Keynote Presentations

Keynote: Subject to Change: Creating Great Products and Services for an Uncertain World

David Verba, Director of Technology, Adaptive Path

In a world of endless consumer choice and expectations based on iPhones, it's increasingly clear that the customer's experience matters. In fact, the experience itself has become the product. To achieve success in this ever-changing and unpredictable market, competitive businesses need to rethink and reframe their strategies across the board. Instead of approaching new product development from the inside out, we have to begin by looking at the process from the outside in, beginning with the customer experience.  We must develop a new set of organizational competencies: qualitative customer research to better understand customer behaviors and motivations; an open design process to reframe possibilities and translate new ideas into great customer experiences; and agile technological implementation to quickly prototype ideas, getting them from the whiteboard out into the world where people can respond to them. We'll review a handful of ideas for succeeding in a future that you can't predict.

Keynote: Rein in RIA Quality: Adopt a Policy-Based Approach

Wayne Ariola ,Vice President, Strategy and Corporate Development, Parasoft

The very technologies that help Web professionals offer extreme interactivity also add a greater level of complexity to the architecture and development of Web applications. Many of these complexities make RIA applications difficult to develop, and even more difficult to test: for example, JavaScript and browser compatibility issues, integration with various server-side components, and the asynchronous nature of AJAX. Since testing is so complex, leaving quality efforts until the traditional testing phase can be a dangerous and costly proposition.

One effective way to reduce the amount of testing required is to adopt a policy-based approach. This involves defining a policy that captures the organization's expectations for Web reliability, security, and compliance, then establishing an inline process that monitors whether each "unit of work" satisfies those expectations as it is built.

With this continuous process for building quality into each component, team productivity increases dramatically. By following clearly-defined expectations for building reliability, security, and compliance into code, development is freed from the constant interruption of having to review, reproduce, and remediate defects reported by QA. Moreover, with so many defects being prevented, QA resources can be reduced or reallocated into tasks that deliver increased business value such as performing a more extensive high-level "functional audit" of the application and assisting the team to monitor and improve its continuous quality process.

The 8 Things Every Web Team Should Know: Lessons From a Grumpy Web Consultant

Lance Loveday, CEO, Closed Loop Marketing

Anyone who has worked in the online space for long realizes that many of the obstacles web teams face have little to do with technology, and everything to do with the damn humans. Why are web projects so easy for some organizations to get right but so excruciatingly difficult for most? Veteran web guru Lance Loveday knows and it makes him grumpy that everyone else doesn't. Join Lance as he reveals the dark side of web team interactions, the damage it can wreak and the toll it can have on an organization's success. He'll share humorous anecdotes based on in-the-trenches experiences and, most importantly, practical tips on how teams can work smarter and more effectively.