Presentations

October 5 Meeting - Don’t test too much! [or too little]

visionary1usa — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:29:30 GMT

October 5 Meeting
Free and Open to the Software Engineering & IT Community

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA

Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:15 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:15 to 6:30
Presentation from 6:30 to 7:45
Q & A from 7:45 to 8:15
Doors close at 8:30

We start presentating earlier now to allow for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

Don’t test too much! [or too little]
(Lessons learned the hard way)

Presented by Keith Stobie, Microsoft

Over- testing can actually be as bad for you as under testing. Whether it is testing to your own lofty expectations (versus those of the project), verifying too much in stress or verifying too much in one test, you might end up with a less useful result than other approaches. You must also be careful of under- testing sequence and state or aspects of the software that are just hard to verify.

This experience report relates parables of mistakes I made and what I learned in the process, so you can avoid these mistakes. These lessons learned are also cross indexed to the book: Lessons Learned in Software Testing (Kaner, Bach, and Pettichord).

Bio:
Keith Stobie is a Test Architect for Bing Infrastructure at Microsoft where he plans, designs, and reviews software architecture and tests. Previously Keith worked in the Protocol Engineering Team on Protocol Quality Assurance Process including model based testing (MBT) to develop test framework, harnessing, and model patterns. With twenty five years of distributed systems testing experience Keith's interest are in testing methodology, tools technology, and quality process. . Keith has a BS in computer science from Cornell University.
ASQ Certified Software Quality Engineer, ASTQB Foundation Level
Member: ACM, IEEE, ASQ

View map by MapQuest

Going North on I-405 toward Bellevue...

Take exit 13B for NE 8th Street
Take the NE 8th Street West ramp
Merge onto NE 8th Street
Turn right onto 110th Avenue. Construx is the building on the left, on the corner of 110th Avenue and NE 8th Street
Turn left into the parking lot immediately past the building

Going South on I-405 toward Bellevue...

Take exit 13B for NE 8th Street
Take the NE 8th Street West ramp
Merge onto NE 8th Street
Turn right onto 110th Avenue. Construx is the building on the left, on the corner of 110th Avenue and NE 8th Street
Turn left into the parking lot immediately past the building

You can join SeaSpin at LinkedIn

SeaSpin is normally hosted by Construx Software and coordinated by Jeff Smith, Steven Smith, and Pamela Perrott. The officers are:

Chair: Jeff Smith, Northwest Cadence (contact)
Program Chair: Steven M. Smith

The SeaSpin charter can be found here.

Sept. 7 Meeting - Lightning Talks on Software Process & Quality

visionary1usa — Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:01:03 GMT

September 7 Meeting
Free and Open to the Software Engineering & IT Community

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA

Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:15 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:15 to 6:30
Presentation from 6:30 to 7:45
Q & A from 7:45 to 8:15
Doors close at 8:30

We start presentating earlier now to allow for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

Lightning Talks on Software Process & Quality

Presented by 8-10 of your fellow SEASPIN participants

The format is the "lightning talk" where each presenter has only five minutes to present their idea (one at a time). The topics include just about anything related to software quality or process in that time – a new idea, lesson, technique, or experience they want to share. Q&A will follow after.

Speakers so far... ( Topic details to be announced. Stay Tuned! )

Steven Smith, Principal, Steven M. Smith & Associates, LLC
Jim Benson, CEO, Modus Cooperandi
Jon Bach, Principal Consultant, Quardev
Jeff Smith, ALM Consultant, Northwest Cadence

Still looking for more noteworthy speakers... Check out our group on LinkedIn.

View map by MapQuest

Going North on I-405 toward Bellevue...

Take exit 13B for NE 8th Street
Take the NE 8th Street West ramp
Merge onto NE 8th Street
Turn right onto 110th Avenue. Construx is the building on the left, on the corner of 110th Avenue and NE 8th Street
Turn left into the parking lot immediately past the building

Going South on I-405 toward Bellevue...

Take exit 13B for NE 8th Street
Take the NE 8th Street West ramp
Merge onto NE 8th Street
Turn right onto 110th Avenue. Construx is the building on the left, on the corner of 110th Avenue and NE 8th Street
Turn left into the parking lot immediately past the building

August 3 Meeting - The Many Levers of Software Productivity

visionary1usa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 19:47:38 GMT

August 3 Meeting

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:15 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:15 to 6:30
Presentation from 6:30 to 7:45
Q & A from 7:45 to 8:15
Doors close at 8:30

We start presentating earlier now to allow for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

The Many Levers of Software Productivity

Productuvity in software development is not merely a matter of process. There are a variety of tools and methods that serve quicker, better results. This presentation is about reviewing these and exposing new ideas that you may not have seen yet. Areas to be touched on include:

