Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Kent McDonald

Topic: Four Things Product Owners Wish They Knew, But May Not Realize It

Agile teams look to product owners to make decisions about what the right things are to build, and in what order.  Unfortunately the Product Owners often do not come equipped with the techniques to do this effectively.  Kent will discuss four techniques that teams can use to help their Product Owners make decisions about what to include in the product and when to include it.

These techniques include:

• How to make informed decisions at the right time
• Understanding purpose to determine when to use a unique approach
• Determining multiple stakeholder’s perspective on priority
• How to look at value to help make decisions.

Along the way, we’ll also talk about other techniques that based on experience folks have found useful for their product owners.

Kent J. McDonald is an author, speaker, and mentor who helps organizations understand their problems and implement solutions.  His more than 15 years of experience include work in agile software development coaching, business analysis, strategic planning, project management, and product development in a variety of industries including financial services, health insurance, performance marketing, human services, nonprofit, and automotive. He is co-author of Stand Back and Deliver: Accelerating Business Agility and currently delivers business analysis training for B2T Training, and shares his thoughts on raising the level of business analysis at Beyondreqs.com.

Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Paul Nelson, Thoughtworks

Topic: Sane Acceptance Testing With Cucumber

While Acceptance Testing principles and tools have become pervasive, teams often stumble in the implementation. Best intentions are eroded over time by tests that stray from the values of effective communication and collaboration. In the worst cases, Acceptance Tests can start to feel like a burden rather than a boon. Paul Nelson, a Principal Technical Consultant at ThoughtWorks, Inc., guides you through common Acceptance Testing pitfalls and provides practical, effective solutions that will get your testing efforts back on track. Starting from a typical test example, you are guided through important principles, such as: Getting the Words Right, Managing Level of Detail, Dependency Isolation, refactoring in Safe Steps, as well as common abstraction patterns. Examples are shown in Cucumber, though the principles are equally applicable using other tools. Leave with a renewed confidence in your ability to regain control of your Acceptance Tests and restore them to the collaboration tool they once were. Stop working for your Acceptance Tests: make your Acceptance Tests work for you!

Paul’s passion for software development began when a pair of Apple ][‘s showed up at his high school through the beneficence of an anonymous donor. At the time he had no idea that pushing pixels around a green screen could ever be anything more than goofing around and having fun.
Today as a ThoughtWorks Principal Consultant Paul travels the world, spreading his passion for finding pragmatic solutions to software development challenges in organizations of all sizes. Pair Programming, coaching teams and assisting C-level executives draft, socialize and implement overall testing strategies are a few of the ways he has applied his passion, empowering organizations to enhance their corporate culture and release quality products in record time… and he’s still having fun!

Location: Okoboji Grill in Johnston (large meeting room)

Speaker: Mark Davidson, Pillar Technology

Topic: From Developer  to Tech Lead