Networking and Refreshments

5:40-6:40:
IIBA™ New Zealand, Special Evening Session
Ellen Gottesdiener
Agile Business Analysis

Meilir Page-Jones
Wayland Systems (USA)

Meilir is the author of three books:

The Practical Guide to Structured
Systems Design

Practical Project Management

The Fundamentals of
Object-Oriented Design in UML

Software Malpractice Through the Ages

KEYNOTE: 9:00-10:25, Thursday 26 March

For over 30 years – as employee, manager, consultant, author, speaker or trainer – I’ve had the opportunity to glimpse, to study or to be incarcerated interminably in more than 200 major organisations.

This keynote talk is about the top ten silly things (some managerial, some technical) that I’ve encountered over and over again during my stretch in the software industry.

Fascinatingly (or perhaps frighteningly), most of the organisations I know share similar patterns of misbehaviour. In them, excellent software gets developed only through super-human effort by heroes – individuals and teams – who, despite the millstones bestowed upon them, can still rise up and turn out gems.

So, what are these silly things? How do they arise and what are their pernicious effects? Why are they still here after at least three decades? In the talk I’ll address these questions and also how you can respond when stakeholders give you silly things to do.

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Philip Abernathy
Suncorp (Australia)

Philip is Suncorp's Agile Professional Development Lead

The Changing Face of the Analyst

KEYNOTE: 10:45-11:45, Thursday 26 March

Agile has matured and entered the realm of the Enterprise. Organisations as a whole, both business and IT departments, are going Agile. So what's the role of the Analyst in this new environment?

Once seen as the go between for business and IT, and the translator of requirements into functional specifications. This aspect of the role is no longer needed. The business now works together with IT, in facilitated workshops with all the software engineering skills represented at the table, and as a part of the business team throughout the process. So what is the “new analyst” role?

This session will highlight the reasons for the continued need for the role and highlight the necessary changes in the role itself if business value is to be obtained.

The analyst becomes the leader, the leader drives change, the analyst is change! We’ll look at the specific steps being put in place at Suncorp to help with this changing role, why Suncorp see this role changing and the benefits they’ll achieve as well as the issues that have arisen and how they are dealing with those issues.

It’s about the interaction and relationship of the role with the other key roles in Agile projects and the new tools and techniques that this person has to bring to the table that add value.

• When is an analyst needed in a project now that there is no ‘specification phase’?!
• For how long is an analyst needed?
• Where should they be located?
• What should they do?
• With whom should they do it?
• How should they carry out their tasks?

We’ll address these questions and look at how and why the role of the Analyst must change.

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Alec Sharp
Clariteq Systems Consulting
(Canada)

Alec literally wrote the book on
business process modeling
– he is the principal author of:

Workflow Modeling: Tools for
Process Improvement and
Application Development

Mind the Gap! – Techniques that Integrate Process, Data and Requirements Modeling

KEYNOTE: 11:45-1:05, Thursday 26 March

Being a great business analyst is not easy, and many common requirements definition methods don’t make it any easier. At one extreme are simplistic, list-based approaches that are too imprecise, incomplete, and inconsistent for all but the simplest applications. (Of course, management loves these methods because of the illusion of traceability and a contract.) At the other extreme is a knot of complex techniques that are indecipherable to most users and analysts, and thus produce results that are just as undependable as the simplistic methods.

What we need are techniques that are repeatable by analysts, understandable and relevant to business subject matter experts, and useful to designers and developers. They should also divide the problem space into a reasonable number of perspectives, offer well-defined, progressive levels of detail, play well together, and be practical enough that you can achieve good results within your natural lifetime!

This presentation will describe an integrated set of techniques that have worked well for all parties in projects of widely varying sizes and budgets. They have been refined over many years of actual project experience, so important guidelines and tips based on experience will be shared.

Key points and questions include:

• What are functional requirements and why are they so hard to develop.
• A framework to integrate business process, use cases, service specifications, and data.
• Scope, concept, and specification (planner, owner, designer) views for each technique.
• How to effectively use data models without anyone realizing that’s what you’re doing.
• The critical differences between workflow modeling and other types of process modeling.
• Avoiding the “useless case” phenomenon by separating requirements definition into external (use cases) and internal (service specifications) components.
• Helping agile developers feel good about model-based requirements discovery.

