Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2011

PRESENTATIONS

Five Dysfunctions of Agile Teams

Is your agile team not reaching their potential? They may be suffering from internal dysfunctions that contribute to less than optimal results.

Bob Hartman, Agile For All

Focusing Testing on Business Needs

Many testers mourn the state of their state-undervalued, unrespected, and often excluded from important project conversations. Even though their advice may be dismissed, many testers somehow believe that they are accountable for software quality. Why does this happen? Testers often forget that they are service providers whose role is to provide critical information to the project’s stakeholders.

Selena Delesie, Delesie Solutions

Geography Matters: What Data Tells Us About Offshoring, Co-locating, and the Flat World

Has the digital revolution really made it possible to do almost anything collaboratively with people separated by time and distance? Or are decisions to split software development around the globe more about pressure to cut costs and less about tapping the intellectual capital from other nations?

Michael Mah, QSM Associates, Inc.

Getting Executive Management on the Agile Bus

Much of the focus on agile transitions is on the team. However, the business side of an organization and the managers that lead it are not particularly interested in the mechanisms of agile teams and processes. They want faster time to market, schedule flexibility, predictability, visibility, better quality, and useful metrics. In other words, they want to know about things that help them get to success and that show when they've achieved it. Alan Shalloway describes agile development from an executive's point of view.

Alan Shalloway, Net Objectives
Growing and Nurturing Coaching for Sustained Agility

Where agile thrives, great coaching is present. Whether formal or informal, coaching is a key ingredient for successful and lasting agility. Unfortunately, many people call themselves coaches yet they fail to do any real, helpful coaching. David Hussman presents tactics for growing coaching in your organization. He begins by focusing on finding coaching candidates-what skills and attributes they need-and then engaging them to grow their coaching capabilities.

David Hussman, DevJam

Implementing a Security-focused Development Lifecycle

Assaults against digital assets are unquestionably on the rise. If you create applications that handle valuable assets, your code WILL be attacked. In addition to lost revenue and productivity, the consequences of compromised systems can include loss of trust, a tarnished reputation, and legal problems. Much like quality assurance, it’s important to have a holistic approach to security that unifies people, process, and technology.

Cassio Goldschmidt, Symantec Corporation
Improving Your CMMI Organization through Lean and Agile Techniques

The good news is that your organization has documented its processes and you've achieved a CMMI® rating. However, you are hearing complaints such as, "We need to increase our agility to respond more rapidly to customer needs" or "Why do our processes require work that adds little value to the product?" So, what can you do? Contrary to popular belief, the CMMI® and lean-agile techniques are not at odds-in fact, they complement each other.

Paul McMahon, PEM Systems
Industrial Strength Exploratory Testing

During the past few years, exploratory testing (ET) has gained popularity as one of the most efficient styles of testing for smaller agile development teams. It has a proven advantage of finding defects faster over larger areas of the software. However, exploratory testing is not a mainstay in large-scale, enterprise product testing. Anutthara Bharadwaj explores some of the myths surrounding ET-lack of planning, misconstruing exploration as ad-hoc testing, lack of metrics, deficiency of actionable data in defect reports, and more.

Anutthara Bharadwaj, Microsoft India (R&D) Pvt. Ltd
Mobile App Development: It's Harder Than You Think

You're thinking of creating a mobile application to take advantage of the sky-rocketing potential of mobile phones and other smart devices. Serious and critical choices must be made. Which platforms and technologies do you support? Are web-based applications the best approach? What sort of testing will you need-from whom, when, and how much will it cost? Do you want to create applications that take advantage of the mobile platforms’ capabilities such as location-aware features?

Julian Harty, ebay, Inc.
Pair Development: How Programmers and Testers Benefit

Automated tests are a foundation of agile software development. Many experts teach that developers should write unit tests and testers should write higher-level tests. However, many of the practices, such as test-driven development and pair programming, say little about how programmers and testers could work together. Shannon Prue (developer) and Dawn Cannan (tester) describe and demonstrate the interactions between the developer and tester pairing to implement a user story.

Dawn Cannan, 42 Lines

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