Developers on an Agile project depend on fast, accurate user feedback to guarantee that you are solving the user’s problem. But often Agile projects have to operate without real, current customers on the team and need to build up the design and research skills to get good user feedback.

This session is for anyone who has the job of getting user feedback. We’ll teach best-practice techniques for working with users in the situations that matter to an Agile team: understanding customer needs, getting feedback on design concepts and testing baselevels, and we’ll practice key skills.

As Development VP, Rich Sheridan transformed his organization by adopting radical co-location and XP practices. Rich will share the history of this transformation including the tactics he used in selling this idea to his peers, his CEO, the Directors, and ultimately his team members. Rich now runs a software design and development company that was built from the ground up with an Agile culture and Agile processes. As the CEO of this company, Rich routinely has to sell customer executives on why they will realize business value from practices such as unit testing and paired-programming.

Summary for Event Guide

A high-performing agile team is tight knit. They have worked hard to become a cohesive unit and have developed a bond. This chemistry can be thrown off balance when someone is added to the team in the middle of a project. It does not matter how flexible, capable, or agile savvy the new team member is. If they have not been involved in the care and nurturing of the team’s culture and is not invested in the same way that the other team members are. When the new team member is not flexible, capable or agile savvy, the effect can be devastating.

So much of moving traditional test teams towards agile methods & testing is focused towards the individual tester and testing techniques. As often is the case in agility—directors, managers, team leaders and test-centric project managers are sort of marginalized. But not in this session! Here we want to focus on agile testing from the perspective of the Test Leader. We’ll pair off into groups and examine some of the greatest challenges when it comes to leading a testing team from traditional towards agile testing and emerge real-world strategies for surviving and thriving in agile testing.

Currently, the iPhone is the hottest platform for mobile development, with everyone wanting to develop on it. Test Driven Development is a proven technique for developing high-quality software, but isn’t encouraged by the iPhone development platform. Open Source developers have stepped in, creating Unit Test Libraries for the iPhone. We’ll show you how to get started, run your first tests, put tests in your build, and touch on advanced techniques like mock objects and dependency injection. Perfect for the Agile Developer looking to get started on iPhone.

As the internet proliferates beyond the PC to myriad devices - from iPhone to smart-phone - anyone delivering digital products deals with complexity: varying form factors, cultural differences and contexts of use. In this workshop we explore the implications of this complexity, discover through collaborative experience where the pain points lie, and identify strategies for dealing with them. We conclude that the unique challenges faced in the design and development of mobile applications benefit from agile software development and its ability to cope with such complexity.

Are you a developer or product manager working without a user experience specialist on your team? Would you like to learn how to quickly explore interaction design concepts? And guide your team in making good UX decisions? This hands-on workshop will teach you to use napkin sketches and whiteboard drawings to make real UX improvements. You’ll walk away with experience designing on-the-fly using personas, scenarios and a few ideation and sketching techniques. No special skills required - if you’ve ever doodled you can learn to design on-the-fly. Be prepared to have fun and participate.

Acceptance Tests elaborate a user story & are essentially behaviour specifications, expressing examples of how the application will actually be used. These should represent customer-intent in terms the customer understands.

This session shows developers and testers how to transcribe their understanding of customer intent in a way that makes sense to customers. Using the popular BDD Given/When/Then approach to acceptance tests, participants will learn how to leverage the popular Fit framework to replicate that approach. Alternatives to using Fit, including using code, will also be explored.

Understanding the forces driving and restraining the adoption of Agile in your organization is key to your success. This audience participation workshop creates two teams, the Drivers and the Restrainers and has them present the forces at work in the most original and humorous way possible.

This results in a lot of fun and learning.

The workshop will be led by two experienced coaches to bring out the subtle details of the forces and lead the discussion on how to improve the success given the forces at work.

It was back in ‘97 that these presenters first opined that: while much attention had been focused on high-level software architectural patterns, what is, in effect, the de-facto standard software architecture had seldom been discussed: the Big Ball of Mud.

Somewhat to our astonishment, since then, no one has ever undertaken to dispute this premise.

A Ball of Mud is, of course, a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape and bailing wire, spaghetti code jungle.

Is Agility’s utilitarian focus on process rather than design its secret weapon, or its Achilles heel?