Business of Software Delivery Track

The business of delivering software is increasingly adapting agile techniques driven by a need to deliver compelling user experiences in an always on and connected world. This is driving leading IT shops to reconfigure around product teams rather than project teams and is driving tools to support increased collaboration and automation. However, the ability to adopt new practices and tools is a challenge of incorrect expectations and cultural change. This year we will explore how successful teams are connecting business to development and operations to transform from a what will it cost, to a what will it return mentality.

We will explore how good AD life-cycle management practices and tools can aid in overcoming challenges such as: global Agile development, driving successful product delivery in regulated environments, and balancing the expectations of management with the reality of application delivery. How can you transition your organization not just to be agile or lean but to be effective, delivering applications that delight customers and adapt to multiple modes of interaction? Learn from thought leaders and interact with your peers in a fun and interactive environment.

Breakout Sessions

Dave West
Chief Product Office
Tasktop

ALM Analyst Panel - chaired by Dave West

Join industry veteran Dave West as he moderates a panel of his past colleagues and find out what these analysts - based on their latest industry research - believe are the current and emerging trends in ALM tooling.

Jeffrey is a software development veteran, with more than twenty years of experience in various development, product management, strategy, and marketing roles.

Jeffrey Hammond
VP, Principal
Research Analyst
Forrester

Melinda-Carol Ballou serves as Program Director for IDC's Application Life-Cycle Management research.

Melinda-Carol Ballou
Program Director
IDC

Michael Azoff (PhD, MIEEE) has been working as an IT industry analyst since 2003, bringing over 20 years of experience in pure and applied research and consulting in the IT industry.

Michael Azoff
Principal Analyst
Ovum

Thomas Murphy is a research director with Gartner, where he is part of the Application Strategies and Governance group.

Thomas Murphy
Research Director
Gartner

Mark Wanish
Senior Vice President
Bank of America

Cultural Change Gains Business Results

One year ago the Bank of America Consumer Purchasing and Marketing Technology Team had established a clear vision for our scaled lean-agile transformation. We were very deliberate about all the MUST have success criteria in order for us to achieve the goals set for the first year of our journey. At the foundation of this transformational vision, was the concept of being able to deliver business value incrementally by taking capabilities from idea to implementation as quickly as possible. In order to achieve our goal, we identified two equally important success factors:

Obtain senior executive and business partner sponsorship to help drive the culture change necessary to move away from a waterfall mindset. Although we didn’t have direct control over the outcome in this area, we discovered that through collaboration (particularly via internal ‘social networks’), education and leading by example through successful execution, we were able to become strong change agents in this area;
Build an organization for speed by integrating all aspects of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), tooling and automation to enable a continuous delivery platform.

While some technology organizations gravitate toward the second item because that can be more easily managed and measured, we found it imperative to apply the proper focus on leadership commitment and partnering with the Business to help ensure successful forward progress toward our goals. By sharing our lean-agile transformation approach and the results gained, including a #1 rating from Forrester for our on-line sales product & increased releases by a factor of six year-over-year, we hope that you may find practices and connections you can leverage in the lean-agile work at your own organization.

Michael Rosenbaum
Founder & CEO
Catalyst IT Services

Empirical Evidence for Productivity Improvements from Co-located, Onshore Agile Teams: A Case Study from a Fortune 500 Sports Apparel Company in Oregon

Most experienced software leaders know intuitively that co-located teams and onshore teams can deliver at higher levels of productivity with lower defect rates. Most agile practitioners know as well that real-time communication, robust team relationships, and common communication styles and understanding are the key to reaping the benefits of agile. But few leaders have access to extensive data, at scale, comparing teams pursuing these best practices with agile in their DNA to geographically dispersed teams less comfortable with agile.

Catalyst partnered with a Fortune 500 sports apparel company releasing a host of digital products, including wearable technology, a host of mobile applications, and game systems, to deliver these products to market. Three leading offshore firms and one leading domestic firm also worked on the effort. Attend this session to learn how this Fortune 500 company collected the data, and see the actual comparative results for productivity and defect rates across the different delivery models.

Jim Szubryt
Enterprise Workforce
Accenture

How Large Global Enterprises can use ALM Tools for Application Delivery

Accenture’s Enterprise Workforce is global and virtual - and this presents many challenges when it comes to having daily stand ups, let alone determine which time zone works for people that can be over 13 hours apart. Many of the teams in the Enterprise Workforce use a shared set of ALM tools to have a better picture of where they are at with sprint deliverables and the march to being done at the end of a sprint. This presentation discusses the challenges they have faced and how they have overcome them to enable globally distributed teams to use Agile and Scrum successfully.