People and Organizations - Humans and teams are by far the primary determinant in success, so how people act is an important ingredient in getting results and evolving your organizations capability. How you Hire, Develop, Train, Manage, and Retain has to be part of your approach.
Process - There are many canned processes, but none are an out-of-the-box solution. Lean, SixSigma, Scrum, XP, UP, and others are ultimately guides in looking at how you approach yoru own process. Your choice of tools need not salute any particular model - we ultimately must address our project and organization needs, and weigh the trade-offs as we evolve.
Technical Leverage - Technology, Tools, and Techniques also come with Tradeoffs. Too often we pick the first answer without weighing options intelligently. Design and architecture are not linear and straightforward - Understanding the range and combinations of available opportunities ongoing can yield great breakthroughs - in product and productivity.
Information - We generally live in the world of IT. But the focus is too often on the technology, rather than the best creation and delivery of information. A wiki, blog, or knowledge base do not automatically solve problems - and just adding another tool can introduce more problems than it solves. We manage a lot of information and yet are starved for fast, correct, actionable information.

This presentation will address the range of tools at your disposal and present ways of looking at your toolset in improving performance. There is a lot of conceptual content, but bring your own organizational productivity challenges as well. The presentation is meant to help you bring new ideas into your own work situation - specific questions and examples are welcome.

Bio

Jeff Smith is an ALM* Consultant at Northwest Cadence. He is an advocate for software process improvement and has been a primary process advisor and developer for Dell Computer, BearingPoint, Boeing, LexisNexis, IBM, assorted startups, and other organizations. He has a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M and did post-graduate studies in Computer Science and Business Administration at the University of Texas - Arlington and University of Texas - Dallas. He has almost three decades of hi-tech and software development experience with a range of organizations, industries, and roles. He is a Six Sigma Greenbelt and a Certified ScrumMaster, and is also ITIL Foundations Certified, ATSQB Certified(CTFL), and Lean+ Certified. He is the current chair of SeaSPIN and has served on the boards of the Austin SPIN, Association for IT Professionals - Austin Chapter, and Agile Austin.

* ALM - Application Lifecycle Management

July 6 Meeting: The Truth of "Good Enough"

visionary1usa — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 21:44:59 GMT

July 6 Meeting

We start presentating earlier now to allow for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

The Truth of "Good Enough"

"Good enough" is a notion that helps you know when to go home for the day. It is also a notion that helps Release Managers know when it’s time to ship. It is a river that constantly flows through us -- the Force that binds us and surrounds us. But it, too, has a Dark Side. It has been adulterated to mean “substandard” as when a mechanic slaps duct tape on a dent and says “Good enough for government work.” Whatever the context, it is a black hole from which not even testers can escape. For example, a tester might marvel at the level of scenery detail in Microsoft Flight Simulator while another might complain that it is not detailed enough. Who is right? This talk is about how context affects expectations and evaluation – two things that we must all frame so that we (and decision-makers to whom we’re in service) can better decide what to do next.

Biography
Jon Bach is the Manager for Corporate Intellect at Quardev, Inc., an onshore test lab where he manages testing projects ranging from a few days to several months using rapid testing techniques. He is an ardent advocate of building test communities and testing cultures by serving as the speaker chairman for Quardev's public QASIG and speaker chairman for PNSQC 2011. He is best known for co-inventing Session-Based Test Management as a way to manage and measure exploratory testing, but he is also a published author ("Above the Clouds", 1993) and has two popular testing blogs ("Notes, Bugs, and Issues") at quardev.com/blog and jonbox.wordpress.com. He can be found on Twitter as @jbtestpilot.

June 1 SeaSPIN Meeting: Yes We Kanban: Applying the Kanban Method to your SDLC

visionary1usa — Fri, 07 May 2010 04:17:42 GMT

June 1 Meeting

We start presentating earlier now to allow for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

Yes We Kanban: An Overview of How to Apply the Kanban Method
to Your Software Development Life Cycle.

Covering the following topics:

What is the Kanban Method?
Why would you choose Kanban over another approach?
Goals for Kanban Method implementations
Kanban core and emergent properties
How to start Kanbanning your SDLC
‘Operating the Machine’ (Using ToC and Lean principles to improve flow)
Kanban metrics overview
(If time permits) Kanban experience report

Biography
John Clifford, CSM, CSP, CSPO
John Clifford is a Senior Fellow at Construx Software where he focuses on software development, project management, and team management practices with an emphasis on Agile practices. Prior to joining Construx, he worked for small startups and software behemoths as a development engineer, product feature team manager, group QA manager, group project manager and development director.

With more than three decades of IT experience, John has developed software for CP/M, Unix, VAX, VMS, MVS/TSO, MacOS, Windows, and Windows CE. His expertise is deep and wide, ranging from desktop, mobile and embedded device applications to frameworks and asynchronous telecommunications software for microcomputers and mainframes.

May 4 Meeting: The Business Case for Agility

visionary1usa — Thu, 29 Apr 2010 17:25:55 GMT

May 4 SeaSPIN Meeting

Note that we are starting the presentation a little earlier now to ensure time for questions within the 8:30pm meeting time.

