John Ferguson Smart comes to Dublin!
John Ferguson Smart, author of BDD in Action and well-known BDD thought leader, will be returning to Dublin in June for an exclusive tour of seminars, meetups and workshops. Book your place now to avoid missing out!
| Event | Date | Topic | Bookings |
|---|---|---|---|
| Breakfast Seminar | June 8 | Left-Shift - Bringing Requirements Discovery and QA Together to Deliver Software that makes a Difference | BOOK NOW |
| Meetup | June 8 | The Creativity Conundrum | BOOK NOW |
| 1-day workshop | June 9 | Low Tech, High Impact Sprint Planning - The fast track from User Stories to high value software | BOOK NOW |
| 1-day workshop | June 10 | Low Tech, High Impact Sprint Planning - The fast track from User Stories to high value software | BOOK NOW |
Breakfast Seminar with John Ferguson Smart
Shift-Left - Bringing Requirements Discovery and QA Together to Deliver Software that makes a Difference
Starting with a continental breakfast, John Ferguson Smart, international speaker and well-known author of “BDD in Action”, will talk about how you can multiply your team’s productivity and innovation by engaging the creativity of the whole team from the outset.
Drawing from his long experience helping teams deliver better software faster and more effectively, John will discuss the latest practical techniques drawn from Behaviour Driven Development, DevOps, Test Automation, combined with research in Psychology and Team Performance, to show you how to get the best out of your teams.
Over this deep dive two-hour seminar, John will cover:
- The new roles of business analysts, developers and testers;
- How to engage the creativity of the whole team during requirements discovery and planning activities;
- How to combine informal and formal requirements definition techniques to balance creativity, innovation and accuracy;
- How testers can play a vital role in not only detecting defects but preventing them;
- How test automation needs to happen during, not after, the sprint, and how you can achieve this;
- The role of test automation in a DevOps world
At the end of the seminar, attendees will leave with an Accelerated Software Delivery self-evaluation checklist to help apply these principles in your own teams.
Evening Meetup
The Creativity Conundrum
Agile is built on conversation and collaboration. But research consistently and unequivolically shows that brainstorming, group discussion and similar techniques generate fewer original ideas, and less innovative ideas, than the same group working individually in parallel. In fact, far from enhancing group creativity, brainstorming can actively stifle it. How can we reconcile the science with the Agile dream of shared understanding through face-to-face conversations and collaboration?
Come learn how to put Science on your side! Learn about the pitfalls of brainstorming and group collaboration techniques, and how to avoid them. And learn how to get more creativity and innovation out of your team, by combining Research in Psychology and Team Performance with requirements discovery techniques from Design Thinking, Agile, and Behaviour Driven Development.
Workshop
Low Tech, High Impact Sprint Planning
The fast track from User Stories to high value software
The best software is delivered by teams with a deep understanding of business needs, and a creative drive to find innovative, effective solutions to business problems. But this doesn’t happen by accident, and cannot be left to chance! Great teams take advantage of team dynamics and rigorous practices to make it so.
This workshop will help you understand how these team dynamics work, and gives you a set of simple, easy to learn practices that they can use during sprint planning to build this shared understanding, and deliver software that delights the customer sooner!
All Agile teams work together to understand what needs to be done for each story. But somehow, despite all our best intentions, requirements still get misunderstood or mislaid, bugs slip into the code, and users are left less than impressed. We can do better!
In this workshop, you will learn practical and pragmatic techniques, drawn from the world of Behaviour Driven Development (BDD), that will have your team defining great acceptance criteria, and delivering great features, in record time.
“Give your team an early, shared understanding of the problem they are solving, and half the work is done before you start.”
Teams practicing these techniques well see defects go down by over 80% and deliver faster to happier users.
You will learn:
- How team dynamics, rules and ceremonies affect individual and group creativity, and how to structure your team activities to maximise creativity, innovation and shared understanding
- How to apply simple and pragmatic techniques to build a thorough, critical, and shared understanding of each story;
- How to significantly reduce the risks of inconsistent, misunderstood or forgotten requirements;
- How to get through sprint planning sessions faster;
- How to lay the groundwork for smoother and quicker automated acceptance testing;
- And how to deliver software that will delight the customer and bring value to the business!
Topics Covered
The workshop is deeply practical, more coaching than traditional training, with an emphasis on real-world applications. Where possible, examples and exercises will be drawn from actual client projects.
The key topics covered will include:
- Design Thinking and breadth-first requirements discovery
- Broad brush and thin brush – when to apply different requirements discovery practices
- Running Effective Requirements Discovery workshops, including Example Mapping and Feature Mapping
- Identifying key scenarios and business rules quickly and efficiently
- Writing Acceptance Criteria that serve the whole team
- A roadmap for full BDD adoption
Why your team needs this workshop
This workshop is about helping your team deliver valuable software sooner, by building a deep understanding of the stories they are implementing and the business goals they need to accomplish.
If you are not practicing Behaviour Driven Development (or have never heard of BDD!), this workshop is an excellent and cost-effective way to get started. And if you are already practicing BDD, this workshop will hone and accelerate your requirements discovery activities with techniques like Example Mapping and Feature Mapping.
You can learn more about some of the ideas underlying this workshop in this article.
For your convenience we will be running two sessions of this workshop, one on Friday June 9th, and one on Saturday June 10th.
BOOK NOW FOR FRIDAY OR SATURDAY