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Meilir Page-Jones
Wayland Systems (USA)

Meilir comes highly recommended
by software development
luminaries Tim Lister and
Steve McConnell.

Event Modeling: The Secret Weapon of Business Analysis

WORKSHOP: 2:00-5:20, Thursday 26 March (stream/concurrent session)

Every business analyst has heard of use cases, but few people have heard of event modeling. Even fewer people actually practice it. Although event modeling has been used since the 1980s, it remains one of the best-kept secrets of business analysis.

In this workshop you’ll cover:

• The essence of genuine business requirements.
• The rigorous definition of what is and is not a true business event.
• The taxonomy of event types.
• How to quickly recognise business patterns through the event taxonomy.
• The relationship between event modeling and use-case modeling.
• How event modeling makes your set of use cases more thorough.
• Event modeling as a way to derive preconditions.

In order to cover these topics, you'll follow a small case study through the various steps of event modeling.

 _______________________________ 

Alec Sharp
Clariteq Systems Consulting
(Canada)

Alec has deep expertise in a rare
combination of fields – enterprise architecture, business process
analysis and redesign, application requirements specification, and
data modeling.

Business Processes for Business Analysts: Successful Practice and Common Pitfalls

WORKSHOP: 2:00-5:20, Thursday 26 March (stream/concurrent session)

Recent years have seen a huge resurgence of interest in everything to do with "business process." Unlike the near-hysteria accompanying the Business Process Reengineering bandwagon in the early 1990s, the current interest is far more pragmatic and driven by real business need.

That makes working with business processes a fundamental skill for business analysts. After all, business processes are the essence of what an enterprise does and how it delivers value. And, they can be a business analyst’s best friend. As long as the right approaches and techniques are used, analysts and clients alike can gain a much deeper understanding of how the business operates now, how it should operate in the future, and therefore what the real requirements are.

The fly in the ointment is that so many organizations and analysts struggle when working with business processes. From the outset, they fail to properly identify true, end-to-end business processes, and it’s all downhill from there – ignoring the inherent resistance to “all things process,” failing to depict processes and their issues in a compelling way, and not effectively using them to establish context and elicit specific requirements.

This workshop will introduce proven techniques for working with business processes, and is packed with practical frameworks and tips to get you off to a successful start. They will be applicable whether you’re working on operational or business intelligence initiatives. We’ll cover the full range of business analysis activities for working with business processes, including discovery, scoping, assessment, modeling (or mapping,) analysis, and improvement/redesign.

Specifics include:

• What people think a process is, what a business process really is, and what goes wrong if you don’t identify them properly.
• Why bottom-up techniques for process discovery can be more effective than top-down ones.
• How to make processes visible and the need for improvement compelling yet blame-free.
• Differentiators, stakeholders, and enablers – ensuring your new process isn’t worse than the old one.
• “Flow first, detail later” - the basics of workflow mapping.
• The potential for overwhelming detail in your workflow maps, and how to avoid it.
• The six factors to consider when assessing and improving a process, the two we tend to focus on, and the two that should get more attention.

Throughout, the key points will be illustrated with real-life examples.

 _______________________________  

This sessson is presented as
an extra in the programme which
the IIBA™ New Zealand Chapter members may also attend

As a attendee at SDC 2009 you
may also atend this session.

Ellen Gottesdiener
EBG Consulting (USA)

The author of the book:

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

Expert reviewer for the International Institute of Business Analysis Body
of Knowledge (BABOK®).

Agile Business Analysis - Presented by Ellen Gottesdiener

IIBA™ New Zealand Chapter extra special session

5:40-6:40, Thursday 26 March

Learn the realities and debunk the myths of how requirements are defined and delivered in short, timeboxed iterations on agile projects, and how just-in-time or just-before analysis is used to elaborate requirements.

Requirements expert and agile coach, Ellen Gottesdiener explains the essential role analysis plays in envisioning and scoping the product, planning releases and iterations, and the skills, knowledge and aptitudes of successful agile business analysts

In this presentation, Ellen will:

• Identify seven agile business analysis actualities - how analysis really works on agile projects.
  
• Name the three levels of planning workshops needed by agile teams on large, complex products which require analysis skills.
  
