Many software development teams wrongly assume culture does not matter in global development. With a smaller world, new highly-educated groups of internet-savvy college-educated people from all around the world have taken-over technology development and left unique, old habits behind! Not true. In a world of English-only as the international business language of choice, how can there be cultural and language barriers preventing us from reaching our full potentials? There are many!

This session confronts many cultural, language and team barriers and presents solutions on how to not only overcome them but also turn them into points of greater understanding and teamwork!

Main Message:

• Why culture matters
• Understanding various cultures and culture models
• Learning cultural differences and using them to foster greater understanding
• Training and awareness as a solution
• Americans and a 7 Habits of Highly Effective People mentality
• How do cultural differences impact Agile developments with so much focus on teamwork?
• Culture reflected in language and averting problems caused by it
• Culture practices in the workplace.

Companies have been offshoring software development for decades. It is not a new topic. But many things have changed in the past ten years: The size of the company offshoring, the type of software development projects offshored, the locations of the offshore teams and the communication tools to facilitate these teams, to name a few.

What have we learned in these past ten years of much more rapid offshoring that we can apply to our own team practices? How can we use the successes and failures of past teams to greater ensure project success, team happiness and customer satisfaction? This session is an essential how-to for any team in an offshoring situation whether you have been offshoring for many years or approaching your first project.

Main Message:

• Top 10 Lessons Learned
• Varieties of outsourcing
• Tools to facilitate communication
• The direction of outsourcing today
• Has Agile changed the way we operate?
• Skill differences needed for today’s offshoring
• The Importance of relationship building
• Investing in training
• It’s the soft skills that matter most!

In this class, we offer strategies, tactics, and test practices, experience and possible points-of-conflict so that the test team supports the goals of agile development and provides the most effective technical service to the product team.

Main Message:

• Foundation agile concepts
• Problems and misconceptions of agile
• Important QA and test ideas and practices that need to be remembered on agile projects.
• Test practices and strategies for testing on agile projects
• Continuous Integration
• Automation strategies in an agile world