Concurrent Sessions

Speaker: Jason Schreuder

Agile has feedback loops on the products we build, and on the process we use to do it, but people feedback is really hard! Studies have shown that people have a negative physiological reaction to just the thought of having to give or receive feedback. But are we conditioned to be terrible at feedback from our experiences in traditional work environments, with all of their power dynamics and political undercurrents? In this talk, we will explore the science behind giving and receiving feedback, and how you can create a culture where everyone actually asks for feedback, continually, and celebrates it as a cultural norm. Even the best agilists struggle working with teams on safety, trust, and feedback. This is a crucial leadership skill, and leaders at all levels should be well versed in this topic.

Learning Outcomes:

• Interpret the science behind giving and receiving feedback
• Compare various elements of effective feedback
• Discuss models of kind, human-centered feedback that you can use in your teams

Speaker: Jason Schreuder

Want Real Agility? Change your Management Culture First. You have probably seen agile practices take root in teams throughout your organization. With frameworks and team-level practices designed to deliver more effectively, you have probably already seen great improvements. But this is only the tip of the iceberg. To get the real business benefits from a customer-centric, collaborative, learn-fast approach, you need to change your management culture. This will take some real, hard work and self-development from leaders throughout your organization. Agile is changing the way your people work, but now you need to transform how managers manage.

Learning Outcomes:

• Recognize the long-held concepts of management that have hindered organizations on their path to agility
• Discuss concepts, techniques and leadership approaches that are on the cutting edge of management innovation
• Distinguish key leadership traits needed to be effective in this responsive, agile world

Speaker: Ken Pugh

Speaker: Ken Pugh

The DevOps pipeline delivers business value to the customer. Two ways to accelerate this delivery are to reduce defects that cause loopbacks and delays and to have testing take less time. Behavior Driven Development (BDD) helps with these aspects of software delivery. In this session, Ken Pugh introduces BDD, explains how it works, and outlines the different roles that team members play in the process.

Speaker: Anne Hungate

Speaker: Chris Lawson

If you Google “Testing Frameworks”, you’ll see millions of articles with conflicting information. In this presentation, Chris cuts through the noise to reveal the critical pieces you’ll need in order to develop an effective framework using open source tools.

Speaker: Chris Lawson

Navigating and understanding the DevOps world can be time-consuming and tricky. In this presentation, Chris explores what DevOps is and is not according to industry standards.

Speaker: Josh Anderson

You’ve read dozens of books on agile and hundreds of articles, but no one actually told you how to build the team of your dreams. Josh Anderson brings the real-world experience of growing a team from zero engineers to thirty while shipping five products—and he did it is less than a year. Learn how to build a team from scratch or transform your existing team into a mystical self-directed team, and understand how leadership operates in a world of self-directed teams. You’ll be able to take these lessons home and hire, grow, and support self-directed teams, then start changing the world.

Speaker: David Dang

As companies “shift left” and “flip the Quality triangle,” unit testing is becoming the most critical aspect of software quality. However, Quality Assurance teams traditionally have not been highly involved in unit testing, as it has always been viewed as part of development providing QA with minimal visibility into those activities. Furthermore, many QA team members feel they are not technical enough to understand or assist in unit testing. How do we bridge the unit testing gaps with QA team members?

Join David Dang as he explains the benefits of QA involvement in unit testing as well as how to identify the type of unit testing needed to ensure quality. Dive deeper into the benefits of unit testing on an organizational level; such as reduced costs to fix bugs, improved cross team collaboration, higher ROI, and quicker product releases. Moreover, he explains the three levels of involvement (comprehending, defining, and authoring) for QA team members. David’s session will provide top insight into how you can better barter up your QA techniques to test smarter.

Speaker: David Dang

Mobile landscapes are constantly changing with new devices, OS, and mobile features being introduced to consumers. It can be extremely costly and time consuming for you to provide full testing coverage on mobile websites and apps. At the same time, you may be afraid of missing important functionalities or features that impact the users. So, what should you do? How should you approach mobile testing more efficiently and effectively? David Dang will show you how to use analytics to minimize risks and define the different types of analytics available on web and mobile products. In addition, he will demonstrate the use of web analytics on new mobile projects and as well as explain how to utilize mobile analytics to continuously fine-tune your mobile testing efforts. Join David for a demo on how to use your analytics so you walk away with the knowledge you need to better define your functional and regression mobile testing.

Speaker: Bob Galen

Mike Cohn introduced the notion of the Agile Test Automation pyramid ~ 2005. Since then, many have adopted its approach to strategizing and developing automation in agile contexts. It’s stood the test of time, is a very sound strategy, and has proved successful.

However, in his travels, Bob Galen sees far too many companies who are going agile who aren’t aware of the strategy or who are simply getting it wrong. In this talk, we’ll revisit the ATA Pyramid in all it’s glory. Exploring the intricacies and sharing stories of real companies who’ve made it work. You’ll leave with a better understanding of and a how-to with respect to getting you automation strategy successful in agile and DevOps contexts.

Speaker: Bob Galen

Quite a bit of the focus for Agile Development has been on Scrum. But over the past few years, Kanban has been making important progress in the agile community as an “alternative” to Scrum. It has some interesting capabilities that make it, in many cases, easier to implement than Scrum. It also has a stronger connection to the Lean community.

Join experienced Agile Coach & Trainer Bob Galen has he provides you a brief introduction to Kanban. You’ll get a crisp overview of the methodology. Then you’ll get the chance to practice a bit as we go through a quick, fun, and informative simulation (The Kanban Pizza Game) that will solidify your understanding of Kanban and enable you to try it yourself.

Speaker: Shaun Bradshaw

Metrics presentations have been a staple of software conferences for years. But, why are they so popular? Businesses rely on data to make decisions and metrics allow them to roll up data into bite-sized morsels of deliciousness for managerial consumption. The key however, is identifying which sets of metrics 1) give a valid picture of what’s happening in the organization and 2) provide enough information for teams and leaders to act upon.

In this presentation, Shaun Bradshaw, once referred to as the Minister of Metrics, discusses four sets of “healthy” agile metrics, which when applied in a balanced manner, can give significant insights into an organization’s place along the agile transformation continuum. Implementing these metrics will also assist organizations in honing in on areas that are working well or need improvement to take them to the next level.

Learning Objectives: Attendees should walk away understanding

• Key metrics dysfunctions to avoid
• 4 sets of measurement areas that can be effectively applied to determine areas where improvements should be made
• How these areas of measurement work together to provide a balanced view of organizational agile transformation

Speaker: Shaun Bradshaw

Testing in agile teams is still one of the great mysteries of the agile world. In some organizations, testers are marginalized or non-existent. In others, testers are active, but rarely understand or reach the full breadth and depth of their role.

In this presentation, we’re going to explore the practices and mindset of “fully empowered” agile testers on high-performance agile teams. Shaun Bradshaw has been coaching agile teams for over 10 years, and has seen it all – dysfunction to underperformance to high-performance. He’ll share real world tactics that will help you guide your team towards higher performance.

We’ll explore defect management, test planning, documentation, test development & execution in agile contexts. We’ll also look at different testing strategies covering risk-based, automated, exploratory, and other manual testing practices. But beyond that, Shaun will leave you armed with an agile testing mindset that focuses on whole team collaboration, respect, and results.

Learning Objectives:

• Review how testing is different in agile contexts vs. traditional testing
• Explore the characteristics of strong agile testers
• Discuss patterns of effective agile testers and test teams that can be modeled in other organizations
• Review cautionary tells of anti-patterns that slip in from traditional testing