This page is to Agile Quality Days 2018, please klick on the link below to reach Agile Quality days 2019

Pablo and Jan will introduce the days, point out the highlights and what we want the conference to accomplish.

- Understanding individuals and how this influences your approach to communicating change
- How timing of messages and decisions make a difference
- How to optimise people’s time by doing less and improving wellbeing

 Examples of using testing challenges to improve quality will be used throughout. E.g how to make sure unit testing and TDD is done, definition of done is quality focused and adhered to and getting testing estimates taken seriously in planning poker.

Join Jonas Allared in a session exploring how to make your team(s) happier and increase their performance along the way. The session will be a mix of presentation intermingled with beehive discussions and short exercises. 

What is and how to streamline tests

What is required to get started - planning, tips and pitfalls
How to efficiently test reliability, reliability, performance and maintainability with fewer resources
Practice case and experience from Lantmäteriet

Quality from a product owner's perspective

Many organisations are organized around functions as sales, development, marketing, finance. This works well when you are small, but when you grow, more overhead appears, more hierarchy to handle the growth, departments are getting further from each other and what you get is less innovation and outcome more internal fighting and sub-optimizing. 

I will share my experience in driving the transformation into next step of an agile organisation at Snow Software.
Topics I will talk about is:
·        Conway’s law
·        Lean waste
·        Value Stream
·        Death by sync forums
·        Make more CEOs
·        Find your value
·        Support functions should stay what they are, support…

Agile has for almost two decades refined the process of delivering services and products with high quality in a short amount of time. But, if what gets delivered doesn’t solve the problem in the best way, neither time or quality matters. This is simply a colossal waste. Only by exploring and discovering how the product should meet business goals, user needs and technical possibilities, you will end up solving the right problem. In combination with a smart delivery process (such as Agile done in the right way) and a strong focus on quality the product or service will be unbeatable. 

 Or to quote this very conference site - ”A really good team must have top of the industry competence in ’Knowing what to build’, ’Knowing how to build it’ and ’Knowing your quality’. ” ;-)

Gone are the days when crappy interfaces were the norm. The acceptance for a sub par user experience is rapidly decreasing and if your company does not understand your users you will likely fail to deliver a product that solves real user needs in a good way. But don´t you worry, there is always a line of competitors ready to take over...and then you die! Let me show you an alternative to wild guessing and hubris by using straightforward methods for research and evaluation. Let´s get passionate about designing but not too passionate about our own design. Learn how to get and handle good feedback and ignore the rest.

- Building empathy for the users
- Defining and prioritizing needs with visual models
- Rapid prototyping to create many hypothesis
- User testing to kill disprove most of your hypothesis and refine the rest until you have a truly great solution

When the reality hits the plan of how to increase quality we need to takes actions, preferable actions with high impact.  In theory it’s easy, use metrics and make data driven decisions. But what if data resists to be extracted? How do we know we are measuring the right variables ? 

Together with the increased demand of short iterations, flexible testing and reporting demands, your daily testing habits has to change. Michael shares his experience about how to keep the possibilities of control and structure when using mind maps for Ideas, strategy, planning, execution and reporting your daily and weekly testing activities.

To the technical debt most organization can add “Competence Debt”, “Recourse Debt” and the most used words are: “I do not have time to….

The presentation walks through why most people THINK they do not have time even if they DO NOT have time to do things the same way as allways.

The “Hero Mentality” is one of the most destructive ways to work, this presentation will shred the idea of heroes and focus on how to maximize your time, happiness and professionalism.

In this talk I will share my experiences from working with specification by example, scenario testing and cucumber. 

We will talk about when scenario testing brings the most value and how we produce the test cases needed. Also, we will cover when the tests should be written and who needs to be involved.

Lastly we will see how cucumber test cases are implemented and some architectural examples for adopting scenario testing.

Fair warning: There will be (a little bit of) live coding in this presentation.

Structured Performance Engineering is something every organization I have come across struggles with. Expensive tooling, complex environments and simulations, very few people with enough experience to be efficient in uncovering and fixing problems in this non-functional domain. This session bring forward a new way of thinking and working in this area. Some say the pattern resembles micro services, from an organizational viewpoint.

Task switching depletes our brain power. We can easily imagine an almost infinite number of value-adding tasks to do. Monotasking is a method that increases your productivity by cutting down on tasks to do. The method relies on research and helps you prioritize and focus in a way that is clear, consistent and easy to grasp. It’s time to get back in charge of your day.

Every company I have worked with can present at least one success story where they managed to fulfill all the project goals, the budget was kept and the customer happy. Most of the time they have more stories about projects that was not that successful. To become successful, they continuously strive to find the silver bullets that will solve their problems. Very seldom these changes solve the core problems because they underlying problems are related to the people in the organization, how they communicate and collaborate. During this seminar we will highlight some of the problems many organisations face but instead of looking for engineering solutions the psychological and behavioral aspects will be presented that needs to be understood to be able to succeed with your projects. If you have a friend with a mullet, it is time to communicate!

