At Improving, we are committed to being a company that provides an environment where learning and growing are encouraged. That's why so many of our Improvers are passionate thought leaders in their fields who love to share their knowledge and experience with others. Topics ranging from technical development, to agile methodologies and even company culture talks are an example of the range of passions our Improvers enjoy engaging with others about.
Upcoming Learning Events
Join us wherever you are in the world as we share some knowledge – hosted by our Improvers.
12:00 PM CST
Have you ever been working 50+ hour weeks on tight deadlines, you reach the finish line and collapse? The monster is slain, the race is won, and you are EXHAUSTED. Then you get ready for the sprint review, and hear that nothing your team produce was "enough". What could cause that? How can we avoid spending dozens ( if not hundreds of hours ) to find failure lurking in the tall grass ready to pounce? In this talk we will talk about the measures and conversations that teams can use to avoid this, and the conversations that can drive different behavior and a healthier approach for everyone.
12:00 PM CST
Web accessibility is on everyone’s mind and provides us a unique opportunity to do work that can have a big impact on people’s lives. Compliance with ADA (and section 508) standards impacts applications at every level from design through implementation, but it shouldn’t be intimidating – let us help you! We’ll cover a range of topics including:
- Why good usability goes hand-in-hand with accessibility
- Why good code goes hand-in-hand with accessibility
- Dos and Don’ts for compliant design
- Common tools you can use to check out your sites (aka making your device talk to you)
- Quick and easy implementation tips for updating your source
We are excited to now be offering our most popular certification classes remotely too
See Our Online ClassesPast Learning Events
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You and your co-workers want to keep track of who picks up the check at lunch. But they can't be trusted. Build a solution in Git that keeps things fair without trust. The solution: blockchain!
You’ve toiled long and hard on that new solution and you feel ready to present your proposal to a group of executives. It has forward-thinking technology. Micro-services and the best CI/CD pipeline anyone could ask for. When you walk into the board room, you’re shocked the only feedback you get is cost, complexity, and timeline concerns. So what went wrong? Your architecture was amazing. Why did they not understand your proposal? Knowing your audience is key to getting a green light for your solution. I’ll share with you how to sell your proposal to executives and give some insight into what they are looking for during this stage of technical architecture.
Many who try to start automating tests end up giving up the practice. Those tests seem really helpful at the beginning, but are abandoned over time. Even the practice of Test-Driven Development (TDD) faces similar issues, with many giving it up.
How do long-time practitioners do it? Or, perhaps more importantly, why do they do it?
Let me share my experiences in this area, starting with unit tests way back in 2004, navigating through lessons learned the hard way, and ending with my current approach to automated tests, code coverage, TDD/BDD, and how I use those techniques to bring together developers, QA, UX, Product Owners, and Business Analysts.
According to Agile Principle 7, Working Software is the primary measure of progress. That is echoed with the urgency of Agile Principle 1: Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software. This is confirmed in Scrum as the goal of a Sprint is to produce a potentially releasable increment of the product that meets the definition of done.
In this webinar we review some typical metrics that Scrum Teams use (Burndown Charts, Velocity Charts) and how they are useful and not useful. We will then explore some alternative approaches to inspecting how the Scrum Team is performing through the Scrum Events. The goal is to help teams uncover measurements that will help them focus on accomplishing the purpose of the events in Scrum which will in turn help them continuously improve and produce potentially releasable product every Sprint so we can get valuable feedback from our customers.
The ability to work remotely is no longer just a benefit but a necessity under today’s global pandemic. As a cloud platform, Microsoft 365 has been critical to many businesses enabling their employees to work from home, but has this exposed them to even more risk by potentially exposing their confidential data to the outside world?
In this session we will discuss many of the common challenges with enabling employees to work from home and how security controls in Microsoft 365 can immediately prevent exposure. With the right Microsoft 365 security controls in place, you can support your employees to be safe at home all while not losing sleep over your data being at risk.
The key to building high quality software is to follow high quality processes. The best processes cannot help you achieve the expected results if those processes aren’t followed. Small variations or missed steps can dramatically impact quality. In this Lunch and Learn session we’ll look how to use Azure DevOps to automate your build and deployment processes. Automating your build and deployments, provides additional peace of mind that your software is meeting a defined set of metrics or tests before it is deployed and that you didn’t miss a stop along the way.
Practically overnight our work turned virtual, our meetings remote. But some things never change. Some meetings still drag on and on... Worse still, some seem to generate more meetings!
What if our remote meetings could be as effective as they were when we were in person? What if they could be more effective!?
They can! And you can get them there! Come learn some simple practices to make all your meetings more effective, and not just the ones you lead! You'll be introduced to tools that will help you leverage the brilliance of your team. Let's use this moment to forge our organizations and our teams into stronger forces than they were before we went virtual!