Meta-Cast in Vegas!

Bob and Josh are speaking at this year's Agile West and Better Software Conference in Las Vegas, NV the week of June 1-6.  We plan on recording a slew of podcasts while we are out there and would love to do a live Q&A version of the podcast.  If you have any interest in joining us, please let us know.  Below are the sessions that we will be presenting.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 8:30am
A Test Leader’s Guide to Agile
Much of the work of moving traditional test teams toward agile methods is focused on the individual tester. Often, the roles of test director, test manager, test team leader, and test-centric project manager are marginalized―but not in this session where we’ll focus on agile testing from the test leader’s perspective.

Tuesday, June 3, 2014 - 1:00pm
Essential Patterns of Mature Agile Leaders
Currently much of agile adoption—coaching, advice, techniques, and training―revolves around the agile teams. Leaders are typically ignored, marginalized, or, in the worst cases, vilified. Bob Galen contends that there is a central and important role for managers and effective leadership within agile environments. In this workshop, we’ll explore the patterns of mature agile managers and leaders—those who understand servant leadership and how to effectively support, grow, coach, and empower their agile teams in ways that increase the teams’ performance, accountability, and engagement.

Wednesday, June 24, 2014 - 12:45pm
Automate Your Mobile Development Ecosystem
Mobile is hard. Mobile at scale is even harder. And automation is your only option for success as you scale. However, many organizations haven’t yet started automating their mobile development efforts. Understanding how to automate your mobile ecosystem puts you ahead of your competition. How do you actually automate the building, testing, and deploying of hundreds of mobile apps across multiple operating systems and multiple app stores? Josh Anderson explains that when compared to the tools supporting the development and deployment of web applications, mobile is in its infancy. This means that you must get comfortable with alpha versions of open source projects, constantly changing APIs, and some good old-fashioned engineering duct tape. Josh takes you through the challenges his company encountered along the path to effective automation and shares the challenges that remain. Take back home with you the lessons Josh and his team learned and effectively pave your path to mobile automation.

Thursday, June 5, 2014 - 2:15pm
Session-Based Exploratory Testing in Agile Projects
One of the challenges associated with testing agile projects is selecting test techniques that “fit” the dynamic nature of agile practices. How much functional and non-functional testing should you do? What is the appropriate mix of unit, integration, regression, and system testing? How do you balance these decisions in an environment that fosters continuous change and shifting priorities? Bob Galen has discovered that session-based exploratory testing (SBET) thrives in agile projects and supports risk-based testing throughout development.