agile

Organizational patterns describe the inner-workings of organizational structures. These patterns are the foundation for agile competence and take you far beyond basic out-of-the box methods to provide deeper insights into agile. Both Scrum and XP have their roots in these patterns, focusing on project management and developer practices respectively. Jim (Cope) Coplien explains the other 75% of the good stuff--the things that Scrum, XP, and other methodologies gloss over. Cope presents the “Top 10” organizational patterns-those that correlate most strongly to organizational success. Do you capitalize on DOMAIN EXPERTISE IN ROLES? How about ARCHITECT ALSO IMPLEMENTS, or the important role of the manager as FIREWALL to distance the developers from "those who want to help?" What important concepts are you missing in your agile practices?

Many who try to unit test their applications-whether using agile or traditional methods-quickly find that doing a thorough job can be difficult if the code was not designed with testability in mind. Roy Osherove describes dependency injection methods for designing APIs so that they are easier to test. He explains how design patterns can help and how to implement applications with interface-based programming. Roy shares his insight on what "evolving a design" really means in the context of test-driven development. For those who are living with legacy code, he discusses special techniques for managing and implementing unit testing. In addition, Roy discusses the build life cycle and how continuous integration fits into the mix.

Agile processes work better if developers and customers have specific aptitudes and attitudes, such as the ability and willingness to handle rapid change. Members of an agile product team cannot always be selected to ensure that they innately possess these capabilities. Developers may not appreciate the need for unit testing. Customers may not be able to interact easily to create just-in-time requirements. You must adapt your agile implementation so that team members can work effectively within their capabilities. In this interactive class, participants first outline people issues they have faced. Based on common issues, the class self-selects into small groups to discuss their challenges in more depth. Each group develops ways to approach these issues and improve their teams. At the end, groups share their key results with the whole class.

In Behavior Driven Development (BDD), you write behavioral tests of an application just-in-time, one test at a time to express its design. You can take a BDD approach to a database schema in the same way. Scott Ambler presents the Behavior Driven Database Design (BDDD) technique. He explains its relationship to Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD) and how it fits into agile software development in general. Find out how to refactor a database by applying simple changes that improve the design without changing its semantics. Create a comprehensive regression test suite to validate your database on a regular basis, ideally whenever a change is made to the database schema itself or when the database is accessed in a new way. Go even further and implement continuous database integration where the database is automatically rebuilt and retested whenever its schema changes.