CANCELLED: UX, Performance And My Grandma
Description:
My grandmother is 85 years old, she has been struggling with the technology boom since the 1950s. For many years she was thinking that the whole technologic boom was an offense to her intelligence, but eventually, she realized that product and service providers were not keeping her in mind as an end-user. One of the most critical technological industries in the user experience of my grandma is the excessive production of radio, televisions, and associated remote controls since the 1950s. She is a frustrated end-user but at the same an expert Senior tester. But so far my grandma is still dealing with the boom of mobile apps, she does not like mobile apps. She says “if that people don't think about me, they don't deserve my money, That's it”. The usability or UX for mobile or Web apps is very important, but a well-designed website isn’t just about how easy it is to use or how elegant it looks. An aspect often overlooked is the performance of an application in terms of response times. Web and Mobile apps need to respond quickly to requests from users and this means optimizing the application with performance in mind.
Key Takeaways:
How my grandma struggled with technology since the 1950s as an end user and also as a tester testing devices like radios, tvs, and remote control.
How response times impact the user experience.
How you can optimize the performance of your web or mobile application from Front End, Back End, and Perception of Web Performance.
Performance-Driven Development
Description:
We've all heard of test-driven development (TDD) (Beck 2003; Astels 2003), as an evolutionary approach to development which combines test-first development. You write a test before you write just enough production code to fulfill that test and then refactoring. Now in 2022 with the increased attention to full-stack operations and scalability, the importance of engineering attention to system performance is shifting left. This talk with introduce the adapted concepts of TDD to performance engineering and scalability: Performance-driven Development. One way to think of this is that you must think through your non-functional requirements or system design before your write your code. This implies PDD can be an inherent principle for agile requirements and agile design techniques. Another common experience in shifting-left performance testing is that PDD is a programming technique - a skill set for writing performant, efficient code and configurations that scale and are reliable.
Key Takeaways:
What is PDD and how is it different from TDD, Agile Development, early performance testing and abstracted performance engineering practices
An overview of different suggested implementation strategies to begin adoption or change to a PDD model
Simple things you can change to start driving development via non-functional performance requirements.
Testing Event Driven Architectures
Description:
Event-Driven Architectures (EDAs) are an increasingly popular way for enterprises to create high scale, fault-tolerant, low latency, cloud-native applications. IDC recently predicted that by 2024 10% of enterprises would be using an EDA for the majority of their applications and 70% would be using EDA patterns in at least some of their ongoing applications. In this talk, we will give you a high-level introduction to how EDAs work, discuss the testing challenges they pose and look at some strategies for testing them.
Key takeaways:
A deeper understanding of Event-Driven Architectures
Understand challenges around testing EDA
Practical suggestions for tackling those challenges.
From Fear To Risk
Description:
Many quality engineering leaders say they do risk-based testing, but walking the walk is showing to be more challenging than enterprises realize. Often, quality engineering teams practicing risk-based testing end up testing “everything” because they continue to test from a place of fear as opposed to calculated risk. Others never reassess or renegotiate risk as their application matures. Additionally, sometimes quality engineering teams lack accurate testing data in order to make well-informed decisions.
Enterprise quality engineering leaders must apply a truth-telling question: What motivates your test coverage decisions? Fear or risk?
Key Takeaways:
How quality engineering leaders assess and measure risk
The real motivating factors behind test decisions and how to overcome bias created by fear and previous failures
How to judge if software quality is “good enough” before a release so that testing does not harm development velocity
How to reassess risk by integrating new data
How Software Quality Governance empowers enterprise risk-based testing.
Human-Centered Design - In Agile Or DevOps Environments (Part 2)
Description:
Is your team made up of some of the best talents in the company and consists of a Project Manager, Certified Scrum Master (CSM), Solution Architect, Data Architect, Developers, a Senior Performance Test Engineer, and an Automated Functional Tester. Your customer is open to HCD but has no idea what that entails. As a professional skilled and experienced in the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC), the Agile Scrum methodology and with some knowledge of Human-Centered Design (HCD), as you start a project, this two-part session will take you on a journey on how to incorporate HCD when delivering using a DevOps workstream.
What are some of the benefits of using HCD for a software or systems integration project?
Does your team anticipate challenges using HCD now?
What risks exist if you do NOT use HCD?
If you are already sold on HCD, how do you incorporate it into Agile Scrum and/or DevOps environments?
If you need to start using HCD, how will you reorganize your work to continue to deliver?
Well, this two-part session is for you and your team. You will experience how HCD methods can be incorporated into both Agile Transformation and DevOps Planning. Bring your thinking caps and be ready to work collaboratively during this interactive event as you take a DevOps problem and take it from Epic to Feature Test employing HCD methods.
