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Software Craftsmanship: It's an Imperative Sadly, ten years into the evolution of agile practices, many teams fail to learn and implement the software development practices that are necessary for long-term code quality and agility. Software craftsmen believe that without these technical practices the quality of software goes downhill and teams can’t sustain high levels of productivity. Fadi Stephan introduces software craftsmanship, reviews its history, and explores the driving forces that led practitioners to create this movement. Fadi describes the software craftsman’s ethics, disciplines, principles, and practices as he explores the latest arguments between advocates and opponents of software craftsmanship. Learn about the value statements in the software craftsmanship manifesto and their relationship to the current state of software development. Discover new tools and forums available to developers for practicing and mastering their craft.
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Fadi Stephan, Excella Consulting
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Scrum vs. Kanban: It's Not Necessarily All of One or the Other Have your Scrum development teams discovered that grooming some features only one sprint ahead is too late? Have your product owners ever asked you to implement a set of features within a month and continue to implement additional features on a periodic basis? As you manage a product and its releases, you must address these and other timing issues to reduce or eliminate rework, maintain a steady pace of delivery, and consistently produce business value. Sharing experiences managing a large and complex product within State Farm’s vast IT organization, Season Tanner describes the successes and issues they encountered using Scrum and Kanban together. Learn about the Kanban process they implemented and tuned to work while retaining some Scrum practices. Find out what ultimately worked best and how they execute that process today.
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Season Tanner, State Farm Insurance Companies
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Eight Principles for Better Unit Testing Unit testing is a core component of agile development methodologies. Teams that perform comprehensive unit testing are perceived to be more reliable, professional, and advanced. Yet, many developers find starting unit testing is difficult. They test the wrong things, often with fragile tests that must be rewritten. Many give up even before realizing the value that unit testing brings. It doesn’t have to be that way! Gil Zilberfeld explains important principles for better unit testing: choosing what to test first, selecting the most appropriate tools, determining what to include in unit tests and what to defer to integration tests, measuring progress, understanding the differences between designing unit tests for new projects vs. legacy code, and more. Learn how to overcome resistance and get the entire team on board. There’s no reason to make the same mistakes others have made. Don’t get stuck with bad tests or the wrong tool.
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Gil Zilberfeld, Typemock
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Agile Development on Large Legacy Architecture Twenty years of traditional processes produced valuable applications at Integrated Research (IR). However, making changes to software was slow and often introduced quality problems that took months to resolve. When one of their customers offered a great new opportunity, IR had to move with speed they did not possess and achieve a quality level that their old ways would not permit. Tony Young shares how his organization introduced agile methodologies on that critical project, giving immediate benefits of speed, focus, visibility, and quality. He describes how Scrum and Kanban practices-daily scrums, pair programming, short sprints, test-driven development, backlogs, and continuous integration-were rolled out across several agile teams. Learn how IR got CEO support for agile, convinced developers to adopt agile practices, evaluated their progress with metrics, and maintained a unified system architecture using a Scrum-of-Scrums.
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Tony Young, Integrated Research
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Agile Requirements Readiness ... and the Role of Testers Mature agile teams work together to ensure sufficient requirement information is ready when an iteration starts. However, on many teams, developers lack this support and may receive overly detailed-and often ambiguous-requirements that are “thrown over the wall.” Drawing on recent industry research and successes of companies with which he’s worked, Chris Duro shares stories from three companies that evolved an agile adoption requirements readiness assessment framework. They used this framework to quantify the requirements problems, obtain management visibility, and win improvements in their requirements process. Chris answers key questions about the framework: How is readiness defined and measured? What is the tester’s role in agile requirements development? How can agile teams check thousands of requirement document pages automatically?
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Christopher Duro, Cognizant
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Agile Development Conference East 2011: The Agile PMO: From Process Police to Adaptive Governance Although success stories from individual agile teams on single projects abound, agile adoptions encounter significant challenges scaling to multiple teams on multiple projects. The Project Management Office (PMO), which often remains poorly defined in agile environments, offers the perfect place to oversee and adapt to govern your agile adoption. Sanjiv Augustine shares success stories from industry-leading organizations that are scaling agile to large projects and across many smaller projects. These organizations have developed PMO managers who bring lean discipline to project prioritization, track and monitor the value delivery across projects, support stable teams for higher productivity, and enable mature process adoption. Rather than focusing more on process compliance than business results, they help teams carefully and adaptively apply metrics, tools, and high-level standardization to their agile teams.
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Sanjiv Augustine, LitheSpeed, LLC
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Surviving an FDA Audit: Heuristics for Exploratory Testing In FDA regulated industries, audits are high-stakes, fact-finding exercises required to verify compliance to regulations and an organization’s internal procedures. Although exploratory testing has emerged as a powerful test approach within regulated industries, an audit is the impact point where exploratory testing and regulatory worlds collide. Griffin Jones describes a heuristic model-Congruence, Honesty, Competence, Appropriate Process Model, Willingness, Control, and Evidence-his team used to survive an audit. You can use this model to prepare for an audit or to baseline your current practices for an improvement program. Griffin highlights the common misconceptions and traps to avoid with exploratory testing in your regulated industry. Avoid mutual misunderstandings that can trigger episodes of incongruous behavior and an unsuccessful audit.
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Griffin Jones, iCardiac Technologies
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Ten Great Practices Learned from Open Source Projects Open source development combines distributed teams, resource constraints, and an overload of end user input. Despite these challenges, the velocity of many popular open source projects is measurably higher than that of their enterprise counterparts. The time has come to take the lessons learned from open source and adapt them to enterprise agile. Mik Kersten begins with an examination of successful open source projects and their approaches to agile delivery. Then he reviews the overlap of open source approaches and agile methods, identifying ten great practices that agile practitioners can apply to improve their collaboration and productivity. Each practice is grounded in empirical data that Mik collected from public open source websites. To provide an intuitive appreciation for the open style of agile delivery, Mik illustrates with graphics and visual aids how open source collaboration evolves and grows over time.
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Mik Kersten, Tasktop
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User Stories from MONOPOLY: Complex Rules, Random Events, and Twisted Exceptions Agile developers often face the difficult task of defining user stories from business rules for complex applications-medical, embedded, insurance, banking applications, etc. In his consulting practice, Rob Sabourin helps teams elicit and describe stories for thorny business rules, multi-path conditions, time/event triggered activities, awkward dynamics, special cases, unusual constraints, exceptions, and non-functional characteristics. Using the popular board game MONOPOLY as a metaphor, Rob shows you how to develop user stories that focus development in different business contexts. He models MONOPOLY stories around personas-the little token players move around the board. If you land on Boardwalk’s hotel after rolling a third double, you Go to Jail rent free. Rent is not owed unless requested and is exempt if the landlord procrastinates.
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Robert Sabourin, AmiBug.com
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Designing Agility that Lasts Every day more agile practices and styles emerge, overlap, and complete. This proliferation challenges you to choose from among XP, Scrum, Lean, Kanban or the ways of the Lean Start Up crowd. Instead of stumbling onto one path or another, come to this session where David Hussman teaches tools for assessing and designing an agile process or set of practices which speaks to your needs and constraints. David covers selecting product planning tools like user stories, iterative delivery tools like kanban boards, tracking tools like burn up and more. If you want to clear the fog surrounding what will really help you, stop in and ask your questions. You will find answers.
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David Hussman, DevJam
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