Facilitator – Terry Wiegman | 10:00 — 11:15
Abstract
Are you a BA/Tester/QA person struggling to find your place on an agile team? Looking for ways to add more value? Wondering what it’s been like for others? Join our panel of practitioners as they discuss what they have learned, what is effective, what got in their way, how they handled challenges, and the opportunities agile presents to us!
Facilitator
She might not be the Black Widow, but Terry Wiegmann was an Awesome Woman in Agile nominee! When she is not conquering ineffective software practices, she is a Director and Service Line Lead with Quick Solutions. She is one of the few people in the world to be both a Certified Business Analysis Professional and Certified Software Quality Engineer, and is also a PSPO and Advanced Gold Toastmaster. Her roots are in concurrent engineering and on her past several projects has been blending business analysis and quality engineering and testing skills to add value to her team.
Panelists
Linda Farrenkopf is currently an Agile Delivery Lead at Pillar Technologies. During the past year, she has coached teams at Worthington Industries and GE Aviation through their agile transformation. Ms. Farrenkopf is a Certified Scrum Master with over 7 years experience leading agile teams to deliver successfully. She has a passion for coaching and mentoring others to maximize their performance. She was the founder and past president of the XP User’s Group and is currently the Director of the Agile PM LIG for the local chapter of the PMI.
Leo Gilbert works as a Quality Assurance Manager for Huntington National Bank. He is currently involved with developing current testing practices to be more efficient working with Agile/Scrum methodologies. Leo has 20 years in Information Technology and holds a degree in Computer Science. He has held several IT certifications and has lectured at companies, schools and colleges on various IT topics.
Ellen Gottesdiener is Founder and Principal with EBG Consulting, experts helping you deliver high-value products your customers want and need. Ellen is an internationally recognized facilitator, coach, trainer, speaker, and expert in agile product management practices, product envisioning and roadmapping, business analysis and requirements, retrospectives and collaboration. Ellen works with global clients and speaks at numerous industry conferences. Author of two acclaimed books—Requirements by Collaboration and The Software Requirements Memory Jogger—Ellen is co-authoring a book with Mary Gorman on practical agile planning and analysis practices available in August 2012. View her articles, tweets, blog, free eNewsletter, and useful practitioner resources on EBG’s web site.
Dan Kohler is a Sr Business Systems Analyst at American Electric Power. Dan started on an agile pilot project at AEP as a subject matter expert representing a small subset of the users. While learning and embracing the agile framework, he became the product owner and has been a mainstay on an agile team that has produced several highly successful projects. Dan has lived in both the traditional waterfall approach and in an agile approach to project management and thrives on being able to do more than just the traditional BA role. After working on an agile team for the last two years, he claims he will never do a waterfall project again!