Steven Borg
Co-Founder & Strategist
Northwest Cadence

Metrics that Matter: Improving Lean and Agile, Kanban and Scrum

This session is born of the hard lessons learned from years of working with diverse companies using metrics to improve their software development processes. Come learn from my successes and be warned by my failures. This session will cover what makes an effective metric, the pitfalls in designing metrics, and the basic principles for using metrics appropriately. We’ll cover many general principles, but will dive deeply in the metrics needed for lean and agile software practices, using Kanban and Scrum as our representative methodologies. You’ll leave with a number of good metrics and how to collect them, and more importantly, you’ll leave with a deepened understanding of why measuring the right things is critical, and how to measure those things. For instance, there’s one highly effective metric that can turn a frantically busy and harried team into a team that will deliver more value without feeling overworked! We’ll even lay to rest some enticing, but ultimately harmful, measures like efficiency. In fact, I’ll show you how reducing efficiency can dramatically improve productivity! (Sound impossible? It’s not, and once you’ve seen how, you’ll never look at efficiency the same way again.)

Eric Winquist
CEO
Jama

Modern Product Delivery: Evolve Your Business for Strategic Advantage

Never has the ability to quickly develop and deliver innovative software solutions mattered more. Product-‐delivery speed is a new strategic weapon and a key differentiator in business success. Old ways of working, perhaps adequate for a slower-‐paced age, are too slow. To keep pace, software development must evolve to embrace change and transparency.

To move fast, teams across the organization must work effectively together. Just as awkward handoffs among define, build and test phases introduce waste and delay, discontinuities with other project teams often stall progress and kill momentum. As ALM tools provide more visibility into project status and key decisions, teams can reclaim the time they would have wasted on status reporting and reapply it to delivering business results.

These application development pressures keep business decision-‐makers up at night:

How do I iterate faster?
How do I manage increasingly complex products, often involving multiple teams, geographically dispersed?
How do I keep the business in alignment with the development process so we can improve product quality and stop redoing parts of the process because of miscommunication and errors?

In this presentation, Eric will present fresh market data and describe how large enterprises building complex products are speeding application delivery time and increasing quality to drive real product innovation. Specifically, he’ll explain why embracing change is the one business strategy you should adopt.

Roy Osherove
Author
Consultant & Trainer

Notes to a Team Leader

Roy Osherove, author of Notes to a software team leader and 5whys.com , talks about the role of the software team leader in these semi-agile times. What is the purpose a team leader serves? How can they achieve their purpose? What about architects? Scrum Masters? Project managers? How can they act as leaders? Find out more at 5whys.com.

Dave Stecher
Senior Business Development Engineer
PointSource

Overcoming Mobility Challenges

As we explore the evolving mobility landscape, new design and development patterns are emerging. How can we take what we have learned about the traditional software development lifecycle and apply that to the mobile development lifecycle? What becomes net new and what becomes an evolution of an existing system?

Although all the same lifecycle domains exist, in the excitable haste to bring apps to the market, many of the phases are being either short-changed or ignored completely. Since mobile success relies on a stakeholder's positive perception of the user interface and interactions and the difference between usability and frustration can be a matter of just a few screen pixels, the design phase is critical in the mobile development lifecycle. The gaps between design tools and requirements, however, can cause teams to skip steps in order to avoid the manual efforts needed.

Another area primed for evolution is the quality and test domain moving in the support phase. Getting an app deployed is not the end of the story; a smart mobile development lifecycle strategy accounts for repeatable test suites, maintenance, and sustained engineering. Even mature mobility strategies struggle to build integration with their development tools and business processes when bringing these domains together. The Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC) Mobile User Group is beginning to tackle the integration scenarios that limit the ability for organizations to leverage all the benefits of mobile, and to drive these scenarios into OSLC standards.

Leveraging our own expertise and what we see with our cross-industry client work, we will discuss the emerging patterns around the mobile development lifecycle, future trends to address gap areas, and community-based standard solutions.

Zubin Irani
CEO
cPrime

Principles of Agile Governance in the Enterprise - Recipes for Hybrid Organizations

Governance is the formalization and exercise of repeatable decision-making practices. The term Agile governance emphasizes rapid decision-making, based on lightweight artifacts that are developed with minimum effort. Thus, Agile governance can be exercised for projects that are inherently non-Agile, or which contain a hybrid mixture of Agile and other processes.