The Business Case for Agility
Too many technology projects fail to deliver on the promised value and some don’t deliver at all. Traditional project management methods continue to frustrate financial professionals and offer poor risk mitigation. How can agile practices reduce costs, reduce risk, reduce waste and improve return? How can we align incremental cost with incremental value? What are the proven practices that will enable us to get more value, sooner, with better results? This session will discuss the concept of agile business value and why companies are adopting agile.

Biographies
Bryan Stallings, Director and Principal Consultant, SolutionsIQ
Bryan leads the efforts of the Professional Services Consulting team to maximize the benefits that agile methods present to SolutionsIQ’s software development and agile consulting clients. He is an experienced leader of Agile adoption initiatives, both as a consultant and as an internal change advocate. Before joining SolutionsIQ, Bryan defined and led the enterprise agile adoption programs at two previous companies where he was employed. A Certified Scrum Trainer, Bryan regularly leads Certified ScrumMaster and Certified Scrum Product Owner training courses. Bryan has an MBA in International Business. He also holds a Six Sigma certification and is fluent in Spanish.

David Wylie, Engagement Manager, SolutionsIQ
David is responsible for the delivery efforts of SolutionsIQ’s agile development teams to several key clients. Over a career of 25 years, David has worked as a software developer, tester, analyst, project manager and consultant. He has been a principle in two consulting firms dealing with technology project management. During the last 19 years, he have been focused on consulting to a wide variety of industries on effective implementations of technology. David has a BS and an MBA.

Apr 6, 2010: How Do We Decide?

visionary1usa — Wed, 31 Mar 2010 19:40:12 GMT

April 6 Meeting

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30

This event is free and open to the software engineering and IT community.

How Do We Decide?
Your team's product is a result of many decisions. There were decisions made about quality; decisions made about economy; and decisions made about speed. But how were those decisions made?

I've experienced teams where these decisions were made by a single individual. I'll bet you have too. If the decision making process of a team isn't producing the results an organization needs, changing the process will change the product. The better the process, the better the product. How effective is your team's process?

You will work in a self-organizing team to experience the logic and emotions involved in making decisions. Your team will be competing against other teams to produce the best product. We will explore the process your team and the other teams used to make decisions. We will discuss their effectiveness. We will explore alternatives. You will return to work equipped with options for improving your team's decision making process. This workshop will benefit both managers and individual contributors -- anyone who works with others to makes decisions.

Biography
Steve (Steven M.) Smith is an independent management consultant who accelerates team productivity by freeing teams from a hairball of technical and social difficulties. His Aha! Moment was the realization that social difficulties were the biggest impediment to his development team's ability to solve technical problems. He marveled over how much precious time was squandered squabbling between team members, fighting with management about direction and warring with other teams over turf. Astonished by how much these troubles crippled the quality of a team’s product as well as the speed and economy of its delivery, he devotes himself to researching and applying methods teams to enhance teamwork and enable better problem solving. He passionately consults, coaches, teaches, writes, and speaks about routes teams can take to produce better results faster, more economically and without pain. Learn more about his thinking by visiting his website -- http://stevenMsmith.com. Steve would enjoy hearing from you about this workshop, please contact him at steve@stevenMsmith.com.

You must come see Steven speak at SeaSPIN.

March 2, 2010: Starting Kanban on Your Team

visionary1usa — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 17:13:36 GMT

SeaSPIN Monthly Meeting
Tuesday, March 2

Note: Since Construx had a Scheduling Conflict, we will meet at NetObjectives for the March Meeting. This is a one-time alteration.

Net Objectives, 275 118th Ave SE, Suite 115, Bellevue, WA

Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30

Starting Kanban on Your Team
Kanban is proving to be an effective agile process for teams. It has helped teams solve many of the problems teams have faced with Scrum because of its focus on a well-defined workflow and an emphasis on managing the amount of work in progress (WIP) the team is working on. What is not as well appreciated is the fact that Kanban can be implemented in a smoother transition than Scrum can because it does not require well formed teams to use it. This talk provides a brief overview of Kanban as well as the steps needed to start your Kanban implementation. This approach both allows for using Kanban where one might think Agile methods would be difficult to implement as well as achieve greater results in less time than one would expect.

Biography
Alan Shalloway is the founder and CEO of Net Objectives. With almost 40 years of experience, Alan is an industry thought leader. He helps companies transition to Lean and Agile methods enterprise-wide as well teaches courses in Lean, Kanban, Scrum, Design Patterns, and Object-Orientation. Alan has developed training and coaching methods for Lean-Agile that have helped his clients achieve long-term, sustainable productivity gains. He is a popular speaker at prestigious conferences worldwide. He is the primary author of Design Patterns Explained: A New Perspective on Object-Oriented Design, Lean-Agile Pocket Guide for Scrum Teams, Lean-Agile Software Development: Achieving Enterprise Agility and is currently writing Essential Skills for the Agile Developer. He has a Masters in Computer Science from M.I.T. as well as a Masters in Mathematics from Emory University.

