Date: 10 Mar 2016
Where: Southampton

Ordnance Survey hosted the event and we would like to thank them for their hospitality. OS is Britain’s mapping agency, making the most up-to-date and accurate maps of the country. But they are also a digital business, and use their content to help governments, companies and individuals be more effective both here and around the world.

Untangling Stories

Producing a clear set of independently deliverable requirements is important to enable a development team to deliver business value early and often. Without this, often large numbers of smaller requirements are batched together leading to a lack of clarity, slow progress in delivery and unmaintainable code. We consider the important role of the Business Analyst in untangling requirements to achieve truly agile delivery.

 

Daniel Marlow is an IT Software Engineering Consultant at Ordnance Survey, a role where he uses his skills in business analysis, consultancy, coaching, training and software development. With a career spanning over 15 years in the public and private sectors he has experience of a wide range of domains and technologies. He has a particular focus on agile approaches to delivering valuable, high-quality products.

 

Miles Austen's interests are in building effective teams and products using Agile approaches. He has been in the software industry for over 35 years with involvement large and small scale developments in roles ranging from Software Manager, Scrum master, Development lead, consultancy and coaching. In his role of IT Software Engineering Consultant at Ordnance Survey he is using analysis, architecture and development approaches as the tools to produce highly productive development teams. Down the pub, he describes himself as a software engineer.

 

UX? No thanks it just costs more money

Tackling apathy and misunderstanding of the User Centred Design process can be a tough challenge. We look at how UCD helps define user requirements, how it can focus project objectives and save build time, and how to approach people who don't understand the value of a user-centred product development process. We end with a real-world walk-through of how OS helped the Cabinet Office define and deliver a pilot to aid communication between emergency services during disaster scenarios such as flooding and terrorist attacks.

Steve Attewell ran a web development agency for 20 years before specialising in User Experience. He joined a brand new UX team at OS as Senior User Experience Designer in 2014. His focus is guiding the team and evangelising the UX processes to the rest of the business to ensure the teams’ skills are utilised at every stage of product development, from idea, through sales, pilot projects, and final builds.

 

Using Model Driven Analysis (MDA) – a Customer story

Using models to capture and drive business analysis is a growing trend. Ian talks about the challenges and rewards of using MDA, using examples from a current client project. He shows how MDA has improved the job role of the BAs on this project, reducing the dull stuff they had to do, and putting the BAs back in control of business knowledge. He also discusses the dangers of BAs ignoring this approach, and what it might mean for their future employment.

Ian Mitchell has been a BA for nearly 20 years, and has lead, taught and mentored lots of BA teams. He is also the designer of the eaDocX document generator for EA, and writes the Artful Modeller blog

 

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