Are We There Yet? Challenges for the Next Decade

Some people find agile to be a bit boring these days-they think that after a decade, there’s not much left to discover. However, if you look around, there are a host of software development problems just waiting for a solution. Mary Poppendieck describes some of these big issues and challenges agile practitioners for answers. For example, consider testing. Although xUnit testing and continuous integration go a long way to assure that software is built right and stays that way, these practices don't guarantee that we are building the right software. We have much more to discover in acceptance test design and automation. Embedded systems constitute a huge percentage of the software developed today; however, current agile techniques do little to address the fundamental problems faced by the teams developing these systems. Moreover, development of very large systems is not easily adaptable to agile approaches, nor are the vital infrastructure projects that customers don't really care about. Join Mary as she explores these seemingly intractable challenges and offers ideas for innovative solutions that may be coming down the road.