Feb 2, 2010: Personal Kanban & Kanban for Distributed Teams

visionary1usa — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 01:34:57 GMT

February 2 Meeting

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30

Personal Kanban and Kanban for Distributed Teams
presented by Jim Benson

Kanban is rapidly gaining popularity in software development. How are teams and programmers migrating from straight agile to Kanban, or to hybrids like Scrumban or Scrow? How has this worked in the past? How do distributed teams make this more challenging? How can managers and teams best apply these new methodologies?

Jim Benson describes introducing both Agile and Kanban to development teams, focusing on a team he led in 2007 which built a complex transportation management prototype using nascent technologies and a team of cowboys – none of whom had used agile or been particularly collaborative before. How did he do this?

The answer: Subversion!

Let Jim take you on a journey of mystery and intrigue as he tells you how he fooled a bunch of programming malcontents into being a Lean, collaborative, highly effective work force. It’s like the A-Team, but with Skype.

Biography
Jim Benson is the owner of Modus Cooperandi, Inc, (www.moduscooperandi.com) which is dedicated to teaching knowledge workers how to collaborate and play nice. Modus does this through teaching lean principles. His clients at Modus have included NBC Universal, British Telecom, Boeing, Intuit, JackBe, Depiction, the World Bank and the United Nations. While at Modus, Jim has launched the Personal Kanban methodology for managing personal and small team work. (www.personalkanban.com)

Previously, Jim owned Gray Hill Solutions, (www.grayhillsolutions.com) which created collaborative software for government. Gray Hill specialized in “bloody” projects where bleeding edge technologies were deployed or where other firms had left a project in burning, fetid shambles. Clients included The Bay Area Metropolitan Transportation Commission, WSDOT, ODOT, CalTrans, The Cities of Seattle, Bothell, Mercer Island, Los Angeles, Newport Beach, San Diego, Portland, and Anaheim, as well as counties of King, Orange and Los Angeles. Gray Hill created solutions for traffic, urban forestry, pesticide management, watershed management, fire prevention, and emergency management.

Before that, Jim was an urban planner and it gets even crazier.

Jim Blogs at http://ourfounder.typepad.com

You must come see Jim speak at SeaSPIN.

October 6: How to Start an Agile Project

visionary1usa — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:15:37 GMT

October 6 Meeting: Seattle & Eastside Area
Software Process Improvement Network
How to Start an Agile Project, presented by Jeremy Lightsmith.
Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Gathering with pizza, salad, soda @ 5:45
Talk @ 6:45 with networking following

HOW TO START AN AGILE PROJECT
Imagine you've been given the go ahead to start a project from the ground up doing "Agile". Your team and your company are sold on the vague concept, but no one in your organization really understands what they've signed on for. How do you start it?

There's remarkably little that's said within the agile community about starting projects. If your organization is new to agile, this is your first and best chance to introduce agile ideas up and down the organization, build trust, get alignment, and generally start off on the right foot. Even if your organization and team are agile veterans and already gelled, you still need to generate a backlog, agree on the vision of the project, talk about risks, etc.

We'll look at practices and ideas that industry leaders are using to start projects off smoothly. The processes we'll be talking about are very collaborative and iterative and this session will be too.

BIOGRAPHY
Jeremy spends most of his time & energy building highly performant development teams.

A seasoned agile coach & facilitator, Jeremy excels at creating environments where teams can discover how they work best. He has a deep understanding of agile, and is constantly looking for better ways to share knowledge and collaborate. As a presenter, Jeremy favors interactive and group techniques and pulls from disciplines as diverse as improv and Montessori.

Though Jeremy is now an independent consultant in Seattle, most of his 11 year career has been spent at companies like ThoughtWorks and Pivotal. During his time at ThoughtWorks, Jeremy coached teams and trained facilitators; he owes much of his toolbox to the ThoughtWorkers with whom he worked. He is currently writing a book about Facilitation Patterns.

December 1 Meeting: Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD) with Elisabeth Hendrickson

visionary1usa — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 00:42:06 GMT

December 1 Meeting

Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Food & networking from 5:45 to 6:45 (pizza, salad, soda )
Announcements from 6:45 to 6:55
Presentation from 6:55 to 7:55
Doors close at 8:30

Beginning with the End in Mind:
Driving Development with Acceptance Tests,
presented by Elisabeth Hendrickson

In The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen R. Covey names "Begin with the End in Mind" as the second of the seven habits. This habit applies not just to individuals, but to software development teams as well. In Acceptance Test Driven Development (ATDD), the Product Owner begins requirements discussions with expectations and examples, and the whole team collaborates to distill these into acceptance tests that define the essence of “Done." Modern testing frameworks enable the team to express the tests in natural language while connecting them to the software so that the tests are automated while the software is being developed. The end result is that the acceptance tests become executable requirements.

