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Project Management Tutorial – Morning
Agile Estimation and Planning
Ken Rubin
Planning is important, even for agile projects. Too many teams view planning as something to be avoided and too many organizations view plans as something to hold against their development teams. In this session you will learn how to break that cycle by learning and practicing skills that will help create useful plans that lead to reliable decision-making. You will learn about story points, ideal days, and how to estimate with “Planning Poker.” Both short-term iteration and long-term release planning will be covered.
This session will be equally suited for managers, programmers, testers, or anyone involved in estimating or planning a project.
Project Management Tutorial – Afternoon
Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements
Ken Rubin
The technique of expressing requirements as user stories is one of the most broadly applicable techniques introduced by the agile processes. User stories are an effective approach on all time constrained projects and are a great way to begin introducing a bit of agility to your projects.
In this session, we will look at how to identify and write good user stories. The class will describe the six attributes that good stories should exhibit and present thirteen guidelines for writing better stories. We will explore how user role modeling can help when gathering a project’s initial stories.
Because requirements touch all job functions on a development project, this tutorial will be equally suited for analysts, customers, testers, programmers, managers, or anyone involved in a software development project. By the end of this tutorial, you will leave knowing the six attributes of a good story, learn a good format for writing most user stories, learn practical techniques for gathering user stories, know how much work to do up-front and how much to do just-in-time.
Kenneth S. Rubin is President of Innolution, a company that provides Agile and Scrum-related training and consulting. Mr. Rubin has a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and his M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and has worked as a developer, product owner, and ScrumMaster on numerous development projects that involve Agile and Scrum. He also has held most executive management roles within software companies including: CEO, COO, VP of Engineering, VP of Product Management, VP of Marketing and VP of Professional Services. Mr. Rubin has trained over 10,000 people on a variety of topics ranging from Agile/Scrum, Smalltalk development, managing object-oriented projects, and transition management. He is the co-author of the book “Succeeding with Objects: Decision Frameworks for Project Management”, and the primary developer of the Object Behavior Analysis and Design (OBA/D) methodology. Mr. Rubin is also the Managing Director of the Scrum Alliance, a non-profit organization focused on the world-wide adoption of the Scrum development process. Previously Mr. Rubin has held positions with StrionAir, InforSense Ltd, Genomica Corporation, Secant Technologies, IBM and ParcPlace Systems and has consulted with over 200 companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10.
Development Tutorial – Morning and Afternoon
Your First Day On Rails
Chad Fowler
Since its introduction in 2004, Ruby on Rails continues to make waves in the web development world. Released in a storm of hype, the Rails framework has drawn acclaim and criticism—-from hero worship to FUD-laden negativity. Claims of Rails’ 10x productivity increase were met with both skepticism and seemingly religious fanaticism. Love it or hate it, Rails has cast an industry-visible light on the dynamic language world and has helped to change the industry’s assumptions about what is both necessary and possible in Web application development.
This interactive tutorial will lead you through the fundamentals of
both Ruby and Rails in a single day. Together, we’ll build a Rails
application from start to finish, leading you through the major
features of the framework and providing a clear path for your own
future exploration of the framework. By the end of the tutorial, you
will have been exposed to:
- What “dynamic language” means and why it’s important
- Object/relational Mapping with Active Record
- All layers of the Model View Controller pattern in Rails
- Rails’ AJAX support
- XML and REST APIs
...and more.
You’ll leave the tutorial with a working application under your belt
and a solid of understanding of how to move to the next step on the
path to Rails enlightenment.
Chad Fowler has been a software developer and manager for some of the
world’s largest corporations. His experiences include moving to India,
to set up and lead an offshore software development center. He is
co-founder of Ruby Central, Inc., a non-profit corporation responsible
for the annual International Ruby Conference and The International
Rails Conference, and is a leading contributor in the Ruby community.
Chad is a contributor and editor for numerous books and is author of
My Job Went to India (and all I got was this lousy book): 52 Ways to
Save Your Job and Rails Recipes.
Testing Tutorial – Morning
Birds’s-eye view of testing techniques and management
Dot Graham
This half-day tutorial takes a high-level view of the most important aspects of testing: how to do it, and how to manage it.
We will look at what testing techniques are, the benefits of using techniques, how the different techniques are complementary to each other, and how to increase the effectives of testing while at the same time making it more efficient. We will look at exploratory testing in particular, as it is agile and popular (though not a panacea).
Managing testing sometimes seems like an oxymoron – an impossible task. In particular test estimation is seen as a difficult area. We will look at how estimating testing is both the same and different from estimating other activities, and give you some ideas to make your estimation more accurate. We will look at what can be monitored during testing, and how to keep track of the most important things, using examples of a number of useful metrics and techniques.
We conclude by describing a very simple but extremely useful technique for measuring how good the testing has been: DDP (Defect Detection Percentage).
Dorothy Graham is the founder of Grove Consultants which is based in the UK and provides advice, training and inspiration in software testing, testing tools and Inspection. Originally from Grand Rapids Michigan, she has lived and worked in the UK for over 30 years.
Dot is co-author with Tom Gilb of “Software Inspection”, Addison-Wesley, 1993, co-author with Mark Fewster of “Software Test Automation”, Addison-Wesley, 1999, and co-author with Rex Black, Erik Van Veenendaal and Isabel Evans of “Foundations of Software Testing: ISTQB Certification”, Thomson, 2007.
Dorothy was Programme Chair for the first European Software Testing Conference in 1993. At the EuroSTAR conference in Barcelona in 1999 she was awarded the IBM European Excellence Award in Software Testing.
Dot is an active participant in working parties that develop international syllabuses for software testing qualifications and was a founder member of the ISEB software testing board. Her work with Grove Consultants involves consultancy, developing new course materials and presenting training courses. She is a popular and entertaining presenter both at Conferences and training courses.
Testing Tutorial – Afternoon
A (Rapid) Introduction To Rapid Software Testing
Michael Bolton
Rapid Software Testing is a skills-based philosophy and methodology developed by James Bach. This approach allows testers to do excellent work in conditions of uncertainty, insufficient information, and extreme time pressure, in a way that will stand up to scrutiny. Rapid testing finds important bugs quickly, emphasizes thinking, eliminates unnecessary work, right-sizes test documentation, and constantly asks how testers can help to speed the development process by providing timely, valuable information to management.
In this interactive overview, Michael Bolton (who co-authors the Rapid Software Testing course with James Bach, the senior author) provides a rapid introduction to Rapid Testing. He’ll highlight the central skills and practices of the approach; present exercises, puzzles, and games that reinforce the lessons; and welcome challenge, discussion, and debate. Some participants may wish to work through the exercises using tools on their own computers; these people are invited and encouraged to bring laptops.