•  Describe the tactical and strategic activities of agile business analysis.

 _______________________________ 

Ellen Gottesdiener
EBG Consulting (USA)

The author of the book:

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

Expert reviewer for the International Institute of Business Analysis Body
of Knowledge (BABOK®).

Read more about Requirements Workshops: What You Need to Know in this article here

Requirements by Collaboration

KEYNOTE: 9:00-10:25, Friday 27 March

How do you get customers and the delivery team to collaborate early on?

Can you avoid situations in which developers and testers work overtime to meet requirements they should have known about weeks or months ago?

How can you mitigate situations in which business analysts have to go back to customers to revise and clarify their needs, resulting in confusion and rework?

How can agile teams grasp enough of the big picture to mitigate the myriad problems that can arise such as guessing which slice of the product to start with or build next, needing extensive rework due to undetected architectural dependencies, and establishing a viable release strategy for business planning?

There is a way —

Requirements Workshops:
A proven practice that has regained popularity for use in agile projects. These workshops, like Joint Application Design (JAD), aren’t traditional meetings. Instead, they are focused, highly productive events attended by carefully selected stakeholders and content experts and led by a neutral facilitator.

Well-run workshops promote trust, mutual understanding, and strong communications among stakeholders, and they produce deliverables that structure and guide development. Agile projects adapt these workshops for product, release and iteration planning – to deliver products from a sound basis in requirements.

In this keynote, requirements facilitator, coach, and author Ellen Gottesdiener will share how workshops differ from meetings, the business case for workshops, workshop roles, and best practices for designing and running effective workshops.

 _______________________________  

Ivar Jacobson
Ivar Jacobson International

Principal author of a number
of books, many influential and
best-selling, including:

Aspect Oriented Software
Development with Use Cases

The Unified Modeling Language Reference Manual

The Road to the Unified Software Development Process

Be Smart – What They Don’t Teach You About Software at School

KEYNOTE: 10:45-11:45, Friday 27 March

One of the most popular buzzwords in software development is agile. Today everyone wants to be agile. That is good! However, being agile is not enough.

For several years Ivar Jacobson has expressed that the most important character you need to have to be a great software developer is to be smart. What does that mean? Most people know intuitively what “being smart” means in everyday language, but what does it mean for software.

In this session, Ivar will describe what it means to be smart when it comes to developing software from requirements through to deployment.

 _______________________________ 

Ellen Gottesdiener
EBG Consulting (USA)

The author of the book:

Requirements by Collaboration: Workshops for Defining Needs

Expert reviewer for the International Institute of Business Analysis
Body of Knowledge (BABOK®).

Successful Agile Requirements: Collaborating to Define and Confirm Needs

WORKSHOP: 12:45-4:05, Friday 27 March (stream/concurrent session)

In this interactive workshop, requirements expert and agile coach Ellen Gottesdiener teaches the key practices of agile requirements so team members can successfully define and confirm customer needs.

This session is for agile teams looking for better ways to build or prune their backlog, start a new iteration, or build a release plan.

It is also for traditional teams who want to understand essential agile requirements practices to adapt in their current environment.

Learn why and how both the content and the timing of requirements analysis differ in agile and traditional projects. Practice agile approaches for defining user stories, as well as establishing requirements for quality attributes and external interfaces. See how you can leverage EBG’s Requirements Roadmap — a set of interrelated analysis models — and learn when, where, and how to draw on other analysis models.

Find out how to calibrate the content, format, and timing of requirements analysis and know when the requirements are "done". With these skills, you can start building a new product or improve requirements practices on your current project.

Key topics for which you will gain an understanding include:

• The key practices of agile requirements.
• How to develop user stories and "just enough" related requirements to plan, estimate, and develop tasks for iteration planning.
• Ways to elaborate on requirements to obtain a more complete understanding of "doneness" for iteration-level requirements.

 _______________________________  

Ivar Jacobson
Ivar Jacobson International

Principal author of a number of
books, many influential and
best-selling, including:

The Unified Software Development Process

The Unified Modeling Language
User Guide

Software Reuse: Architecture,
Process and Organisation for
Business Success

Back to Basics: Getting Good Software Quickly and at Low Cost

STREAM SESSION: 12:45-4:05, Friday 27 March;

Getting good software quickly at low cost is what we have been striving for to make this a better software world. The approaches to achieve this goal change over time.