In this demo-based session, Elisabeth uses ATDD to implement a feature in a sample application, live, with acceptance criteria coming from the audience. Along the way, she explains the ATDD cycle and how it fits with other Agile development and testing practices including TDD, Continuous Integration, and Exploratory Testing.

Biography
Elisabeth Hendrickson is the founder and president of Quality Tree Software, Inc., a consulting and training company dedicated to helping software teams deliver working solutions consistently and sustainably. Elisabeth wrote her first line of code in 1980. Moments later, she found her first bug. Since then Elisabeth has held positions as a tester, developer, manager, and quality engineering director in a variety of companies ranging from small startups to multi-national enterprises. A member of the Agile community since 2003, Elisabeth has served on the board of directors of the Agile Alliance and is one of the co-organizers of the Agile Alliance Functional Testing Tools program. These days, Elisabeth splits her time between teaching, speaking, writing, and working on Agile teams with test-infected programmers who value her obsession with testing. She blogs at testobsessed.com . You can also find her on Twitter as @testobsessed.

November 3: Selling Your Ideas to Management

visionary1usa — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 08:26:38 GMT

November 3 Meeting: Seattle & Eastside Area
Software Process Improvement Network

Selling Your Ideas to Management, presented by Steven Smith.
Construx Software, 10900 NE 8th St Suite 1350, Bellevue, WA
Gathering with pizza, salad, soda @ 5:45
Talk @ 6:45 with networking following

Selling Your Ideas to Management
Do you have a problem selling your ideas to management?

Employees do their best to sell their ideas to busy managers. But a typical outcome of the conversation is “No.” or “Let me think about it.” Employees seldom ask and management seldom offers feedback about elements of the selling that worked and those that didn’t.

If you could hear managers talking with each other, you would hear them complain about employees who whine; who don’t define the problem; who don’t state the impact of the problem in business terms; who don’t provide an action plan; and who don’t explain why fixing a problem is more important than fixing other problems.

Selling ideas is a problem solving activity. Join Steve to learn about three top characteristics of proposals that sell; apply these characteristics to an idea of yours; experience a conversation with management where a proposal is made; and experience the same conversation after hearing feedback and receiving coaching.

Managers are busy. You may only have only one shot to sell your idea. Propose your ideas skillfully so management sees how the idea will benefit the business and, just as importantly, sees you as a leader.

This presentation will benefit both managers and individual contributors, anyone who wants to sell an idea.

Biography
Steven M. Smith (www.stevenMsmith.com) is a management consultant who specializes in helping leaders of technical organizations satisfy customers, manage change, and strengthen teamwork. With more than three decades of experience as a thought leader in technical organizations, he shares his know how through his writing, consulting, and leadership of experiential workshops. He is a founder and host of the annual Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference (www.ayeconference.com), at which he leads experiential workshops. Steven can be reached at steve@stevenMsmith.com.

Quote on the internet about the quality of this presentation at PNSQC 2008...
Steve Smith quite possibly presented the best presentation of the entire event. This topic had little to do with testing, collaboration, or agility. Though, each and every individual attending this presentation walked away with great insight in how to better sell an idea to management (or anyone for that matter).

Reference: http://www.mattkowalczyk.com/blog/?p=16

August 4: James Bullock - Data-Driven, Experiential SPI

visionary1usa — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:03:02 GMT

Data-Driven, Experiential SPI

So much SPI is evangelism, attempting to impose the one true way from outside. That tends to fail, and creates at best compliance.

Process improvement that works treats SPI what it is - a kind of experiential learning, centered on the team doing software development, supported by data about the local practices & results. The team learns how to do things differently, perhaps drawing candidates from an external catalog of techniques.

This talk draws from about a dozen personal experiences with process & practice changes plus industry examples with reference to antecedents like TQM, and Deming and current frameworks like "Lean" and Critical Chain.

Supporting the fact of change
"Your process is what you do"
Process development is knowledge formation.
Relevance: mission and data and mission and data and ...

The talk finishes with a strategy that works for explicit, ongoing SPI.

This material is part of a Jim's future book "Change in Technology Development Organizations: Learning On Purpose".

Bio

James Bullock has been successfully building systems for more than 20 years. In that time he has built high-volume embedded control software, automated plant-floor manufacturing, architected enterprise data warehouse systems, created tools used to manage multi-million SLOC tactical and commercial systems, run technology departments in Internet-based businesses, and shipped multiple releases of innovative SW products for the enterprise.

Through this varied experience, James has remained more interested in how systems are built than in the systems themselves. He has written on subjects such as the development system as a system, the value of testing as a function in a business, software tools and methods in e-commerce, database performance tuning, and how software projects differ from other projects. He is the lead editor of Roundtable on Project Management and coeditor of Roundtable on Technical Leadership, both published by Dorset House.