Part 1: Using Empathize and Define to plan Epics and Features
During Part I, we will apply HCD methods and frameworks for user research and problem definition to develop Epics and Features for a DevOps case study.
Part 2: Using Ideate, Prototype, and Test to detail Features and Work Items
During Part II, we will apply HCD methods and frameworks related to brainstorming, prototyping, and testing at the Feature- and Work Item-levels such as user stories, associated wireframes, and additional Work Items based on test results.
Agile Coaches Can Wear Many Hats. Find the Coach You Need.
Description:
Agile Coaches may be asked to have many skills, but which skills are most important to you? Do you need a teacher, facilitator, mentor, consultant or something else?
Understanding the different “hats” an agile coach may wear, helps in hiring the right coach, upskilling your current coaches and setting expectations with your teams. This understanding also helps Agile Coaches have better conversations with leadership by framing and naming the different characteristics, skills and outcomes needed to wear each hat.
An experienced Agile Coach will put on 12 different hats and discuss the pros and cons of wearing each one.
While this is a presentation, the use of many hats and props will provide unique visuals and allow the audience to connect to the various skills, behaviors and outcomes associated with each hat an agile coach may wear. While a presentation doesn’t allow for Concrete Practice, it does allow for Connection, Concepts and Conclusion.
During this session, a seasoned Agile Coach will put on 12 different hats with appropriate props while discussing the distinct differences of each. Some of the hats such as a teacher you expect. Others such as the “Yes Person” may come as a surprise.
1. Teacher (Graduation Cap)
2. Mentor (Hogwarts Wizard’s Hat)
3. Facilitator (Party Hat)
4. Coach (Ted Lasso’s Hat)
5. Consultant (Surgery Scrub Cap or my Judge’s Wig)
6. Dojo Coach (Karate Kid Headband)
7. Project Manager (Hard Hat with Head Lamp)
8. Auditor (Green Accountant Hat)
9. Agile Police (NY PD Hat)
10. Spy (Sherlock Holmes Hat)
11. Deliver This Product! (Crash Helmet)
12. Yes Person (Propeller Beany)
Key Takeaways:
Understanding the various agile coaching skills
Taxonomy for better discussions with agile coaches and leadership
I’m A BA Girl In Agile World
Description:
Is what a business analyst (BA) does on an agile project much different from what is done on a waterfall project? Yes and No. Do the three amigos include the analyst or not? It certainly does! Although how the work is done depends on the team and project. During this session we’ll review how the role of a BA on an agile project can vary, how BAs impact the development team, the various roles a BA does, and what makes a BA good at their jobs. All analysts bring excellent communication, collaboration, and trust to their work on project teams – but how we communicate and collaborate will differ. This session is targeted at anyone on a project team that has never worked with an analyst before.
Key Takeaways:
Understand the progressive elaboration with analysis staying several sprints ahead of development
Understand the Roles a BA plays on a project other than BA
Know and utilize the skills an analyst brings to the team
How To Nudge Your Way Through Agile Testing
Description:
We are very aware of biases that are a threat to delivering software quality. But those biases can also be used to our advantage and there is a name for it: nudging.
Biases have been the subject of quite some talks on stage nowadays. Biases that are a threat to delivering high-quality software. And for sure there is a lot to worry about, we all know for example that we assume that we know exactly what our stakeholders want, and we still produce not working software. But is it also possible to use those biases in the favor of quality and testing? In fact, there is a way that biases are used positively, and it has a name: nudging. Nudging uses ‘choice architecture’, which means creating a situation where you can make an unconscious choice for a good purpose. It is used a lot in marketing and politics, for example how a grocery store, using green arrows to the fruit and veggie aisles, increase the sale of healthy food. I looked at different opportunities that nudging gives us for the sake of better agile testing. For example, in a refinement or in a discussion about bugs or when we are delivering our results to our team or our stakeholders. In my talk, I will elaborate more on what nudging exactly is, the ethical questions around nudging, and how we can apply nudging while testing. It will be an exploration so bear with me.
Scrumban – Effectively Combining Scrum and Kanban
Description:
Teams using Scrum sometimes struggle with operational or emergent work blowing up their sprint plans. As DevOps delivery is increasingly used by organizations the need of Scrum teams to accommodate operational work also increases. After all, it does not matter how interesting that new feature is if production is down. By combining the disciplines of Scrum and Kanban teams can find that happy balance of planned work and emergent work while still maintaining discipline and continuous improvement.
As an example, we will build up a hybrid process for a hypothetical team to discuss the reasoning behind different combinations of practices that could be used. I will review 3 categories of hybrid ScrumBan delivery methods that are typically seen in the industry.