ALM Chicago 2012 Highlights

“It will get harder before it gets easier.”

Those parting words were spoken to me by Benjamin Day and Chad Albrecht, two speakers at last week’s ALM Chicago conference.  The intent of attending the conference was to learn more about Agile Development methodologies in order to apply them towards improving my team’s development processes - it was a great success.  Below are some key takeaways from various speakers combined with my own thoughts:

• Motivation for hiring the best developers: In the opening keynote, Mike Gilpin explained that the best software developers constantly are learning new things and trying new technology - thus making them more creative and faster.  The faster that we work and the better that we become, the more money we can charge!
• On strategies for combining Waterfall and Agile methodologies: Gilpin suggested a “Water-Scrum-Fall” process: Planning (“Water”), Requirements, Development and Testing (“Scrum”), and Deployment (“Fall”).  This approach tries to capitalize on the portions of the project lifecycle that Developers have the most control over (Requirements, Development and Testing) while maintaining a Waterfall approach to Planning and Deployment.  I was happy to hear this, as it is a similar approach that my team already uses.  The one question that still remains for me is, “How can we improve upon the heavy Client-facing portions given our lack of control over the speed of their processes?”. There may not be much we can do - as Gilpin said, “you can’t control everything.”
• On strategies for combining Waterfall and Agile methodologies, again: Benjamin Day presented his approach - “Scrum under a Waterfall”.  It is an attempt to leverage the strengths of each - the Agile portion utilizes Scrum for day-to-day activities with a focus on TDD and working software while maintaining Waterfall methods for releases and coordination among multiple teams.  Similar to the “Water-Scrum-Fall” method, this approach makes sense as once again the focus is on being agile with processes that we control (development) vs. those that we do not (how other teams work/interact).
• Upcoming Agile tools in Visual Studio 11: Many new features of Visual Studio were demoed.  Among the most interesting was PowerPoint Storyboarding (quickly generate user stories in PowerPoint) - perhaps an alternative to boring, dry whitepapers?  Continuous Test Runner (constantly runs unit tests in the background; akin to Intellisense) aims to increase development and testing speed.  Finally, Code Reviews are being added to TFS.  My team needs to commit to having more of them and this feature makes it quite easy - you choose the code to be reviewed and assign the person to review it.  The person given the Task via TFS can quickly review the code and send it back to you, making for some great time savings.

Speeding up our software development processes while maintaining a high level of quality is a key focus of mine this year.  Thanks to ALM Chicago, I feel confident that I will make it happen!