A Seattle resident, since 2002 James has focused on "conscious software development" guiding clients in purposefully changing how they develop the software they depend on. He is currently developing presentations of general systems thinking in software engineering practice and teaching. James still occasionally builds software or does automated testing because, he says, "I like the toys."

June 2: Software Process Transformation in the 21st Century: Confessions of a Software Process Professional

visionary1usa — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 17:13:20 GMT

About Aaron Hoffer:

Aaron Hoffer is an IT services professional with 15 years of experience. After earning a degree in mechanical engineering, Aaron went straight into software development with IBM Global Services. At IBM he specialized in object-oriented analysis, design and programming. He later left IBM to become an independent consultant and ended up working in Switzerland for several years. In Switzerland, he participated in an early Extreme Programming project with some coaching by Kent Beck. On returning to the US, Aaron went to work for Washington Mutual Bank as an object-oriented developer. He later moved into the architecture group to pursue software process improvement. The Sarbanes-Oxley legislation breathed new life into the program and Aaron became a principal architect of a new enterprise-wide system development lifecycle. Aaron stayed on to evolve the SDLC and participated in other process improvement initiatives until leaving Washington Mutual in 2007.

About the Presentation:

Transforming how an enterprise develops software is a difficult undertaking and success is not guaranteed. This presentation examines a few of the challenges that can occur in these undertakings and attempts to classify those challenges.

2009-02 Knowledge Management & How It Impacts Process Results

visionary1usa — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 23:05:22 GMT

About Jeff Smith:

Jeff Smith has worked as a hardware & software engineer, technical lead & architect, process consultant & implementer, solutions manager, and QA practitioner for over 25 years. Past efforts include work at LTV Aerospace & Defense, Recognition Equipment, Amdahl Communications, Mizar, IBM, Dell Computer, Journee Software, ClearOrbit, Trilogy, Boeing, Protier, Brady Systems Integration, and others. He recently moved from Texas, where he served as President for the Austin SPIN and Vice President for the Austin Chapter of AITP, and currently works in Development Tools and Infrastructure for Litigation Systems at LexisNexis in Bellevue. Jeff holds a bachelors in Electrical Engineering from Texas A&M University, is a Certified ScrumMaster, and is certified also in ITIL Foundations and ATSQB Foundations. Jeff's primary career focus is on process improvement, team productivity, knowledge management, and organizational evolution.

About the Presentation:

This interactive workshop will focus on challenges around information and productivity. The group discussion will review the effects and possible approaches for:

Process Flow & Organizational Decisions impeded by poor, slow, or missing Information
How to achieve better Knowledge Transfer & Collaboration Organizational and Tool Approaches
How to Harvest, Distill, Present, and Manage Enterprise Knowledge
How to Build a Learning Culture

Possible topics may also include:

Use of Blogs, Wikis, Instant Messaging, Content Management, and other Tools
Human Challenges in Driving Availability of Useful, Actionable Information
Aspects of Information and Knowledge, like Information Architecture, the Information Lifecycle, Web 2.0 Thoughts, and Lessons Learned

Bring your Problems and Ideas for this open discussion.

2008-12 Practical Process Improvement Using Metrics

Jeanne-Anne Jensen — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 20:43:31 GMT

About Jeff Levinson:

Jeff Levinson works for a consulting company called Northwest Cadence where he leads the Application Lifecycle Management practice. Earlier, Jeff worked as an enterprise architect for The Boeing Company. He has a masters from Carnegie Mellon in Software Engineering. He is also a certified Scrum Master, though his main background is CMMI. He has written three books on software development (one on distributed application development and two on Visual Studio Team System).

About the Presentation:

In this session, Jeff walked us through an example business question, "How can we turn around bug fixes faster?" We went through a simple approach to choosing metrics to break down the problem to get at root causes which can be fixed. This approach works well for any development method.

PDF of the presentation: http://seaspin.org/files/folders/2008_presentations/entry254.aspx

2008-10 Swarming: The Birds and the Bees and Agile

Earl Beede — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:59:19 GMT

Join us as we hear Tom Perry speak about the Birds and the Bees and Agile

More and more teams find themselves working in an incredibly chaotic environment. How the team reacts to the stimuli in that environment can mean the difference between success and failure. Discovering and applying the rules that will best guide us to success in this complex ecosystem is a daunting task. Where else can we look for examples of this kind of complex group behavior?

In the animal world there is a fascinating set of behaviors that are self organizing, emergent, have simple rules, no central control, etc.These ideas resonate strongly with some of the central tenets of Agile development. These patterns of behavior exhibited by animals are very reminiscent of the team behavior we are seeking in Agile development teams. What can the behavior of groups of animals teach us about working on Agile teams?

In this presentation we will discuss the definition and characteristics of swarming behavior and how it applies to the work of Agile teams. Through a combination of hands on exercises and discussion, we will explore the rules that seem to work well in the natural world and the Agile development world.