Software development happens in cycles. We’re constantly rediscovering old truths and practices, but there is change, and every cycle is influenced by our present view of work culture and the state of technology. 

This talk covers what has been, is, and maybe will be. It’s about development and testing practices, learning and rediscovering, new and old roles and formations, and the challenges around the corner.

Agile Quality Awards will be given for the first time.

1.Agile Quality Excellence Award, for the person that has excelled the most in creating Agile Quality.

2.Agile Quality Team Excellence Award, for the team that mostly enbodies the spirit  of  Agile Quality.

The presentation of the winners will be in the same venue as the conference after day one on the evening. There will be Light food and drinks in place.

How can obsession with quality make you totally succeed, or totally fail? And what does this have to do with toast?

“Quality can not be inspected into a product or service; it must be built into it.” – W. Edwards Deming. 

Quality like many other ilities and aspects delivered is fundamentally nothing more, or less, than the receipt of how well the system that produced it is setup, working and evolving. Taking an Outcome focused view helps us put practices and principles to bear on a problem that often gets superficially labeled as a lack of some activity or discipline. 

Let us move beyond symptoms towards causes and make progress by changing our paradigm.

"Graphic Facilitation/ Visualisation helps organisations align, convey important messages and above of all it is sharing of the most important information. With quality in focus.
We all need support when we navigate our complex world. We also need help when we want to share information in an interesting and clear big picture that we all agreed on when our meeting is over.

Graphic Facilitation has helped thousands of people master the art of communication. Through adding visualization to our communication we listen, see and learn most effectively. We also bring a clearness to our conversations.
Visualization/ graphic facilitation help us to:
* remember important things longer
* connect ideas quicker
* understand concepts deeper
* bring a higher quality assurance to our conversations and decisions 
Visualisation/ Graphic Facilitation is a tool that helps us achieve all of the above."

Regardless of how we choose to work with requirements in an agile way, it’s always a good idea to know why it’s being done, and for whom. What needs are we addressing, or what changes are we trying to implement that add value? It’s deceptively easy to start working without reflecting on your goals and without involving relevant actors in what’s to be accomplished. We discuss the importance and challenge of visualisation and communicating in a way that is conducive to creating an understanding between involved parties, as well as the establishing of a productive agile process for requirements engineering. We also examine practical examples of different methods of managing the overall picture of requirements from an agile viewpoint. 

Can an agile environment work for people with Asperger syndrome? Hear about Unicus, the skills and their experience in embracing the potential of autism within software development.

Many organizations attempt to be agile but has limited influence over large part of their code base, due to using standard components, or outsourced development. In this talk we'll go through some of the consequences for how agility is applied given these constraints and how you still can be as agile as possibly in this kind of context.

How to create an Innovative and qualitative Culture with Design 

– Design Studio is an interactive and fast method for creative problem solving and Inspiration on how to build an Innovative organization with innovative working methods and how to create a Climate, Culture with Collaborative teams: Have you wondered why some teams perform and some don’t and why? Is it the individuals, teams, culture or the climate that nurture the culture. What nurtures engagement, creativity and innovation? We believe that the top three fundamentals for inner motivation is playful, purpose driven and developing climate which fosters an innovative culture that nurture self-organizing and performing teams. When helping our customers we use visual techniques  storytelling and design studio as workshop methods in the innovative process.

This mini workshop will include an exercise were we co-create together

What you get insight of/Learn

1.     Insight in how to create an Innovative and qualitative organization and why
2.     Insight in a how Design studio contribute in create innovation
3.     Understand why does it works from neuro perspective.

Test management in agile could be quite different in many ways since many traditional test roles such as test manager and leaders can be questioned. However doing testing in cross functional and dependent agile teams, while being part of test chapter is getting quite complex. To deal with test management complexity in such environment, a test buddy could be required who performs and manage testing in an agile way.

"Testers need to get involved early in the process of software development" has been a de facto quote for a while now when it comes to defining quality work. The problem however still exists, that when given the opportunity, most dont know what to do. How can quality professionals make valuable contribution early? QA kickoffs is the single most valuable quality activity performed at Atlassian when I was there. Now that I am rolling out quality assistance and quality culture within my new company Avensia, it is a key element when coaching developers on testing mindset. 

One definition of software architecture is that it's "the bits of the system that are hardest to change". This isn't very helpful and also completely wrong!

In this talk I describe how good architecture can enable agility and how you do it in a development context where you cant "set the architecture" as an initial step. Instead you have to enable an evolutionary approach. 

Sometimes we place unreasonable demands on our colleagues and ourselves. When you are leading a major change process, you want to make sure that you have thought of everything, but this is in itself an impossibility. We live in a time where all changes have to be executed quickly and smoothly while it is also expected that all employees should cheer when the new organisation is presented. We are also facing a big generational shift where the new generations (80s and beyond)have a different view of work compared to the older generations.

-How do you create a ”change-culture”