One of the toughest problems facing agile UX designers is keeping the big picture in mind while designing incrementally. This talk builds on prior work at Alias (now Autodesk) that described successful agile adaptations of usability testing, contextual inquiry and iterative prototyping.

I’ll present a framework we used to create and implement multi-sprint designs for a complex product without violating the agile taboo against big design.

System Metaphor was and is an elusive practice of the original XP. It has largely been forgotten over time.

Yet in the past few years, my colleagues and I have discovered the stunning power of a genuine System Metaphor on our own shipping product. This makes us wonder why System Metaphor ever went out of vogue.

This session will explore why Metaphor matters. We’ll examine how our own Music Metaphor reshaped our flagship product, even our company, and how the right metaphor can supply the driving beat that can turn your product into a hit.

Many Java teams want a more modern language that preserves their investment in Java technology. This talk looks at Scala, a new JVM language that fixes many of the limitations of Java. I’ll show why Scala is an ideal “upgrade” language for most Java teams.

Using examples, we’ll see that Scala is statically-typed, yet it has a succinct and flexible syntax. Scala traits add mixin composition to Java’s object model. Scala fully supports functional programming, which is the best approach for robust concurrent applications. All these qualities improve our agility.

This hands-on advanced workshop teaches incremental Test-Driven Development, showing how to grow code one feature at a time. It will show: how to use tests at multiple levels to focus on requirements, how to use unit tests to drive the discovery of roles and responsibilities in your design; and how to write resilient tests that express your intent and don’t break for irrelevant changes.

The workshop is for programmers who want to improve their TDD practice. It has been presented at several conferences, one review from XpDay London was “Incredibly useful; the best technical I’ve heard”.

There is much information available about how to begin automated UI testing projects. There is little information available about how to maintain successful, effective, long-term, large-scale UI testing projects.

Over the course of more than two years, my company Socialtext was able to grow a test automation project from a proof of concept of 400 test steps, run on demand, to nearly 10,000 test steps run automatically 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. This talk will cover test design, test architecture, test creation, test maintenance, and the project’s future steps.