A major challenge for software organizations is creating software that can continue to adapt and change over time, a code base the team can live with. This session reviews the lessons learned from CruiseControl, a popular tool for continuous integration. CruiseControl is an open source success story not only because it has had over 400,000 downloads but also because it has successfully contributed to by over 200 different people. For practitioners who are tired of brittle code that must be discarded and rewritten CruiseControl provides valuable lessons.

Using Google Docs you can create your own lightweight project management tools and through simple and powerful visual management provide the people involved with shared information that will give transparency into progress and problems

Compared to most commercial project management tools using Google Docs is very flexible. That way the tools can be adapted to how the processes of the project continuously improve. And not the other way around.

The demonstration is based on more than 2 years of experience using Google Docs for Agile processes in a distributed development context.

Most agile methodologies tend to assume that the team is co-located in a single team room. They give little guidance as to how to address team distribution although proven practices are starting to emerge within the community. The Microsoft patterns & practices team has been experimenting with distributed teams for several years, mining proven practices from the community and experimenting them out on numerous agile projects. This talk summarizes those learnings and proven practices and gives examples of their application - both good and bad - within our teams.

When it is achieved together, the combined benefits of both Agile and Offshore software development, can be multiples greater than either approach alone. During this interactive session, we will simulate a distributed project with some participants being onsite and the others offshore. With 4 teams of upto 8 people each, this game will draw out learning around the challenges of Distributed Agile and different methods to communicate successfully on such projects. The rules of the game help illustrate how to deal with travel, different timezones, delayed communication and other such hurdles.