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

BW2 Validating Assumptions: From Unknown to Known

Ade Shokoya, AgileTV

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 10:15am

Although many organizations are successfully using agile practices to develop higher quality, customer-satisfying solutions faster and cheaper, an increasing number of companies are using the same practices to develop the wrong solutions—faster and with a higher level of quality, too. Why is that? Even though most people know that assumptions are the mother of all things that go badly wrong, many “agile” adopting organizations still invest time, money, and resources developing “solutions” based solely on assumptions, opinions, and guesses.

BW3 A Year of “Testing” the Cloud for Development and Test

Jim Trentadue, New York Life

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 10:15am

Jim Trentadue describes the first year his organization used the cloud for its non-production needs: development, testing, training, and production support. Jim begins by describing the components of a cloud environment and how it differs from a traditional physical server structure. To prove the cloud concept, he used a risk-based model for determining which servers would be migrated. The result was a win for the organization from a time-to-market and cost savings perspective. Jim shares his do’s and don’ts for moving to the cloud.

BW11 How Experian Revolutionized Product Strategy and Management with Big Data

Jeff Hassemer, Experian

Wed, 11/13/2013 - 3:45pm

Agile discussions often focus on stories, backlogs, development, and testing. At Experian they also brought product strategy management and strategy into the agile fold to ensure their teams were in lock-step with customer requirements and priorities. That resulted in the delivery of Experian’s first big data project—without adding a single new person or “big data expert.” How did they do it? Product guru Jeff Hassemer shares his (not-so) kumbaya moments of how he learned about the principles of agile within big data projects—in action.