Release Management

Conference Presentations

Developer-driven Quality: Putting Developers in the Drivers' Seat

Although many software development teams rely on their QA/Test departments to uncover critical product defects near the end of development, we all recognize the inefficiency of this approach. It’s better to find and fix defects earlier in the software development process to save time and money in the long run! Colby Litnak explores key concepts that encourage and empower developers to take primary responsibility for producing quality software. As with a souped-up race car, developers need specially designed tools and practices when they are at the wheel: fail-fast frameworks, one-click test execution, automated defect prevention principles, automatic notifications of untested code, hurtful test failures, and much more. Discover the principles developers must embrace to produce high quality code the first time-before it goes to QA/Test.

Colby Litnak, MasterControl, Inc.
ALM in the Cloud: Bringing Code to the Cloud and Back Again

The deployment destination for today’s applications is going through its biggest transition since the rise of the application server. Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and other cloud service offerings are putting pressure on every stakeholder in the application lifecycle, forcing us to modernize both our skill sets and tool stacks. Mik Kersten describes the key cloud technology trends and demonstrates how the coming wave of cloud-friendly application lifecycle management (ALM) tools and practices will become the defining factor for productivity and ultimate success. Discover the new challenges developers face when deploying and debugging multi-tenanted applications on hosted infrastructures. Learn how continuous integration loops require testers to learn new tools that connect them directly to running applications.

Mik Kersten, Tasktop Technologies
Selecting the Right Mobile Testing Solution: Practical Considerations and Proven Practices

Because the mobile market is extremely dynamic, maintaining consistent application quality is always difficult. Managing the risk exposures with mobile apps and embedded software requires comprehensive testing of a wide variety of platforms operating on multiple networks. Testers have to contend with short development cycles that require continuous QA efforts. Three key building blocks are required to overcome these obstacles: device-agnostic automation, access to a large selection of handsets and tablets, and ways to seamlessly apply your existing testing tools, skills, and knowledge to mobile. From his experience working with enterprises going mobile, Eran Yaniv shares the do's and don'ts for selecting an enterprise-grade mobile testing and automation platform, and offers his analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of the various approaches.

Eran Yaniv, Perfecto Mobile
Sustainable Software Quality-at Warp Speed

Businesses demand high levels of product quality, development productivity, planning reliability, employee satisfaction, and customer loyalty. And yet, people and organizations often ignore all those goals and focus on building systems with as many features as possible delivered by a specific due date. When the work is complete, retrospectives surface the dissatisfaction concerning missed dates, poor quality, technical debt, and more. Richard Hensley describes his last three years at McKesson, where they have delivered 103 production releases with no significant defects, fulfilled sixteen multi-million dollar contracts, maintained high employee morale, and trained 5,000 users. Employing the Kanban approach for change management, McKesson implemented new tools selected from RUP, XP, Scrum, and lean-daily focused planning, stand-up meetings, retrospectives, TDD, information radiators, user stories, etc.

Richard Hensley, McKesson Health Solutions
STARWEST 2012 Keynote: State-of-the-Art Cloud Testing: Experiences with Bing Search
Video

The cloud is penetrating every technology organization and almost every software product or service. The cloud affects everything inside development, bringing profound changes to how engineers build, test, release, and maintain software and systems.

Ken Johnston, Microsoft
No Silver Bullet? Silver Buckshot May Work

During Greg Pope’s forty years in the industry, many great processes and new tools have been promoted by incredibly gifted people. It seems that someone is always promising a cure all-the proverbial “silver bullet”-for software woes. Still, the most common request Greg gets from software developers and managers is to “look at our development process and tell us how to make it better.” Greg’s goals for this presentation are for us to understand what “better” really means, to discuss common problems and potential solutions, and to become empowered to make our personal and our group’s practices better. He examines valuable ideas that seem to reincarnate themselves periodically and explores the challenges of today’s modern software.

Gregory Pope, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Enterprise DevOps: Breaking Down the Barriers between Development and IT Operations

Agile processes were originally designed to break down the barriers among users, programmers, and testers. Now, DevOps-an emerging set of principles and practices for communication, collaboration, and integration between development and IT operations-seeks to break down the development/operations barriers. By applying agile principles to operations and re-architecting the interfaces between these groups, DevOps empowers organizations to deliver high-value software faster and with fewer errors. Jez Humble describes how to implement DevOps practices in large enterprises-and small organizations. Starting with an investigation of the crisis facing large IT departments, Jez discusses the root causes of operations challenges and how DevOps addresses them.

Jez Humble, ThoughtWorks Inc
Mission Critical Agility

Whether it is controlling interplanetary spacecraft, managing medical records, or "merely" staying in business, it seems that more of us are facing the pressure of building and managing mission-critical systems and teams. Although it's tempting to think that reliability is all that matters, we're also forced to adapt to constantly advancing technologies, shifting priorities, and relentless competitive pressures. What can we learn about agility from great inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and the pioneers at NASA who risked everything to change the world? Is it wise to embrace innovation and take risks when so much is at stake? Can you afford to be agile when failure is not an option, or can you afford not to? Jeff Norris explores key principles of agility from a fresh and entertaining perspective by drawing on inspiring stories of people who demonstrated agile work practices long before anyone had heard of a ScrumMaster.

Jeff Norris, NASA
Performance Engineering for MASSIVE Systems

Dealing with a single system is challenging enough, but the game changes dramatically on a multi-system, distributed platform. MASSIVE platforms can consist of more than fifty distributed systems and components, integrated to process millions of transactions per day-from millions of users-while processing hundreds of terabytes of data. The ramifications of one component or system not scaling to support this load might cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in lost revenue for a single system disruption. Mark Lustig explains how to integrate performance engineering across the entire development lifecycle. The world of MASSIVE platforms requires a disciplined approach to building, measuring, and ensuring system scalability, performance, and throughput.

Mark Lustig, Collaborative Consulting
Better Software Conference East 2011: Writing High Quality Code

Quality in delivered software is intangible and very different from quality in physical goods. Some external attributes of quality software-free from defects and easy to maintain-are reflections of the code's internal qualities. When classes and methods are cohesive, non-redundant, well-encapsulated, assertive, and explicitly coupled, they are less prone to mistakes and far easier to debug, test, and maintain. David Bernstein asserts that paying attention to code quality helps us focus on the key principles, patterns, and practices used by expert developers. If you don't pay attention to critical code quality attributes, iterative development practices can quickly degrade code into a maintenance nightmare. Join David and your peers to take a deep dive into the code qualities that make software more maintainable and less bug friendly.

David Bernstein, Techniques of Design

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