agile

If you are an agile coach and your team or organization is struggling to adopt agile methods or is backsliding, this class is for you. David Hussman shares coaching techniques you can use to grow sustainable agility that lasts beyond the early iterations and the first few agile projects. David begins with a series of tools to help you build a solid foundation: assessments, pragmatic practice selection, chartering, and product planning tools. He shares his coaching experiences that you can adapt to help your teams establish a strong cadence while also building the essence of coaching within your organization. You'll learn to step back from prescriptive practices and use the agile principles and values to amplify existing strengths and address challenges. Whether you are new to agile methods or a seasoned player, David helps you grow your coaching skills and your ability to discover and deliver sustainable, real value.

While most organizations are starting to come to terms with the process aspects of agile, they still face challenges when identifying how to modify their testing practices to be more flexible. This is particularly true for security and performance testing where many organizations hold on to a waterfall-style approach, leaving these critical aspects to the end of the release and often leaving the application open to vulnerabilities. Based on her many customer experiences, Tracy DeDore shares the practices she recommends for nonfunctional testing: writing testable user stories, planning for testing beginning at sprint 0, and introducing "hardening" sprints that help users and developers incorporate security and performance testing into agile processes.

Since the early days of agile, we've known that face-to-face communication is optimal. In fact, one of the twelve principles in the Agile Manifesto is, “Business people and developers must work together daily throughout the project.” So, what are the real differences between collocated and distributed teams with the advent of “closeness” technologies-Web-based meetings, shared project whiteboards, Skype, Wikis, video conferencing, and more? Through a series of stories about teams he’s worked closely with over the past few years, Michael Feathers explores the issues surrounding team collocation. Whether you are lucky enough to have your entire agile team together or are required to work apart most or all of the time, you'll discover new ways to encourage collaboration and build personal relationships. In the end, you'll arrive at your personal understanding of what "being there" means.

Agile, waterfall, iterative, staged, gated, phased-none of it really matters if all you create are a few early "wins", mediocre solutions, and quick fixes. Many organizations twist the time pressure screws so tightly that creative thinking can only be done after work or surreptitiously during the five-minute coffee break or the fifteen-minute lunch at your desk. We often are told that “good enough” software is what the company needs. Although “good enough” is acceptable when the systems we create neither differentiate us from our competitors nor are critical to our mission, why do we waste precious resources creating those kinds of systems? Tim Lister knows that there is hope because many organizations do create superior systems-systems that set them above their competitors and wow their customers. What are these organizations doing to yield innovative, superior results from their software development?