Agile Dev West 2017 - Architecture - Design

Built from index cards or sticky notes, a story map is a simple model that helps the people who create it envision a customer’s experience with the product. Story maps are a core practice within a design process focused on understanding and building empathy with customers and users, and then identifying and testing solutions to improve the customer’s experience with your product or services. Jeff Patton says that design process and story mapping can help you identify completely new product opportunities or improve the existing product experience. Learn how to map your customer and user...

The Internet of Things now has a strong foothold in our world. If your business is not prepared for it now, it’s already behind. The IoT is no longer something talked about as a futuristic concept. With the proliferation of connected devices, connected appliances, connected cars, and even connected clothes, the stage is set and IoT apps are here to stay. Our testing, product management, and development teams need to be preparing to address how to develop and test in this new world we live in. The explosive growth of the IoT market has had a major impact on mobile testing and testing in...

Many enterprises are migrating to mobile while new organizations are adopting a mobile-first or mobile-only strategy. Because of the special characteristics of mobile and its user base, usability and the user experience (UX) are of increased importance, especially with SaaS-based business models where users can pay by the month and switch applications in a heartbeat. This is intensified with mobile users who can download another app and try it for free. So you've got about thirty seconds for your users to understand how to use your app and get value. How do you do that? With a UX that...

For many years, software architecture was described as the “parts that are hard to change later.” Modern advances in architecture have shown that if architects build evolvability into the architecture, change becomes easier. Neal Ford describes a family of software architectures that support evolutionary change, how we can build evolvable systems, and how to retrofit existing ones. He discusses three key concepts that support evolutionary architectures. Incremental change covers engineering practices to support continuous delivery and DevOps. Neal explains how fitness functions build...

Now that we’ve gotten beyond the initial shock and prevalence of mobile applications, we’ve come to realize that it’s not just about making apps work. In chasing the mobile market, we often don’t really understand or choose to ignore the differences in the mobile platform when it comes to designing and building a successful app. Of course, the mobile platform is smaller, but what else do you need to consider? To be successful, you need more than just “it works.” Phil Lew explores the top mobile quality challenges, and discusses how to approach and solve them. Some of these challenges...

Continuous integration has made development faster and more reliable. However, as codebases expand, organizations are finding that their build pipelines slow down dramatically. One of the most common reasons is that we often rebuild parts of the system that don't need to be rebuilt. This can happen when the code structure isn’t a faithful representation of the logical dependencies between the different parts. This prevents the pipeline from detecting which parts of the system are impacted by a change and which ones aren’t. Abraham Marin-Perez describes common scenarios in which the...

By shaving time and cost to build and maintain your app by half, Xamarin—a free, open source framework offered by Microsoft—can revolutionize your mobile application development. Most app development approaches result in building the app twice—once for iOS and once for Android—or producing a sluggish app that has an inconsistent HTML-driven user interface. Xamarin lets you write C# code that’s compiled for each operating system to leverage each platform’s native UI, API access, and performance. Create an app that feels and performs like it was custom-built for that device, while sharing 90...

Michael Durrant has found that paying attention to basic usability and accessibility guidelines can make millions of extra dollars for his company. He describes his uphill journey to improve accessibility and usability for users purchasing car insurance through their website. Michael shares many factors to consider and barriers to overcome—from those who thought it wouldn’t make much difference to their customers, to those who pointed out that it had been tried before and not made any money, to those who didn’t have knowledge of or even agree with some of the basic principles of usability...

Docker has matured and expanded from its primary use in the build/test stages into production deployments. Similarly, microservices are expanding from use mostly for greenfield web services to use in the enterprise as organizations explore ways to decompose their monolith to support faster release cycles. Anders Wallgren says that running microservices-based applications in a containerized environment makes a lot of sense—for both build and test, and from a runtime perspective in production. Docker and microservices are natural companions, forming the foundation for a new generation of...

Decomposing a system design into small classes with narrow responsibilities is essential for creating a maintainable software product. However, without guidance, it can often be difficult—especially for new software developers—to see how a large class might be broken down into smaller pieces. The problem usually isn’t knowing how to make a change, it’s knowing what change to make. Max Guernsey shares six techniques that can ease the burden of identifying smaller design elements. These include direct examination of code qualities, modeling real-world entities, responding to code smells,...

The Internet of Things (IoT) will be a $1.7 trillion market by 2020. Don MacIntyre explains how agile is being used in Internet of Things systems—often combined with mobile and cloud technologies. Don reviews how agile is successfully being used today in a wide range of development environments, including software as a service applications, large and complex mission critical systems, and for both mobile software and hardware. Don looks closely at IoT, examines how it is disrupting many traditional markets, and explores how traditional device manufacturers are applying agile. Learn which...

Rapidly evolving business demands and competitive environments pose challenges to increase the speed of delivery and do better with less. This often results in sacrificing quality and failing to understand that a minimum viable product must be “viable” to the customer. When organizations realize this, they often turn to DevOps practices that are rapidly becoming the new norm. Gajan Pathmanathan discusses how to ensure quality-driven development through DevOps while maintaining delivery speed. He focuses on the transition an organization needs to make to ship “quality” software frequently,...

If the cloud is supposed to eliminate infrastructure concerns and create an instant-on environment, why do DevOps teams commonly spend six to twelve months bootstrapping their first cloud environment? How can teams reduce the time and effort required to establish a cloud network topology, layer security controls, automate cluster provisioning, and lay a DevOps pipeline? Chris Haddad describes the typical enterprise cloud journey and how to accelerate value by adopting road-tested worksheets, patterns, and templates. After sharing how teams assess infrastructure prerequisites with a legacy...