You've heard of eXtreme Programming (XP) and perhaps Scrum. How about Crystal Clear, Adaptive Software Development, Dynamic Systems Development Method, Rational Unified Process for Agile Development, and Feature Driven Development? These are some of the many variations of Agile development methods. Join Jeff McKenna as he explores the many flavors of Agile development methods and explains the similarities and differences. Find out what aspects of Agile development can help your organization’s development team in its particular environment. If you are considering Agile development and need to decide in which direction to go, this session is for you. Although a one-hour session cannot provide all the information you will need, you can explore what is common-the philosophy, the values, the characteristics-and what is different-the methods, the coverage, the costs-about different Agile approaches.

Think about it ... You are responsible for performance testing a system containing over 5 billion searchable documents to an active user base of 2.6 million users, and you are expected to deliver notification of sub-second changes in release response and certification of extremely high reliability and availability. Your n-tier architecture consists of numerous mainframes and large-scale UNIX
servers as well as Intel processor-based servers. The test environment architecture is distributed across large numbers of servers performing shared functions for a variety of products competing for test time and resources during aggressive release cycles. Because it is impractical and too costly to totally isolate systems at this scale, capacity and performance test engineers produce high quality

Test-driven (or test first) development (TDD) is an excellent method for improving the quality of software applications. It forces the programmer to focus on ensuring that the behavior of the objects at the lowest level of the system is appropriate. It also provides a mechanism to ensure that future source code changes do not break existing behaviors. Using C++ as the example language, Robert Walsh presents an overview of test-driven development, available TDD testing frameworks, and a demonstration of a project started from scratch using TDD. You can apply these concepts to other languages, including Java and Visual Basic. Learn how to overcome the initial hurdles many developers experience when starting out with TDD.

• An introduction to test-driven development using C++ as the example language
• The testing frameworks available for TDD
• Programming tasks that are difficult to implement using TDD

Focusing on the customer throughout the software development lifecycle (SDLC) is difficult to do. Teams often can become mired in technical problems, internal resource limitations, or other issues. Following the customer mantra of "Faster! Better! Cheaper!" Steve Wrenn offers measurement and process techniques that he has used to deliver projects on time, on budget, and, most importantly, meeting customers needs. By focusing on the development cycle from the outside in, his organization provides business-based metrics dashboards to monitor and adjust the project plan throughout the development project. Find out how their performance dashboard helps the team and the customer stay on course and drive directly to the targeted results. Discover an approach to determine what customers really want and match product development to customer expectations.