W1. Risk Workshop: Project Code Name “Blind Faith”

Tim Lister, Atlantic Systems Guild

Most people seem to learn most comfortably by example, so this workshop will be a case study in risk management. It is a risk discovery and risk assessment workshop.

This workshop will walk the participants through the nuts and bolts of risk management for software projects. Tim will describe the Blind Faith project in its early days, and ask teams to nominate risks. With a class-built risk list in hand, the class will decide on risk mitigation strategies, risk containment strategies, or decide to accept some of the risks (and pay the price if any does become a real problem.)

To further advance the skills learned from the workshop, the participants will “fast forward” in a virtual time machine (patent pending) to talk about how the Blind Faith project is doing, decide if the risk list should be modified and or added to, and what immediate actions the group recommends.

This workshop is open to anyone who has been on a project that was under stress, doubt, and uncertainty, and therefore Tim assumes that this workshop is open to everyone.

When the workshop is completed, the attendees will be able to:

1. Identify risks and uncertainties
2. Understand the choices of managing risks
3. Know the relationship between risk and time
4. Assess the cost and probability of a risk
5. Handle risk budgets

Target Audience:
For those who have ever been on a project that did not go exactly as planned.

View Tim Lister’s Bio

W2. Exploratory Test Automation

Harry Robinson, Microsoft

Exploratory testing emphasizes human creativity and thinking, but its effectiveness is limited if you restrict yourself to manual testing.

Test automation focuses on speed and power, but it rarely finds interesting bugs and is usually relegated to regression test duty.

Exploratory test automation blends the best of the two approaches – combining human judgment and computer horsepower to create testing that is thorough, robust, and flexible. This workshop shows you how to extend the reach of your exploratory testing using creative problem-solving, lightweight automation, heuristic oracles, and common sense.

As economist Leo Cherne said in the 1970s:”The computer is incredibly fast, accurate, and stupid. Man is unbelievably slow, inaccurate, and brilliant. The marriage of the two is a force beyond calculation.”

View Harry Robinson’s Bio

W3. Managing Virtual Teams for Real Results

Rick Brenner, Chaco Canyon Consulting

Virtual teams are now officially the way of things. Everything about such projects or operations is more difficult than face-to-face teams – including figuring out how to declare victory when failure is what actually happened.

You’ll find various definitions of virtual teams if you surf around a bit, but their main features are what make them so difficult for everyone – the people are dispersed geographically, they meet infrequently or never, and they come from different cultures. These factors conspire to make what’s usually easy, difficult – and what’s usually difficult, impossible.

This workshop helps people who sponsor, lead or participate in virtual or global teams. Participants learn to appreciate the true challenges of virtual teams, how their economics differ from the economics of face-to-face teams, and how the picture conveyed by conventional organizational cost management system distorts our view of these differences.

Most important, they learn strategies and tactics for making the dispersed environment productive and effective. Based on attendee interest, topics will be drawn from this selection:

• The nature of global and dispersed teams
• Building and maintaining trust
• Planning communications
• Dealing with dispersion
• Accounting for socio-cultural and political differences
• Accounting for language differences
• Allocating the work with dispersion in mind
• Dealing with voicemail and email in virtual teams
• Making face-to-face meetings count
• Celebrating achievements
• Leading telemeetings

Whether you’re a veteran of virtual teams, or a relative newcomer, this program is a real eye-opener.

When the workshop is completed, the attendees will be able to:

1. Build trust in a multicultural team where “trustworthy” means something different to everyone.
2. Lead a telemeeting effectively when attendees are speaking the meeting’s language with varying degrees of skill.
3. Minimize errors when critical documents are translated from one language to another.
4. Divide the work so as to minimize turf battles and battles over budget.
5. Minimize resentments when only some team members can attend worldwide meetings.

Target Audience:
This workshop is suitable for all audiences.

