David Hussman

Presentations

Acceptance Test Driven: Beyond the Geekdom

How testable are your requirements? If they are user stories, you have better odds than others, but you may still struggling to increase your automated feature testing. Acceptance test driven (ATD) means understanding the needs or the value before you start coding, and it is often hard to make ATD sticky in organizations.

While tools and geekology are needed, the upstream flow with the larger project community must exist to be successful. The session will teach you how to spark ATD from idea to code, connecting the dots and the players along the way. From product concept to automated tests, we will discuss and practice various ways to connect business, development and testing around the creating and getting value from ATD.

After a short introduction, we will practice to tasks need to take an idea to a set of testable statements. We will touch on tools, but not over focus on tools. Tools come and go and being stuck on a tool is often the failing of making ATD sticky.

The larger focus, and the deeper value, will be the importance of gathering the core players needed to create well formed acceptance tests that clarify value and promote collaboration within project communities.

Agility as a Tool: Getting Ready to Iterate

Many people simplistically apply agile recipes, assuming a one size fits all approach. This may lead to naive use beliefs like collocation breeds instant success. While sitting together always helps, it does not mean that people spontaneously collaborate to create sustainable value.

Instead of approaching agile methods like a recipe, this session will teach you to design agility that is a useful tool for your project community. We will cover practice selection ideas, tools for creating healthy development eco-systems and product discover tools. If you would like to improve the stickiness of your agility, stop in learn a pile of techniques to use before holding your first planning session.

Imagine you want to use agile methods and you’re looking for ideas from introduction to iteration, this is the path we will take. We start by will examining ideas for selecting which practices will improve your existing strengths and address your existing issues. From there, we will walk through growing product and customer knowledge, creating a collaborative work area and two levels of planning: planning to discover and planning to deliver.

Coaching Agility into Organizations: Success over Dogma

If you want to introduce meaningful agility in your company, real change takes more than a few certification courses or one successful pilot project. Process that produces tangible results sticks while dogmatic preaching is short lived. If you are planning to grow agility that helps you produce better products and better code in meaningful timeframes, stop in and learn how to succeed and how to avoid common failures.

The session provides answers to both why and how to coach. We will cover: 1) what successful coaches do, 2) who has the skills for the job, and 3) what is takes to move from success on one project to larger organic growth of real agility. Combining presentation, critical questioning, and small group exercise, we will practically dig into the skills needed and the challenges faced while trying to truly grow lasting agility within an organization.

What Stops You From Delivering? : Flow and the Theory of Constraints

What stops you from delivering to your customers and what truly prevents incremental learning in your project community? How much of it lies in coding issues? Do you even need to write code to learn where to go or how to get there?

For many companies, being agile means producing working code from an iteration. While working code is a measure of progress, and provides a tool to validate success, it is not always your best investment. Your best investment lies in combining 1) what helps you learn about your product and your market and 2) what you need to do to deliver it, and what is constraining either of these.

Using ideas taken from successful agilists, Theory of Constraints and the Lean Start up Community, this session will challenge you to think about what truly stops you from producing what is valuable when.

Will we use techniques that examine delivery and development constraints that start at product ideation and end with real user feedback? Along the way, we will discuss how agile methods can help and hurt your ability to build the do the right thing at the right time.

Redesigning Agility: Incorporating Design Thinking

Design tends to mean one thing to developers and another thing to designers. The later group are product designers and are not aware of the structure of the code.

The hipsters in the agile community are trying to blend product design into the process of coding and delivering software. This session discusses what to do after your agility is flowing, or post agilism: imagine you using agile methods successfully, what's next?

Starting with the state of state of agile methods today, we will discuss ways to incorporate discovery and design into the delivery vehicle provided by agile practices. You will find this session an excellent forum to discuss "what's next?" in a post agilist world.