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Track Sessions
Adaptive Leadership - Cyndi Mitchell, Thoughtworks
Over the past ten years, increased global interconnectivity among societies, businesses and individuals has given rise to a lot of complexity. For most people and organizations, the future is more volatile and uncertain than ever before; and this is only the beginning. The next decade belongs those who learn to adapt and thrive through large-scale structural changes and turbulence.
For most businesses, software plays a key role in anticipating and responding to these dynamics. Getting ahead and staying there is now directly tied to our ability to design, deliver and evolve software. Routinely closing the loop between business strategy and software delivery has never been more critical, or more possible. But it is hard. Everyone - business, techies, managers and executives - must get in on the action.
Continuous Delivery can help large enterprises become as lean, agile and innovative as a perpetual beta startup. It requires a culture of collaboration, learning and discovery across the entire organization. Leaders will need to re-think their management styles. Business people will need to learn a lot more about software, and software people will need to learn more about business. Individuals will need to re-invent themselves at every level in the organization. In this talk, we'll look at the leadership practices, mindsets and behaviors you'll need to make it happen.
Agile User Experience Practices Applied - Miki Konno, Microsoft
Working in 3-week sprints, the Visual Studio ALM teams had to create practices to quickly ideate, develop and test user experiences within the sprint cadence. Miki will cover how the teams applied "Quick Pulse Studies" to put new ideas, designs, and concepts in front of customers on a regular basis. Such studies require minimal advance planning, can have immediate product impact, and can meet urgent needs. She will use rich examples and case studies to see how the engineering team all works together toward one goal - getting the user feedback frequently and consistently into working software during the agile development cycle.
ALM in the Cloud - Doug Neumann, Microsoft
Doug Neumann will share a first look at Visual Studio Team Foundation Service Preview. Visual Studio Team Foundation Service Preview is the next generation in application lifecycle management, agile project
management and software development collaboration services based on the next version of Team Foundation Server running on the Windows Azure platform. As a special treat to the ALM Summit attendees
Doug’s team will be giving all ALM Summit attendees free preview invitation codes! These invitation codes will enable the recipient to create an account on this future offering from Microsoft. Until then head on over to tfspreview.com to learn more!
ALM in the Jungle - Mik Kersten, Tasktop
Over the past decade, many ALM stacks have shifted from vertically integrated silos to tangled and disconnected systems reminiscent of the London tube map. Layer upon layer of legacy, piecemeal Agile deployments and open source tools have brought traceability to a halt, forcing us into overloaded email inboxes and lengthy meetings for tracking delivery. The path forward is to either standardize the entire ALM stack, or to embrace heterogeneity. Either way, the ALM architecture must be untangled and the legacy connected for the modernization to happen. For inspiration, we can look to how ALM strategies have formed bottom-up in the very heterogeneous jungle of open source projects. Open source ALM combines distributed teams, heterogeneous stacks, resource constraints, massive amounts of stakeholder input, and an overload of cross-project dependencies. Despite these challenges, the velocity of many popular open source projects is measurably higher than that of their enterprise counterparts. In this talk, we will examine the key lessons learned from the latest developments in open source ALM, and examine how to apply the practices, ALM architecture patterns and strategies for embracing heterogeneity in order to help pave a path for your Agile and ALM modernization efforts.
ALM Tools Vendor Panel - Thomas Grant, Forrester (moderator)
What is the state of ALM in the industry and has it changed over the last few years?
What are the biggest challenges to adopting ALM?
What is next? What is the next big thing for ALM?
Join Thomas as he hosts a panel of industry executives
John Weigand (IBM),
Cyndi Mitchell (ThoughWorks),
Melinda Clover (HP),
and Sam Guckenheimer (Microsoft)
for their take on these questions...and more!
Architectural Renewal - Cameron Skinner, Microsoft
Our existing code bases represent enormous investments that organizations must move forward. But many of these code bases are “big balls of mud”; software entropy, architectural mistakes, dependency mismanagement, and lost “tribal” knowledge have made these code bases very difficult to work with. In this talk, Cameron Skinner will discuss some techniques designed to battle these issues in order to maximize the returns on these investments.