Some ideas have become main-stream and pushing them is like throwing in open doors.

Use cases, architecture, components, iterations are great. We also like user stories, features and sprints. We have become agile. We promote services, product lines, aspects and other ideas.

How do we integrate all these ideas into something useful that can help organisations to deliver good software, quickly and at low cost?

 _______________________________ 

International Speakers Panel

4:10-4:40, Friday 27 March

Hear the Words of Wisdom From the Experts: Get, Grab ‘n’ Grill.

• Get an answer to that question you’ve always wanted to ask - but never before had the opportunity too.
• Grab that last BIG IDEA to take back to the office – look to further extend your capability.
• Grill the panel during the open-questions-from-the-floor period – put them on the spot to deliver the meat in the sandwich.

This is the final chance in the conference to interact with these business analysis "best minds". They’ll be presented with a number of key questions from you and look to answer them providing those extra nuggets of wisdom furthering your professional knowledge. You’ll be able to submit your question(s) before the panel starts and anonymity will be preserved if requested.

There’s a great deal of buzz about the future of software business analysis. We speculate about innovations, trends, future directions, what works and what does not. But, before we can understand where we are likely to be going or where we want to be, it helps to have a realistic sense of where we are today and what’s important to concentrate on right now.

The open-questions–from-the-floor period is your chance to get extra clarification on an earlier answer, big idea or raise a new point that you’d like addressed. Put them on the spot to deliver the meat in the sandwich.

We’re looking to make this facilitated session an illuminating exchange of ideas and a valuable close to the conference for you.

4:40-4:50, Conference wrap-up and close.

 _______________________________ 

Get up to speed and gain even more from SDC when you also attend this.

For your convenience this workshop will be held in three locations:

Auckland, Monday 23 March

Christchurch, Tuesday 24 March

Wellington, Wednesday 25 March

SAVE $200
When you attend SDC conference
and Introduction to Agile Methods
the fee you pay to attend this
pre-conference workshop is
only $790 (per person +GST).

Book Introduction to Agile at the
same pageas you book SDC conference.

NOTE: If you wish to attend this
workshop only please contact for booking details.
0800 268 773

Introduction to Agile Methods
An independent one-day introduction and overview of Agile Software Development.

ONE DAY PRE-CONFERENCE WORKSHOP: 9:00-5:00
Auckland, Christchurch, Wellington

Overview

How important is the move to "Agile" based software development? Tom DeMarco considers it extremely significant - "Agility: 1, everything else: 0"

This course provides an independent one-day introduction and overview of Agile Software Development. We look at the underlying philosophy and motivation for this trend in software development and examine the core practices and techniques of a number of Agile methods.

Intended For

• Managers and executives responsible for software development
• Project managers responsible for software development projects
• Business analysts gathering requirements for software development
• Team leaders and developers building software systems
• User Managers who have to sponsor and are responsible for the introduction of new computer based information systems.

Prerequisites

Participants are expected to have some understanding of basic business practice, and to have been exposed to aspects of the Software Development Lifecycle. The course does not teach any specific tool or technique but provides an introduction to the Agile methods that will enable the participants to make informed decisions regarding practices that will be effective for their own organisations.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the course participants will be able to:

• Understand the background to and driving forces for taking an Agile approach to software development
• Understand the core practices and philosophies behind a number of specific Agile methodologies
• Understand the organisational and people challenges and opportunities the Agile approach brings to the software development process
• Understand how these have been overcome in some real projects.

Content

• Introduction & Background
• Some History
• The Agile Manifesto
• Theories of Complex Adaptive Systems
• Thriving on the Edge of Chaos
• What Projects can Benefit from Agile?
• The Gurus
• What About Requirements?
• Do Just Enough
• Common Elements
• Focus on People & Communication
• Some Agile Methods
• SCRUM - Project Management in an Agile Environment
  • eXtreme Programming
  • Dynamic Systems Development Method
  • Adaptive Software Development
  • Methods
  • Feature Driven Development
  • Pragmatic Programming
  • What's new this week?
• Challenges & Issues
• Success Stories
• A Literature Review

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