Rob Myers

Agile Institute

Rob Myers is the founder of Agile Institute. He has twenty-eight years of professional experience on software development teams, and has been training and coaching organizations in Agile, Scrum, and Extreme Programming topics since 1998. He has recently worked with numerous organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 100 companies, helping them with cultural change and essential practices during their Agile transformations. His courses are always a blend of fun and practical hands-on labs, "Training From the Back of the Room” learning techniques, and first-person stories from both successful and not-so-successful Agile implementations.

Speaker Presentations

Monday, June 2, 2014 - 1:00pm

Half-day Tutorials

Essential Test-Driven Development

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. The developer first 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. Rob Myers demonstrates the essential TDD techniques, including unit testing with the common xUnit family of open source development frameworks, refactoring as just-in-time design, plus Fake It, Triangulate, and Obvious Implementation. During this hands-on session, you’ll use exercises to practice the techniques. With many years of product development experience using TDD, Rob will address the questions that arise during your own relaxed exploration of test-driven development.

Laptop Required. Delegates should have strong programming skills and be familiar with an object-oriented language and programming techniques. Delegates should bring a laptop installed with their favorite programming language and IDE—and come prepared to write code. Rob can provide JUnit for Java, and NUnit for any .NET language. For any other language choice (e.g., C++ or Ruby), you will need to install and verify your chosen IDE and xUnit framework prior to the tutorial, as technical support for those platforms will be very limited.

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 - 2:15pm

Agile Techniques

Essential Agile Engineering Practices: TDD, Pairing, and Continuous Integration

Organizations are often reluctant to adopt the more challenging agile engineering practices, first described in Extreme Programming, and now adopted by the Scrum Alliance as the “Scrum Developer Practices.” They're difficult to implement and sustain, and the benefits are often vague, subtle, and measurable only after months of disciplined effort. Rob Myers describes two techniques that help evaluate the impact of any change to the organizational system―lean's value-stream mapping and the theory of constraints' five focusing steps. Rob describes the most common agile engineering practices from the standpoint of how they provide a return on investment including their costs, and how they often work in tandem to multiply the effect. He draws extensively from his hands-on experience with these practices and shares data from well-established sources. After briefly discussing TDD, pair programming, and continuous integration, Rob evaluates practices that the delegates choose.