Test-driven development (TDD) is a skill that takes patience to master-you can’t learn it reading a book. As with learning any new language, to gain fluency you need to practice TDD with competent coaching and lots of hard work. Many well-intentioned programmers try and finally give up on TDD because they never develop the fluency it requires. On stage, Llewellyn Falco leads a live TDD demonstration, talking through the process and microsteps of: (1) studying a feature, (2) creating an initial test, and (3) iteratively developing the related test code and feature code until the feature is completely programmed. Watch how to iteratively write a test, see it fail, and then write the feature code to make it pass. After explaining the theory behind the particular TDD technique used, Llewellyn leads participants in testing progressively more complex objects and scenarios.

Is your organization implementing test automation and not achieving the expected success? Are you spending too much effort rewriting scripts that don't hold up over time? Do your test plans sometimes look like random acts of automation? Roi Carmel shares a pragmatic process he’s used for defining automation goals, addressing automation challenges, and assessing an organization’s readiness for automation. Learn how to achieve greater success with automation and significantly increase test coverage, shrink timelines, and support overall business goals. Although there is no magic bullet, no express lane to a perfect automation center of excellence, Roi explains how organizations can assess their maturity against an automation maturity model in the areas of people, processes, and technology.

There are many paths to innovation. At one extreme, many large companies create research labs, staff them with world-class Ph.D.s, and set them working for years to solve complex technical problems. At the other end is the proverbial "two entrepreneurs in the garage" working on a shoe-string budget. Between these extremes are all sorts of organizational structures, team sizes, budgets, and time horizons to encourage innovation. Patrick Copeland introduces basic models for innovation-top-down, democratic, and his personal favorite “eXtreme”-and describes how Google's core beliefs, culture, organization, and infrastructure have successfully encouraged and enabled democratic innovation throughout its growth. From the now famous “twenty-percent time” offer to engineers to its culture of trust, Google is famous for its innovation and out-of-box thinking and execution.

Are you running automated tests during development yet not providing automated feedback to the project stakeholders? Vikas Bhupalam approached this problem by leveraging and integrating monitoring, logging, and defect tracking systems to provide automatic feedback to stakeholders.