Agile Development Conference & Better Software Conference West 2011

PRESENTATIONS

Teamwork Is an Individual Skill

Are you in this situation? You share responsibility with others to get things done, and, although you are not in charge of them and they are not in charge of you, your individual performance, credibility, and perhaps even your paycheck depend on what you accomplish with them. Knowing how to get things done with others over whom you have no direct authority may be your greatest leverage for career success-and your success in developing high-value software.
Christopher Avery, Partnerworks Inc.
Test-driven Development: Achieving Testable Code

Test-driven Development (TDD) has proven valuable on many development projects for more than ten years. Unfortunately, even today, many teams do not practice it. They give a myriad of excuses for not making TDD a part of their everyday practice.
David Yancey, Sogeti, Int
The Art of User Storytelling

Agilists employ user stories as a way to capture user requirements and drive the planning process for iterative and incremental delivery of software. Traditionalists with experience in "big requirements up front" often struggle with the brevity of user stories and how to best communicate requirements. Fadi Stephan compares and contrasts user stories, use cases, and traditional requirements development approaches and explains the benefits of user stories.
Fadi Stephan, Excella Consulting
The Business and Test Analysts' Guide to Acceptance Test Driven Development

On traditional software teams, business analysts define requirements in batches, describe them in big documents, and deliver them to developers and testers. Developers interpret the requirements and start writing code while testers interpret them and start writing tests. Almost always the interpretations differ, and neither precisely matches the analysts’ intentions. The mismatches are often discovered late in the project, after much effort has been expended and when corrections are most costly.
Dale Emery, DHE
The Essential Product Owner: Partnering with the Team

Over the past decade or so we've seen important new ideas added to the mix of software design practices to help us produce better software. Design Patterns help us capture the design solutions and reveal a rationale for using them. Refactoring allows us to improve system design after the code is written.
Bob Galen, iContact
The Secrets of Scrum Success: What the Books Don't Tell You

You've heard the hype about Scrum: 300% increases in productivity, huge reductions in defects, happy employees, and delighted customers. You wonder-is this really possible just by holding daily stand-up meetings and having something potentially shippable at the end of each sprint? Mitch Lacey shares the mostly untold secrets that make these kinds of results not only possible but likely.
Mitch Lacey, Mitch Lacey and Associates, Inc.
The Value of Defining "Done"

Many agile teams fail to meet customer expectations by releasing products before they are complete. Eric Jimmink coaches teams to treat the Definition of Done (DoD) as a learned and required practice. The DoD must reflect both the team's ambitions and the customer's demands for a ready-to-release product. Defining “Done” gives direction to the team, manages customer expectations, and secures the value that is promised to the business.
Eric Jimmink, Ordina
The Whats, Whys and Hows of Kanban

Lean software development practices are gaining momentum-with good reason-and many software teams are learning to use Kanban to help manage development and reduce waste. Sharing his experiences-both good and bad-implementing Kanban at Pillar Technology, Tim Wingfield explains how this practice can help you rapidly refine and improve your development and delivery processes.
Tim Wingfield, Pillar Technology
Understanding and Using Code Metrics

Have you heard any of these from your development staff or said them yourself? "Our software and systems are too fragile." "Technical debt is killing us." "We need more time to refactor." Having quality code is great, but we should understand why it matters and specifically what is important to your situation. Joel Tosi begins by defining and discussing some common code metrics-code complexity, coverage, object distance, afferent/efferent coupling, and cohesion.
Joel Tosi, VersionOne, Inc.
Virtual Private Clouds: A Secure Approach for Leveraging Cloud Benefits

Using cloud computing resources to test software can significantly expand the universe of plausible test scenarios. With the power of the cloud, we now can simulate test loads of many thousands of concurrent users across hundreds of platform combinations. So, how can we provide a secure environment for cloud-based testing over the Internet? Or must we abandon the cloud and revert to testing behind the firewall?
Prashant Suri, QA InfoTech

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