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Nate Oster

CodeSquads, LLC

An agile player-coach and founder of CodeSquads, Nate Oster helps clients adopt lean and agile methods. Nate builds high-performance teams that adapt to change, embrace a pragmatic philosophy of continuous improvement, measure progress with new features, and deliver high-quality software that delights customers. As a coach, he inspires adopters with hands-on mentoring and simulations that provide a safe learning environment for new ideas. Nate promotes testing as a serious technical discipline. While Nate maintains a speaking schedule at software development conferences, he spends most of his time as a hands-on advisor to software product teams from startups to multinationals. Nate is easily defeated at all card games. Contact him at [email protected].

Speaker Presentations
Monday, November 11, 2013 - 8:30am
Half-day Tutorials
Acceptance Test-Driven Development: Mastering Agile Testing

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.

Thursday, November 14, 2013 - 3:45pm
Agile Requirements
ATDD: Stop Testing at the End

Even the fastest agile teams can struggle when they “test at the end.” As automation efforts fall behind, untested features pile up—and so does the pressure to cut corners. In contrast, Acceptance Test-Driven Development (ATDD) “tests first” by writing automated specifications for a new feature using concrete examples in plain language. This approach focuses everyone—from analysts and customers to developers and testers—on the same definition of “done.” Join Nate Oster as he explains his skeptical journey from traditional testing to ATDD.