of creating humane software and how he has integrated userinterface design and usability testing into the tight feedback loop that is the hallmark of agile development processes. John illustrates this process with snippets from usability tests that he has conducted, feedback from end users, and data on how usability testing improves customers’ ROI. T9 AgILE MANAgEMENT T13 AgILE DESIgN & ARCHITECTuRE A Lean Approach to Managing the Project Portfolio Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group Whether you’ve been agile for a while or are still thinking about it, you have one thing in common with every other software team I’ve encountered. You have too much work to do. One way to organize your work is with a project portfolio. But if your portfolio is an “as desired” portfolio, you still haven’t solved the problem of too much work. Fortunately, taking a lean approach to managing the portfolio helps make those problems of “desired” and “too much work” transparent. Johanna Rothman discusses the several choices you have in managing the portfolio. She presents a project portfolio plan at the highest level and the lowest level and describes how to apply rolling wave planning to your project portfolio. Johanna discusses ways you can evaluate the projects in your portfolio, whether it’s a kanban board, a fixed queue, a fixed timebox, or other evaluation approach. getting Agile with Legacy Code Steve Berczuk, Cyrus Innovation Applying agile methods to legacy code is challenging. You have to live with code that is not as testable or as modular as you’d like, and you have to manage support concerns that disrupt your iteration plan—all while trying to establish new build and testing practices. Even if your project is agile, you may have dependencies on legacy projects that are not delivering at iteration boundaries. Steve Berczuk explains how to be agile with a legacy code base using design, testing, build, and software configuration management practices so that you can be agile even when your code is not. You’ll leave better understanding how to balance the requirements of working with an existing code base with the desire to have a more agile development environment. T14 SPECIAL TOPICS T10 AgILE PROJECTS Maximizing Team Dynamics and Overcoming Dysfunction in Agile Environments Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc. Change can be painful, but staying stagnant can hurt even more. Deciding to “go agile“ may be the right choice for many companies, but seeing Scrum or XP as the next silver bullet can be a mistake—or perhaps the right medicine at the wrong time. In the rush to be faster, better, cheaper, or superinnovative, it’s possible to become trapped in organizational dysfunction, even to the extent whereby good medicine won’t work. When companies seek to “become agile,“ what roadblocks might they hit that could increase risk of failure? Michael Mah presents examples of companies that have overcome problems, plus a few who didn’t. learn how systems theory plays a role in software development, why complex communication and expert thinking are the penultimate challenges facing knowledge workers today, and how accurate and reliable metrics are to revealing patterns that help managers find the right path through their software development jungle. Agile Project Inception: Escaping the Waterfall Kenny Rubin, Innolution Whether you are working on a new development effort or the next release of an existing system, you are probably required to make a compelling business case for the proposed work to clear an approval committee’s “go/ no-go” process. As an approval prerequisite, many organizations require big up-front planning and estimating resulting in a “complete” project plan including dates, costs, and resources. However, a key aspect of agility is an incremental, just-in-time approach to planning and estimating. Kenny Rubin focuses on how to align management and agile teams to eliminate the message of “build in an agile way but still provide all of the same waterfall-like artifacts to get your project approved.” Kenny describes different resource-allocation and organizational-constraint models and then focuses on agile techniques for incrementally answering reasonable versions of questions, such as: “When will the project be completed?” “How much functionality can be developed by a particular date?” and “How much will the project cost?” T11 AgILE PROCESSES The Business Value of Pair Programming Rob Myers, Net Objectives After ten years in the public eye, pair programming (two people seated together, working on the same programming task) is still one of the most controversial of all the agile programming practices. Managers are concerned about the cost of having “two doing the work of one,” and developers are concerned about what will happen to their privacy, their reputations, and their personal performance metrics. Rob Myers dispels these and other concerns by examining the lean aspects of the technique and by describing subtle (yet high-dividend) benefits. Rob’s “Top Ten” contains only benefits that provide clear and significant value to the organization, the team, and the individual. Rob also gives some clear advice on how to try this technique and evaluate the results. You will be better equipped to weigh the costs, benefits, and ROI of pair programming, and to decide whether or not it is valuable for your organization. “I captured new and helpful information from these sessions. Our company has been developing applications in agile for about 1½ years now. It feels good to know that we’re applying practices that the speakers have indicated, and at the same time I’ve heard new things that will help us improve our process.” — Agile Development Practices 2007 Delegate 20 CAll 888.268.8770 OR 904.278.0524 TO REgISTER • W W W. S Q E . C O M /A D P R E g http://WWW.SQE.COM/ADPREG
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