Conference Presentations

A Tester’s Guide to Collaborating with Product Owners
Slideshow

The role of the Product Owner in Scrum is only vaguely defined—owning the Product Backlog and representing the “customer.” In many organizations, Product Owners go it alone, trying...

Bob Galen, Velocity Partners
How Can I Develop the Ability to Collaborate?

In this installment of FAQ, SQE Trainer Bob Payne and consultant Ryan Olivett answer one of the questions students ask them most often.

Bob Payne's picture Bob Payne Ryan Olivett
Attacking Silos with DevOps Attacking Silos with DevOps

Many professionals, while having expertise in their technical niche, are sometimes less than perfect at communicating effectively with colleagues from other departments. This can result in departments failing to work effectively together; these departments resemble silos more than a collaborative and cohesive organization. This article will help you identify and understand some of the reasons why teams operate in silos and what you can do to change that.

Leslie  Sachs's picture Leslie Sachs
Strengthen Your Discovery Muscle

An organization shouldn’t spend all its time building its delivery muscle without simultaneously building its discovery muscle. In fact, successful software teams deliver great products because they invest in discovery. Learn how to expand your innovation and strengthen your discovery muscle.

Collaboration without Chaos
Slideshow

Sometimes software testers overvalue the adherence to the collective wisdom embodied in organizational processes and the mechanical execution of tasks. Overly directive procedures work—to a point—projecting an impression of firm, clear control. But do they generate test results that...

Griffin Jones, Congruent Compliance
A Big Helping of DevOps with Career Advice on the Side
Slideshow

For decades-with the exception of agile-dev followers-the IT community has continued to build and protect its departmental silos. Project management, business analysis, development, testing, DB administration, and operations are just a few of the specializations that are carved out and institutionalized. Agile practices seek to eliminate the walls and empower people to deliver the highest value to the business. DevOps is the latest effort in this direction-bringing developers, testers, and operations together to replace their silos with a continuous collaboration pipeline. Paul Peissner introduces DevOps and explains how it is a key to transitioning from continuous integration (creating the finished software product immediately) to continuous delivery (making the product immediately available to users) and adding tremendous new business value.

Paul Peissner, CollabNet
Creating Great User Experiences: Tips and Techniques
Slideshow

Many software people look at creating great user experiences as a black art, something to guess at and hope for the best. It doesn't have to be that way! Jennifer Fraser explores the key ingredients for great user experience (UX) designs and shares the techniques she employs early-and often-during development. Find out how Jennifer fosters communications with users and devs, and works pro-actively to ensure true collaboration among UX designers and the rest of the team. Whether your team employs a formal agile methodology or not, Jennifer asserts that you need an iterative and incremental approach for creating great UX experiences. She shares her toolkit of communication techniques-blue-sky brainstorming sessions, structured conversation, and more-to use with different personality types and describes which types may approach decisions objectively versus empathetically.

Jennifer Fraser, Macadamian
Forgotten Wisdom from the Ancient Testers

In our increasingly agile world, collaboration is the new buzzword. But collaboration is hard to do well. Testers are challenged to work directly, effectively, efficiently, and productively with customers, programmers, business analysts, writers, trainers-and pretty much everyone in the business value chain. There are many points of collaboration including grooming stories with customers, sprint planning with team members, reviewing user interaction with users, whiteboarding with peers, and buddy checking. Rob Sabourin and Dot Graham explain what collaboration is, why it is challenging, and how to make it better. Learn how forgotten but proven techniques can help you work more efficiently, improve your professional relationships, and deliver quality products. Join Dot and Rob to hear how “ancient” techniques apply in today’s world, with stories of how these techniques work now.

Dorothy Graham, Consultant
Collaboration Workshops: Discover, Plan, and Prepare the Product Backlog

To deliver high-value products, your agile team must reach a shared understanding of prioritized stakeholder needs. Collaborative techniques are best for this type of work, but not all agile teams use them or use them efficiently. Some rely too heavily on written user stories or story maps and fail to address complex topics or resolve requirements conflicts among stakeholders. Ellen Gottesdiener outlines how you can systematically collaborate about the product backlog in nimble, timely workshops that give your team an open venue for working together to make complicated decisions. Ellen explores collaborative techniques for backlog discovery and preparation. She teaches you to use the Seven Dimensions technique to make sure you capture all product needs.

Ellen Gottesdiener, EBG Consulting, Inc.
Agile Teamwork: Three Ways to Minimize Handoffs

Rather than rely on large handoffs between specialties, high-performing Scrum teams learn to do a little bit of everything all the time during a sprint. To do this effectively, teams must make three changes: shift from writing about requirements to talking about them, reduce the size of handoffs and make them more frequently, and pay more attention to the size of the product backlog items that they bring into their sprints.

Mike Cohn's picture Mike Cohn

Pages

CMCrossroads is a TechWell community.

Through conferences, training, consulting, and online resources, TechWell helps you develop and deliver great software every day.