In agile projects, design ideally "emerges" over the course of development. However, if teams primarily focus on independent user stories, they risk losing sight of the product's vision and the integrity of well-thought-out architecture. Ken Kubo shares techniques he's used to improve the chances that a product's design will emerge into a cohesive and coherent architecture that serves its customers for many years. Join Ken to find out how you can incorporate contextual design principles and simple, visual techniques as part of his "A-Little-Before-Its-Time Design" framework. You can add these practices into your agile workflow to maintain a shared team understanding of your product's vision and the system's emerging design. Ken believes that you can only realize all the promises of agile development with a clearly and constantly communicated product vision and a set of architecture goals.

Continuous integration (CI) has become a buzzword, with most engineering organizations claiming they've adopted the practice. However, the sad truth is that unreliable tests, long feedback loops, and poor configuration management block their efforts and minimize CI's potential benefits. Jesse Dowdle shares how AtTask radically redesigned its engineering pipeline and, through massive CI scaling, drove three days of testing to just minutes. Learn the pros and cons of different CI systems and how to integrate them with the cloud. Watch a live demo of AtTask's internal test and CI systems, which they’ve designed to make "Every commit a potential release candidate"-meaning that every commit is an iteration. Arm yourself with the talking points to sell massive CI to executives.

Mobile application development shares many similarities-and some stark differences-with traditional web-based development. To build, test, and deploy five-star mobile applications, your organization needs-from inception-a focused test strategy to drive quality. Employing the wrong approaches and tools can leave your business sponsors and clients wondering what went wrong. Will Hurley outlines the current mobile landscape and explains what can and cannot be controlled in the mobile lifecycle. He explores the current landscape and limitations on tools for testing mobile apps, and offers guidance on what-and what not to-automate. With Will's guidance, you’ll learn how to establish a mobile lifecycle test strategy that is both leading edge and practical.

Although “agile architecture” may sound like an oxymoron to you, the reality is that a simple, elegant architecture is a key enabler of any successful system, particularly large scale ones. Scott Ambler describes agile architecture practices-at both the project and enterprise level-that form a middle ground between the extremes of big architecture up-front and outright hacking. Scott discusses agile modeling practices-initial architecture envisioning, proving an architecture with working code, and just-in-time model storming-that enable agile teams to benefit from architectural modeling without suffering the drawbacks of detailed design documentation. Beyond architecture, Scott introduces agile design techniques-continuous integration (CI), test-driven development (TDD), and refactoring-that build on and provide feedback to an emergent architecture.