Agile Development

Tutorials

MF Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing

Nate Oster, CodeSquads, LLC

Mon, 11/11/2013 - 8:30am

On agile teams, testers can struggle to keep up with the pace of development if they continue employing a waterfall-based verification process—finding bugs after development. Nate Oster challenges you to question waterfall assumptions and replace this legacy verification testing with acceptance test-driven development (ATDD). With ATDD, you “test first” by writing executable specifications for a new feature before development begins.

TI Eight Steps to Kanban

Ken Pugh, Net Objectives

Tue, 11/12/2013 - 8:30am

Because transitioning to agile can be difficult—and often wrenching—for teams, many organizations are turning to kanban practices. Kanban, which involves just-in-time software delivery, offers a more gradual evolution to agile and is adaptable to many company cultures and environments. With kanban, developers pull work from a queue—taking care not to exceed a threshold for simultaneous tasks—while making progress visible to all. Ken Pugh shares eight steps to adopt kanban in your team and organization.

TK Essential Test-Driven Development

Rob Myers, Agile Institute

Tue, 11/12/2013 - 1:00pm

Test-driven development (TDD) is a powerful technique for combining software design, unit testing, and coding in a continuous process to increase reliability and produce better code design. Using the TDD approach, developers write programs in very short development cycles: first the developer writes a failing automated test case that defines a new function or improvement, then produces code to pass that test, and finally refactors the new code to acceptable standards. The developer repeats this process many times until the behavior is complete and fully tested.

Concurrent Sessions

AW7 Adopt Before You Adapt: Learning Principles through Practice

Steve Berczuk, Fitbit, Inc.

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 2:15pm

Although agile principles sound simple, adopting agile is often extremely difficult. Some teams adopting agile start by making changes and tweaks to prescribed processes—bad! Steve Berczuk explains how following the recommended practices of your chosen agile method for a time will help you internalize the process and leverage the experiences of those who developed the method. Through experience, Steve has discovered that premature customization can lead to more problems and eventually to failure.

AT1 Large Agile Transformations: A Roadmap for Lasting Change

Ole Jepsen, goAgile

Jenni Jepsen, goAgile

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 10:15am

Agile methods have gained the attention of leaders as a way to speed time to market and increase motivation. Businesses are looking to agile as a way to achieve organizational change so teams deliver more value faster, and where people’s pride and joy of work are enhanced. However, we know from extensive experience that agile practices by themselves will not lead to this kind of an organizational transformation. What does it take?

AT8 The Kanban Pizza Game: Maximize Profit by Managing Flow

Brad Swanson, agile42

Thu, 11/14/2013 - 2:15pm

The Kanban Pizza Game is a hands-on simulation designed to teach the core elements of a kanban system—visualize the workflow, limit your work-in-process (WIP), manage flow, make process policies explicit, and improve collaboratively.