View Rick Brenner’s Bio

W4. Intuitive Risk Management

F. Michael Dedolph, CSC

The Intuitive Risk Management workshop approaches risk management as something we all do, every day—and, it is important to us. Therefore, it can be transformed into a fundamental part of a project’s everyday activities.

This is a “how-to” workshop, using group-oriented techniques to create an integrated mechanism for improving project performance with better risk management. An introduction to intuitive risk management will help participants view risk differently, and will provide methods for developing and sustaining a meaningful risk list. The participants will use the techniques to come up with a prioritized risk list, and will develop mitigation plan(s) for the most important item(s). The risk management examples and exercises will be drawn from everyday activities—getting to work, managing your health, and real project work. Project teams and people from inside the same organization are encouraged to attend as a group, and to use this workshop as a real risk identification session.
Through a combination of instructor demonstrations and hands-on activities, participants will learn to view risk management as an intuitive activity that applies equally well to everyday life and to project management.

At the conclusion of the workshop, participants will:

• Identify how to approach Risk Management intuitively, both as part of everyday life and as part of project management.
• Have some quick, cost effective mechanisms for risk identification, categorization, and prioritization.
• Understand how outputs from retrospectives can be used as the basis of risk management for future projects, and as a catalyst for improvement efforts.

Target Audience:
The intended audience is system developers, managers, and customers who want to improve their chances of project success.

View F. Michael Dedolph’s Bio

W5. The Role of Testers in Agile Projects

Alan Koch, ASK Process Inc.

Adopting an Agile software development method significantly changes the roles of everyone involved in software projects, not the least among them being the testers. While the Agile methods describe significantly altered roles for developers, managers and even customers, they are silent about the topic of Testers. Some people have taken these methods’ silence about testers (and their focus on developer testing) to mean that the role of tester is obsolete.

While the Agile methods do not anticipate the specialized role of “tester” on Agile projects, neither do they preclude it. This is a current topic of discussion in the Agile community, and the growing consensus is that the tester role can be valuable. Many organizations have been experimenting with Testers on Agile projects, and have identified a variety of ways to integrate testers into their teams.

In this workshop, we will explore the different options for integrating testers into Agile projects. We will investigate the costs, benefits and impacts of each option and discuss the new demands that such roles would put on testers. Ample time will be reserved for participants to discuss options with each other and learn from the experiences of other attendees. Along the way, each participant will use worksheets to apply this information to his or her own situation, and in the end will be prepared to embark on Agile testing in the most appropriate way given his or her context.

When the workshop is completed, the attendees will be able to:

1. Describe the Agile methods, the principles upon which they are built, and how they differ from traditional approaches
2. Describe how the Agile methods recommend testing is done and what they (don’t) say about the role of Testers
3. Articulate the value that Testers can add to Agile projects
4. Become an active, integrated member of an Agile Development Team (one option)
5. Form an Agile Test Team that operates in parallel with an Agile Development Team (a second option)

Target Audience:
Intermediate.

View Alan Koch’s Bio

W6. Rightsizing Your Project at Internet Speed

Michael Mah, QSM Associates Inc.

Did you know that “wrong-sizing” your project inside an Internet-speed deadline dramatically drives up defects? Did you know that an overcommitted team is a less productive one?

This workshop shows you how to measure software releases, recognize historical patterns, and better understand productivity and complexity, whether they be waterfall, Agile, new development, package or maintenance projects.

You’ll learn how to capture essential metrics from simple sketches, build a trendline, and let your data reveal how to avoid common estimating traps. Employing industry data from 8,000+ completed projects worldwide, Michael describes how projects behave when deadlines are imposed, especially with regard to defects and quality. Using case studies from leading companies, see how to estimate and commit to a reasonable project scope in the face of aggressive dates, and as a consequence increase your chances of delivering a quality product.

Target Audience:
This intermediate workshop is for software developers, team leads, and project managers with some project leadership experience.

A Windows PC laptop will be required for the workshop exercises.

View Michael Mah’s Bio