Services & Specialized Products

ATSC: The Agile Choice

At ATSC, we understand that successful technology projects are the result of effective collaboration between business and technology professionals. We believe that the quality of our interactions is as significant as the processes or tools that we employ. How well people work together, how effectively they communicate with one another, how well they understand the nature and the value of the problem at hand, and how they respond to change -- these challenges are all addressed by agile methods for project delivery.

Our long-standing commitment to understanding high-performance teams and how they work together is reflected in the passion and experience that our agile coaches bring to our clients. Certified in the Scrum methodology and contributors to the OpenUP and the Eclipse Process Framework, our coaches employ their experience, knowledge, and judgment to help you find the right level of ceremony and appropriate software development tools that will foster effective collaborations and successful projects in your organization. Partners Delivering Results.

Packaged Services

Consulting

  • Agile Coaching
  • ScrumMaster Services
  • Software Process Improvement
  • Tool implementation

Training

Podcasts

Whitepapers

Webinar Series

Demos

Recorded Webinars

Presentations

New Innovate 2010 (Rational Software Conference) Presentations:

Case Study: How to Build a Successful Agile Test Team with Non-Technical Testers(PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Thursday, June 10, 2010
Kim Werner, Sr. Management Consultant, ATSC
Creating a Testing Team from mostly non-technical Testers can be very challenging. This is especially true when the Team is spread out over multiple geographical areas. Building a Test Team and adopting best practices from scratch is not a trivial task. In addition to building the team, the act of testing itself needs to be more efficient and yield more value through the adoption of one or more Agile techniques. Technology must play an important point in the solution in order to be successful. IBMs Rational Quality Manager (RQM) and Rational Functional Tester (RFT) certainly fit this solution. This session is a Case Study of the build-out of a new testing team including the deployment and adoption of the Jazz-based IBM Rational Functional Tester (v2) and integration with IBM Rational Functional Tester, RequisitePro, and email servers. The case study focuses on a large Health Insurance organization that deployed an enterprise level Quality Management solution using RQM, and RFT.

Case Study: The world is flatter - software development and reducing barriers with Rational Team Concert(PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Thursday, June 10, 2010
Eyal Abukasis, Director, Eastern Region, ATSC
Pratik Bengali, Sr. Consultant, ATSC
Over the past decade, we have seen software processes, practices and tools used to transform and then re-transform. Not too long ago, the norm was waterfall development using best of breed tools often working in siloes. Teams were co-located and projects involved teams of 5-10 software developers who wore the hats of many (analysts, architects, developers, testers, project managers and deployment managers). Recently, everything became more complicated with much larger projects and teams, often geographically distributed, but by using integrated suites of tools and processes, we were able to take advantage of the flatter world. The playing field has changed once again with shrinking budgets, outsourced development and the need for fast results. Come and hear a real world example of the evolution of a team and a project that moved from silo'd development to JAZZ based solutions.

Quality in the Trenches Panel: Traditional? Agile? Something else?(PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Tuesday, June 8, 2010
Scott Ambler, IBM; Kim Werner, ATSC; James B. Massey, IBM; Reedy Feggins, IBM
There is a great variety of techniques and tools for testing and quality assurance. Should you embed testers into development teams? When should there be an independent test team? Should people pair program? Does refactoring work? How does test-driven development (TDD) fit in? How can you test user interfaces, services, and databases effectively? Do agile strategies really work? Do agile testing strategies scale?

Getting Started with Agile – Methods

Presented on Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Kim Werner, Agile Coach & Process Engineer, ATSC

Description: Is your team ready to do Agile development, but unsure where to start, which methods to tackle first, or if your existing tools will be sufficient? Join IBM and one of our top Agile Business Partners, ATSC, for an in depth discussion of Agile methods, where to start, and why a deep dive using Scrum, illustrated through IBM Rational Team Concert Express-C (Free Edition) can accelerate new teams in their Agile adoption to achieving rapid results.

Agenda:

  • Review of Agile disciplines and methods
  • Deep dive on Scrum
  • Demo of how Rational Team Concert Express-C Free edition automated key Scrum activities

If you were unable to attend, please take some time and view the replay.

Agile 2009 Conference

Where Does Developer Testing End and Tester Testing Begin (PDF)
Presented on Monday, August 24, 2009
Abby Fictner, Agile Developer & Coach, ATSC
Nate Oster, Agile Player/Coach, ATSC
This is a trick question, right? In agile, everyone works on the same items together, at the same time. Yet, the reality is we’re not all interchangeable cogs. Developers and testers each bring their own, unique skills to the table. The key to effective agile is not minimizing our differences, but building upon the strengths each person brings to the team. Join us for this hands-on simulation and retrospective as developers and testers explore how agile teams build quality into their process, how each member contributes to that quality, and how we can avoid traditional testing pitfalls.

We’ll examine the various ways that agile principals and practices build quality into our process, and how these work best when programmers & testers work together. We’ll facilitate games and discussions on how traditionally cast “developers” and “testers” can use these techniques to best draw on their own unique strengths to ensure a quality product.