Continuous Feedback - Justin Marks, Microsoft
How often have you built software that matched what your customers asked for, only to find out when you’re ready to ship that this is not quite what they wanted? Have you ever struggled to understand what your customers *really* needed while looking through the list of specifications they doled out for their solution? Have you received conflicting requirements from different customers while building a single solution for both? Working with customers through the project management lifecycle to remain focused on customer value of the end product is key to any successful product. In this talk, we look at ways in which you can remain focused on customer value, seek different kinds of feedback from customers at critical points in the software development lifecycle, integrate customer feedback into the product effectively to deliver an end product that can wow your customers! Through demos, we explore specific examples of seeking, providing and processing customer feedback with the new Visual Studio ALM 11 toolset.
DevOps: Lessons Learned Running Microsoft Services - Chris Hanaoka, Microsoft
In this talk, Chris Hanaoka, GM, Global Foundation Services (GFS) Software Development, will share the Top 10 lessons learned within Microsoft around the inflection from world-class packaged software to world-class online services, and from private data centers to production in a public cloud.
Interactive Session: Improve Your Scrum with Contentious Questions - David Starr, Pluralsight
Organizations succeed or fail in predictable ways when it comes to software development using Scrum. Many teams stumble due to key misunderstandings or misinterpretations of Scrum’s core elements. For example, self-organization sounds great in the classroom, yet many Scrum Teams never really select and plan their own work, causing failed Sprints and low quality.
Fortunately you don’t need to repeat the mistakes of others! Instead, come exploit our collective wisdom to discover repeatable patterns of Scrum Team success and failure. Here you’ll find immediately useful wisdom as you derive a plan for improving Scrum in your organization.
Attendees in this interactive session learn to recognize common dysfunctions of struggling teams and inject effective behaviors of high-performance Scrum. Learn how your team’s practice compares with others and choose some things to deliberately improve when returning home.
The Process Improvement Backlog - Claude Remillard, InCycle
Discover BluePrint, a free TFS Template designed to manage practice improvement projects.
In general, development teams are aware of opportunities for improvement but struggle with prioritization, practice details and how to get started --- in comes InCycle Blueprint. The free TFS Template provides an agile-based framework combined with a series of ready-to-use initiatives to accelerate time to improvement.
Topics will include:
* How agile concepts are used for ALM improvement projects
* The InCycle Blueprint process
* How to create an improvement backlog from the Blueprint Library
* How to manage an improvement iteration
* How to track advancement with dashboards
Questioning the Big Bang Theory: The Case for Incremental Change - Steven Borg, NW Cadence
Many agile methodologies require dramatic change to an organization during adoption. For instance, Scrum adoption often requires a complete reorganization of the development team, regardless of current structure or corporate culture. This can sometimes lead to dramatic success, but in far too many cases the result is chaos, thrashing and failure. For many organizations, the risk is too high, so they plan to adopt agile “tomorrow, when things aren’t so busy”. But tomorrow never comes.
There is another way.
In response to the high failure rates of agile adoptions, organizations of all sizes have sought another path – incremental improvement. And it’s working.
This presentation introduces the tools and techniques for incremental process improvement, why it works, and tips for adoption. But we’ll also talk about when it doesn’t work -- because incremental change isn’t always the right fit.
To wrap up, we’ll walk through the organization and cultural patterns that lend themselves to incremental change, and those that lend themselves to radical change. You’ll walk away with an idea of where your organization fits, and what path to agile adoption that you should take.
User Panel - Sam Guckenheimer, Microsoft (moderator)
By popular demand and touted as one of the most informative, exciting and interactive sessions at last year’s ALM Summit, the “User Panel” hosted by Sam Guchenheimer is back!
Our goal is to take an insider’s look at the challenges and options facing teams and their organizations as they transform from siloed practices to integrated ALM.
In this year’s session, Sam will start by validating how well many of the widely held “ALM Industry Truths” deliver in the cold stark reality in which we live.
As with last year, this session will be fueled by the audience and the topics where you feel the most urgency.
We have assembled a diverse panel of experienced leaders from very different companies in very disparate geographies.
Representing the agile (purists) we have Rob Maher: Scrum Coach, one of the founding trainers of Scrum.Org, active community contributor and Microsoft ALM MVP.
Representing the admittedly heterogeneous world of “Big design up front” Enterprise development at the impossibly large, we have Michael Surface, Solutions Architect at Boeing.
Finally representing the often unsung heroes in the QA world we have author, trainer and noted Test expert Senior QA Consultant Debra Forsyth.
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