About Tom Perry

As a Certified Scrum Practitioner (CSP), Project Management Professional (PMP) and Sr. Program Manager for Authorize.net Tom has 10 years of in-depth experience with Agile methodologies. As an Agile mentor and coach, Tom has helped to foster the growth of XP and Scrum teams on challenging projects in a variety of different industries and using a wide variety of different technologies.

Tom's blog: http:\agiletools.wordpress.com

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2008-06 Telling Your Testing Story

Earl Beede — Tue, 27 May 2008 20:21:54 GMT

Abstract:

What do you say when a stakeholder asks, "How's it going?" If you have a pile of test cases on your desk, it may be enough to say, "I ran 35% of these tests today," or "I'll be finished with this stack in 4 days at my current rate." But that might be just one of many stories you can tell about your testing. For example, you might have found a nasty bug from going "off-road" from those test cases, or you might have created a complex scenario you contrived on-the-fly from your experience, or by operating the program, you might have discovered a valuable new purpose for it! You might have done any number of interesting things, but your summary might have obscured the compelling parts of your testing story. If you've tested software, you know that good testing ideas reveal important information as you go, just as an interesting story becomes more compelling as you read. In this talk, Jon talks about how his role as a journalist, author and writer has enhanced his role as a tester for the past 13 years, helping stakeholders know enough detail about testing to make good decisions on what to fix and how to plan from limited resources. This talk is about why storytelling is a skill that should be studied to help us imagine better tests and give more meaningful reports to those who ask "How's it going?"

Bio:

Jon Bach is the Manager for Corporate Intellect at Quardev, Inc., an onshore test lab where he manages testing projects ranging from a few days to several months using rapid testing techniques. This talk won him "Best Presentation" at STAR East 2008 in May has been selected as a keynote for STAR West in September. He is an ardent advocate of building test communities and is currently the Vice President for Conferences for the Association for Software Testing, the speaker chairman for Quardev's public QASIG, and producer for the "Questioning Agile" stage for Agile2008 in August. He is best known for inventing Session-Based Test Management for managing and measuring exploratory testing, but he is also a published author ("Above the Clouds", 1993) and has a testing blog ("Notes, Bugs, and Issues") at quardev.com.

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2008-04 Strategies for Ground Up Process Improvement

Earl Beede — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 21:38:46 GMT

Expert advice says that management support is critical to process improvement success. How to you get that support? How do you lead process improvement from the ground level? Construx’s Earl Beede will lead a talk on Strategies for Ground Up Process Improvement. Earl will identify several ways individual contributors can start process improvement in their organizations. While not a cookbook approach, the strategies described have been used to initiate change

Earl Beede is a Certified Software Development Professional with the IEEE and Professional Software Engineer and the Director of Seminar Content at Construx Software. Earl has been in the IT industry for over 15 years as a quality assurance representative, systems analyst, process architect, and manager. He is a member of the Computer Society of the IEEE. Earl is an expert in early project lifecycle practices. He has designed and written software development processes at Verizon Wireless, AirTouch Cellular, Boeing Computer Systems, and the Defense Logistics Agency, where he was a certified quality representative. He has deep knowledge in software project management, estimation, requirements, quality assurance, contract management, and software methodologies.

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2008-03 Three Things I Wish I Learned in School

Earl Beede — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:27:50 GMT

They teach you a lot of great things in software engineering / computer science classes, but there are a few things they don't. Steve Tockey shares the three things that really matter that they don't teach and why they matter.

Steve Tockey is the Principal Consultant at Construx Software. He has been employed in the software industry since 1977, and has worked as a programmer, analyst, designer, researcher, consultant, and adjunct professor. He is widely published and has extensive experience with software development and maintenance at all levels of application, as well as knowledge of various hardware. Steve has a Master's of Software Engineering (6/93) from Seattle University. He is also an IEEE Computer Society Certified Software Development Professional (CSDP).

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2008-02 Top Metric Things to Remember

Earl Beede — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 20:24:41 GMT

Most software metric programs fail. Why is that? Pamela Perrott of Construx Software will explore the top things to remember when starting/improving your software metrics. Pam will share industry wide knowledge on what makes on measurement program succeed where another would fail.

Pam is a Professional Software Engineer at Construx Software. She has been in the IT industry for over 25 years as a programmer, systems programmer, analyst, project manager for tools implementations, and instructor. Pam is a member of the Computer Society of the IEEE, the Association for Computing Machinery, the Data Resource Management Association, the Puget Sound Chapter of the Association for Women in Computing, and the Puget Sound Chapter of the Special Interest Group on the Computer-Human Interface (SIGCHI). Pam is expert in quality practices, such as implementing inspections, and has a deep knowledge of software process improvement, testing, and software project management. Prior to working at Construx, she integrated new technologies, implemented inspections, and performed complex requirements management at Verizon Wireless.

