Fifteen Tips for Speeding up Your Project
Johanna Rothman, Rothman Consulting Group, Inc.

Faster is better for software projects—if and only if all the right elements are in place and ready to go. Sometimes your organization is in a sweet spot—that period of time when your project should start immediately. Other times, it’s better to wait. Join Johanna Rothman to discover how to decide whether your project is ready to go, including how to help your managers define the project portfolio to see where your project fits in and how it supports your organization’s goals. Johanna discusses fifteen ways to measure and steer projects to help you get to the end faster. Learn about rolling wave scheduling, continuous integration, time-boxing, and much more. In this interactive session, you’ll discuss the meaning of “done” so you can help the team finish a project sooner and avoid having it drag on. Although you don’t have to use all of the tips, the more you use, the faster your project will run.

Your Attention Please: Concentration is a Learnable Skill
Lee Devin, Swarthmore College

With the possible exception of the fakir walking barefoot on a bed of nails, no one can focus attention on a single object for more than about fifteen seconds. There’s a practice, though, that anyone can learn to accommodate this fact and go on to solve vexing problems quickly and creatively. Lee Devin borrows from the skills that actors develop to direct their attention so their mind and body behave as if the imaginary world they've created is real. Similarly, when you watch a good movie or read a great novel, you direct your attention with single-minded intensity. Using theatre exercises, Lee introduces you to the techniques of warm-up and the skills of concentration. Although simple, they're by no means easy. Learn and practice these mind-bending exercises and take away a powerful tool that can increase your concentration both at work and in your personal life.

Continuous Integration: The Cornerstone of a Great Shop
Jared Richardson, 6th Sense Analytics

Jared Richardson believes that of all the development practices being promoted today the best single practice is continuous integration. It's a simple concept—you run a software program that monitors your source code in an automated version control system. When anything changes, your code is automatically checked out, re-built, and all the automated tests are re-run. Continuous integration gives you an early warning if anything in the most recent changes broke the software. Continuous integration forces you to use 100 percent source code management and demands a solid, automated build script. It provides a framework for your automated tests to grow, live, and thrive. Continuous integration becomes a new “team member” who keeps a constant eye on your code and provides the reminders you need to keep the product solid and your team on track. Join Jared to learn the steps to introduce continuous integration into your shop and how to set it up yourself.

The Uncertainty Surrounding the Cone of Uncertainty
Todd Little, Landmark Graphics

Barry Boehm first defined the “Cone of Uncertainty” of software estimation more than twenty-five years ago. The fundamental aspect of the cone is quite intuitive—that project uncertainty decreases as you discover more during the project. Todd Little takes an in-depth look into some of the dynamics of software estimation and questions some of the more common interpretations of the meaning of the “cone.” Todd presents surprising data from more than one hundred “for market” software projects developed by a market-leading software company. He compares their data with other published industry data. Discover the patterns of software estimation accuracy Todd found, some of which go against common industry beliefs. Understanding the bounds of uncertainty and patterns from past projects help us plan for and manage the uncertainties we are sure to encounter. Take back a collection of measures and metrics you can use to track and analyze uncertainty in your current and next project.

A Toolkit for Assessing SOA Readiness
Jerry Smith, Symphony Services

Before charging “full speed ahead” into the land of service-oriented architecture (SOA), you need help to ensure success and mitigate the risks inherent in such major systems changes. Jerry Smith provides proven tools for assessing SOA readiness and outlines the essential steps to implementing SOA. Jerry presents reference SOA architectures that demonstrate solid standards and specifications to compare with your implementation plans. He introduces an SOA Maturity Model to help you understand your current organizational and technological state. The SOA Maturity Model is a communications tool that outlines how the organization’s SOA implementation will evolve along both business and technical lines. Jerry outlines the various stages the model entails and how to apply it so that technical and organizational changes are easily coordinated across the enterprise. With this new toolkit in hand, you can deliver a clear action plan to drive the improvements only SOA makes possible.

Beyond the Mission Statement: How Values Drive Behavior
Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting

Companies often invest a lot of time and money into defining their mission statement, expecting it to drive employee behavior toward the stated purpose. Unfortunately this is a myth. Instead it is values that drive behavior, and corporate values are often not part of the mission statement. We’ll look at what other companies have posted as their mission statement and their values and how that has affected their business. We’ll walk through a common example of how a mission statement without values can lead to project failures. You’ll find out how to determine what your company values and how to compare that to what you value—and what to do if they are different. Most importantly, learn how to apply what you’ve learned in your own situation. See how to define values at the team level, a must in order to ensure effective working relationships and that the right actions are taken by everyone to achieve project goals. You’ll learn visioning exercises that you can conduct with your team, and on your own—so you can better understand what you personally value, how that guides your behavior, and what you plan to do about it.