2009 Rational Software Conference Presentations:

Case Study – Rethinking Conventional Test Strategies (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Thursday, June 4, 2009
Eyal Abukasis, Director, Eastern Region, ATSC
Pratik Bengali, Sr. Consultant, ATSC
The introduction of software quality tools and methodologies to non-technical practitioners is often viewed as a challenging task when the objective is to demonstrate results of improved efficiency and productivity gains in less than four weeks. This presentation presents a case study discussing strategy, implementation, hurdles, lessons learned, and success - a 300 percent productivity gain - from start to end of a tool rollout, training, and implementation achieved by simply rethinking conventional test strategies.

How to Get Agile in 40 Days (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Tuesday, June 2, 2009
Kim Werner, Senior Management Consultant, ATSC
Agile is the latest craze being embraced by many companies, but there are many facets of agility, including tools, several Agile methods, and adoption techniques. It can be confusing how or where to start in order to be successful and maximize productivity and leverage best-of-breed new technology like tools based on IBM® Jazz®. This presentation walks through the steps necessary to become Agile in 40 days, including adoption techniques and where to start by leveraging the IBM Jazz tool solution.

Can Agility and IBM® Rational Unified Process® Coexist in the Workplace? Yes! (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Wednesday, June 3, 2009
Kim Werner, Senior Management Consultant, ATSC
Large and medium-sized organizations who have adopted the IBM® Rational Unified Process® (RUP®)and invested significant resources in process adoption and supporting tools might scoff at the idea of being Agile. It might be viewed as cowboy programming that certainly couldn't work in particular organizations because of compliance needs right - or could it? This presentation shows how organizations (or even parts of them) can adopt some Agile methods to be more productive yet still comply with RUP adoption and compliance needs.

2008 Rational Software Conference Presentations:

Applying Agile OpenUp in a New Team: A Case Study (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Thursday, June 5, 2008
Greg Gurley, Principal Consultant, ATSC
Nate Oster, Player Coach, ATSC
An initial release of a project had issues with requirements churn and late testing. This presentation reviews the implementation of Agile methods using the Open Unified Process (OpenUP), a lean IBM(R) Rational Unified Process(R), to release two of the project to improve the process. An overview of the Agile techniques applied, Agile estimation and planning, challenges of applying Agile in a federal government environment, retrospectives from the team, and real-world project artifacts are presented.

Case Study - Migrate Offshore Majority Development Team to a Unified Change Management Environment Enabled by IBM(R) Rational(R) ClearQuest(R) (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Thursday, June 5, 2008
Arnold Cruz, Tools Specialist, ATSC
This session discusses the migration of a development organization from Visual Source Safe and Sablime to one common tool set: IBM(R) Rational(R) ClearQuest(R) enabled unified change management (UCM) and IBM(R) Rational(R) ClearCase(R). The presenter discusses the configuration and implementation of a UCM environment in which the offshore development team strictly uses IBM Rational ClearCase Remote Client and IBM Rational ClearQuest Web.

From the Requirements Trenches: What To Do When It Isn't Like It Was In The Book (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Wednesday, June 4, 2008
Joseph Lamy, Process Engineer, ATSC
Rick Adler, Process Engineer, ATSC
Modern software requirements management techniques seem to be well understoodand well documented, but sometimes situations arise that don't fit the pattern.From transitioning a large base of requirements over time to the use case style,to dealing with the tendency to design the UI up front, to managing requirementsat the enterprise level, this presentation explores these situations andsuggests solutions, using real-world examples.

Agile Development Mechanism and Patterns with RAD (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Wednesday, June 4, 2008
David Pitt, Architect , ATSC
Jaime Niswonger, Architect, ATSC
This presentation will describe how software developers can use Rational Application Developer (RAD) in conjunction with Java 5 constructs (Generics, Annotations), and the popular Spring and Hibernate open source JEE frameworks, to provide an Agile development mechanism. Attendees will see the productivity and agility the combination of RAD's productivity and integrated test environments provides, and how common generalized application architecture patterns support an agile way to construct applications.

Visual Models on Agile Project? You're Kidding Right? No! (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Kim Werner, Process Engineer, ATSC
Agile projects are known for their lean approach to software development. User stories over use cases, conversation over detailed written requirements. Visual models? Forget about it. Or should we?

A Look at Business Process Modeling Best Practices and Transformation to a System Realization (PDF) (MP3)
Presented on Tuesday, June 3, 2008
Kim Werner, Process Engineer, ATSC
Joseph Lamy, Process Engineer, ATSC
At IBM several products are capable of modeling business processes: IBM(R) WebSphere(R) Business Modeler, IBM(R) Rational(R) Software Modeler/IBM(R) Rational(R) Software Architect, and IBM(R) Rational Rose(R). Each product is quite different at its foundation, but fit certain market spaces. IBM sales can present vastly different, contradictory or even confusing ideas about each product. This session helps demystify IBM business modeling tools and how they may integrate with other IBM Rational tooling.

What our Customers are Saying

“[It's] transforming the way we work. We’re one Team now, working together in parallel, transparently. Its more fun, and much more productive.”
-- Mary Jo, Project Architect

“We’ve been trying to do that for three years, and they did it in three weeks!”
-- IT Executive at a leading provider of waste and environmental services

“As someone who learns well from doing instead of listening to a lecture and regurgitating information, I found the hands on exercises brilliant. This is exactly how it's done in the real world."
-- Bill Alexander, Business Analyst