Pam has an AB from Bryn Mawr College in Biology, an MA from Cambridge University in Biochemistry, a Certificate in Data Processing from North Seattle Community College, and a Master's in Software Engineering from Seattle University. She is also a Certified Software Test Engineer (CSTE) and a Certified Function Point Specialist (CFPS).

2008-01 Twenty-First Century Change Leadership

Earl Beede — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 15:01:37 GMT

Description
Successfully leading your organization through change is at the core of process improvement. Because our professional success depends on being effective change leaders, let’s step back, explore, and improve our leadership process. Many people have written about the change process. What do twentieth century process models tell us about change? What do twenty-first century models tell us? What insights do these models contain? Steve will intrigue you with a story about a technology change that happened during the turn of twentieth century. He will connect the story to a change model and analyze the story and derive lessons from it using that model. He will poke fun at a few models that people experience but rarely discuss. He will ask you about where you are having difficulty leading change and he will speak to those problems. Join Steve for an entertaining and informative presentation about change leadership.

Biography
Steven M. Smith (www.stevenMsmith.com) is an independent consultant who helps managers make effective decisions about satisfying customers, managing change, and strengthening teamwork. With more than three decades of experience as a thought leader in technical organizations, he shares his know-how through his writing, consulting, and leadership of experiential workshops. He is a founder and host of the annual Amplifying Your Effectiveness (AYE) Conference (www.ayeconference.com), at which he leads experiential workshops. Steve can be reached at steve@stevenMsmith.com.

2007-09 Multi-Tasking, Dinner Parties, and Software

Earl Beede — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 01:16:24 GMT

The project management tools you choose strongly influence the way your organization approaches project execution. During the development of LiquidPlanner we found that some of our simple models showed quite dramatic departures from “traditional” schedules. The results of these models suggest specific tactics for project prioritization and execution.

Bruce will use a couple simple Excel models to show the effects of multi-tasking and “properly balancing” the load on your team.

Bruce P. Henry managed a team of about 100 software testers at Expedia. But now Bruce manages to confuse himself by thinking about effort-space, duration-space, and schedule-space at LiquidPlanner.

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2007-11: Applying Agile Techniques to Process Development: Lessons Learned (part2)

Earl Beede — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:16:19 GMT

This presentation is entitled “Applying Agile Techniques to Process Development: Lessons Learned” and is based on an article published in the August 2007 issue of Crosstalk, the Journal of Defense Software Engineering. It presents lessons learned from a process improvement effort that took an organization from no formal process capability to the implementation of the Software Engineering Institute (SEI^SM) Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI^®) using the continuous representation with a focus on the staged representation’s maturity level 2 process areas. This presentation summarizes techniques that were used to reduce the overall time to achieve institutionalization of new processes as well as what worked well and what could be further improved. The topics to be covered are a) resource utilization, b) process development, c) using Agile methods to run the process improvement effort and develop related outputs, d) process piloting approach used, e) addressing process improvement via technology improvements, f) leveraging the internet and IEEE standards to speed process development, g) employing the continuous representation of the CMMI model, h) issues associated with QA, and i) process rollout management strategies used.

The presentation is being delivered in two (2) parts. The first part (October 15, 2007) covers the theory and methods. The second part (November 19, 2007) covers the lessons learned in a real world example.

When an organization decides to newly embark on process improvement (PI), there are several issues that influence the amount of effort involved and the effective timeline to achieve a particular PI goal. Lessons gleaned from the software development world in the use of incremental or iterative approaches can be applied to any type of project to achieve similar results, including process improvement. With proper planning the end goal can be reached in a greatly accelerated fashion. Effective planning is not the only element, however, that should be considered when reducing duration or budget. This presentation examines the approach taken at a particular IT company on a PI effort that not only met its goals but exceeded the expectations of all involved.

Nelson Perez is president and principal consultant of Sierra’s Edge, Inc. (an SEI Transition Partner) and was the architect and author of all the policies and process assets associated with this presentation. Perez has over 20 years of work experience and has worked the entire life cycle and held numerous management and engineering positions on such high visibility programs as the B2 Stealth Bomber; NASA Space Shuttle; and National Missile Defense. He has worked as a software engineer in several domains including IT, avionics, modeling and simulation, automated manufacturing, non-destructive test, electronic warfare, and large scale security systems. He has co-authored 1 NASA-related patent and his first process improvement effort helped garner the US Air Force/TRW (now part of Northrop Grumman) SOF EISE program the USAF 21^st Century Partnership Team Quality Award. He is a candidate SCAMPI Lead Appraiser with an observation appraisal planned for April, 2008. His specialty is project failure turn around, project management, and process improvement. His research interests include process efficiency and effectiveness. He holds a Bachelor of Engineering degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from the Stevens Institute of Technology.

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2007-10: Applying Agile Techniques to Process Development: Lessons Learned (part 1)

Earl Beede — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 21:15:18 GMT

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