QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams.

Training: "Impact Mapping - How to Make a Big Impact by building Valuable Software Products and Projects"

Track: Training / Time: Monday 09:00 - 16:00 / Location: Rutherford Room

The first principle from the Agile Manifesto states: "Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software." but how often do you capture the real value of what you're developing and delivering and use that to help prioritise your work?

In this tutorial, Russ Miles of SimplicityItself & Gojko Adzic of Neuri Consulting will teach how to practically apply Impact Mapping for just this challenge Impact Mapping is a strategic planning technique that prevents organisations from getting lost while building products and delivering projects by clearly communicating assumptions, helping teams align their activities with overall business objectives and make better roadmap decisions. Impact mapping can help you build products and deliver projects that make a valuable impact, not just ship software.

The participants of this interactive workshop will learn the practices of Impact Mapping and try it out in practice on several realistic examples to understand the key facilitation techniques and learn how to run and apply Impact Mapping sessions in their organisations.

Key learning points of this tutorial are:

  • how to create good user stories
  • how to ensure that you're building the right product
  • how to align the activities of delivery teams and the organisation around them
  • how to make an impact with software products and projects
  • how to communicate overall goals and vision to delivery teams
  • how to facilitate impact mapping sessions
  • how to build a delivery roadmap and backlog with impact maps

Keywords: product owner, business analyst, agile developers, agile testers, business stakeholders, impact mapping, specification by example, requirements, product backlog

Gojko Adzic, Strategic Software Delivery Consultant

Gojko Adzic

Biography: Gojko Adzic

Gojko Adzic is a strategic software delivery consultant who works with ambitious teams to improve the quality of their software products and processes. He specialises in agile and lean quality improvement, in particular agile testing, specification by example and behaviour driven development. Gojko is the author of the Impact Mapping book. His previous book, Specification by Example, was awarded the #2 spot on the top 100 agile books for 2012 and won the Jolt Award for the best book of 2012. In 2011, he was voted by peers as the most influential agile testing professional, and his blog won the UK agile award for the best online publication in 2010.

Twitter: @gojkoadzic
Blog: gojko.net

Russell Miles, Co-Author of Head First Software Development

Russell Miles

Biography: Russell Miles

Russ Miles is Principal Consultant at Simplicity Itself and works with their clients to continuously and sustainably delivering valuable software.

Russ' experience covers almost every facet of software delivery having worked across many different domains including Financial Services, Publishing, Defence, Insurance and Search. With over 16 years experience and through consultancy, coaching and training, Russ uses a holistic view of the software delivery process in order to implement multi-faceted continuous improvement programmes touching on everything from developer skills and practices, creating and evolving the best architectures and designs for a given domain, through to advising the management of various companies on how to apply lean and agile thinking and practices to better tune their return on investment from their software development effort.

Russ is also an international speaker on techniques for achieving the delivery of valuable software as well as a published author, most recently of "Head First Software Development" from O'Reilly Media. He is currently working on two new books; "Programming Spring" for O'Reilly Media that launches the Simplicity Itself technique of "Test Driven Learning" for the first time publicly, and another book, working title being "Field Guide to Continuous Improvement for Software Delivery Team Members" that captures the different thinking tools and techniques that a professional software developer can apply concretely to their own continuous improvement goals.

Twitter: @russmiles