The principles act as a guide for how to construct new governance recipes for the unique scenarios that cPrime encounters with clients. Often organizations that are growing rapidly, or whose methodologies are in flux, are the ones who seek help with refining their governance practices.

cPrime has written a comprehensive white paper, Recipes for Agile Governance in the Enterprise, which illustrates how Agile Governance can be accomplished by defining and using a set of standardized elements: Roles, Ceremonies, Metrics, and Governance Points at the different levels of an organization.

Chad Albrecht
President
Centare

Stepping Forward into Modern Business

There is a seeming dichotomy between forecasting business growth and being agile. The truth is that these two things can live in perfect harmony once an organization can learn a few modern business tools. While we no longer live in a world where we can rely on long business cycles and loyal buyers (did we ever?), we have new variables that force us to look at much of what we do through a different lens.

In this presentation, Chad will review some of the challenges business leaders face today, why they exist and present the “new lens” for capitalizing on them. Focus areas will include

Agile Metrics
Lean Economics
Developing elastic and T-shaped skills
Competency models and performance management
Responding to transient advantages
New tools for strategic planning including SOAR, Strategic Forums and Real-time Strategy

Jed Moffitt
Direction of IT Services
KCLS

Using Agile to Drive Innovation: A Case Study from the King County Library System

Slow adopters inside large enterprises everywhere object to new processes and mindsets necessary to take advantage of agile’s ability to help drive innovation and dramatically improve delivery and response times. In this session, we will explore how one organization overcame objections and transformed its business with agile, moving from timeframes of years to deliver improvements to applications to releasing every week. Attend this session to understand how to drive adoption in slow adopting environments, and how slow adopters can reap the benefits of agile.

This session will highlight the agile transformation of the King County Library System, one of the largest circulating libraries in the United States. Public libraries, and the librarians who form the core of these organizations, are not typically considered early adopters. Indeed, the very role of a public library is in question in a world that includes Amazon and massive amounts of free content. The leadership of the King County Library System took a look at this landscape, and decided to reinvent the public library for the 21st century. But in order to do that, it first needed to transform its delivery framework for the applications technology that drove the organization to make it nimble, effective, and innovative.

The story of KCLS’s agile transformation underscores the insight that every company is a technology company.

Lightning Sessions

Scott Anderson Team Lead Avanade	Agile Transformation of a 20,000 Person Company – a Long Term Journey Over the past few years, demand from customers to run agile projects has steadily increased worldwide. In response to this accelerated demand, in 2012 Avanade, a 20k person strong consultancy focusing on business technology solutions and managed services, launched its worldwide Agile initiative with the objective to build an Enterprise-level Agile capability pervasive throughout all layers of their organization. In the past 18 months, they have been working hard on formalizing and building a core Agile capability with the aim of gradually becoming more Agile – from the consulting force to executive leadership. This session outlines how a consultancy with a global footprint has embarked on this long transformation journey, what has worked and what hasn’t worked, the good and the bad.
Eric Clayberg Software Engineering Manager Google	The Three L’s of Leadership Eric Clayberg, featured in a recent Harvard Business Review article on managing at Google, is a Google Great Manager Award winner and manager of the open source Dart Editor project. He will discuss his personal management philosophy and his road from serial entrepreneurship to managing in the rapidly moving environment of Google. An advocate of Google's Project Oxygen model, he distills his philosophy down to what he calls "the three L's of Leadership", Listening, Learning, and Loyalty.
Arnoud Lems Application Development Avanade Netherlands	Go Live Every Day - How to Speed Up Your Delivery Pipeline One of the challenges of today’s business is getting business value developed by team out to the marketplace to actually deliver the value. In Arnoud's experience there are a lot of barriers to overcome in the delivery pipeline before for example a large insurance company. The late arrival costs revenue to a business and teams bogged down by lengthy go live procedures raise the cost of development. The barriers in and on itself make sense (e.g. security tests), however the delivery pipeline can contain a lot of manual and time consuming steps. So how can you remedy that? How do you orchestrate and automate your delivery pipeline to minimize time spent in that pipeline. Based on the guidance in the book Building a Release Pipeline with Team Foundation Server 2012 (for which Arnoud was on the review committee) and his current experiences with Philips implementing inRelease, Arnoud will take attendees through the steps shortening the length of the delivery pipeline and address issues like how to deal with workflows involving different people.	s

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Business of Software Delivery Track

Breakout Sessions

Lightning Sessions

All ALM Forum 2015 conference
attendees also receive:

ALM Forum Logowear

ALM Forum Bag

Business of Software Delivery Track

Breakout Sessions

Lightning Sessions

All ALM Forum 2015 conference attendees also receive:

ALM Forum Logowear

ALM Forum Bag

All ALM Forum 2015 conference
attendees also receive: