program selection system

Agile methods provide new opportunities to create great products through tightly integrated design and development. But too often, that promise is not fulfilled. In this session, you’ll learn why that is and how leading teams make it work.

Program Description:

Evidence is mounting that Agile adoption is finally mainstream, so what’s next?

This panel draws the discussion away from process and technology to focus on what we build, not just how we build it. Panelists discuss the important role of product innovation and debate philosophies about how to source innovation. The panel tackles questions like what role Agile plays in helping or hampering product innovation; should innovation come from designers, customers, or elsewhere; where does product design meet product innovation; and how do we deliver innovation?

The phrase clean code encapsulates a philosophy of coding and specific principles that improve code quality and extensibility. These principles include the importance of code that clearly expresses its intent and the effective use of encapsulation and abstractions to isolate details appropriately. What about at the architecture level? Can systems be clean?

What do masters of refactoring know that novices don’t?

In 2006 I stumbled upon an answer to that question. I was preparing numerous refactoring labs for use in Industrial Logic’s eLearning. Each lab features problem code and solution code. To produce the solution code, I’d refactor the problem code by applying sequences of low-level design transformations, like Extract Method, Move Method, Extract Class and Inline Method.

Last fall I received an email with the software requirements from a potential customer that would establish us in an important new market. We had been brought in when the client had only two months left before deploying their chosen solution. The customer requirements list is vague and long, but the prize is big. Could we design and deploy major functionality in just two months? Thanks to agile development and some fortunate circumstances, our team of four delivered the functionality, won the deal, pleased the users, and didn’t work an hour of overtime.

Have you ever been told “Agile works great for UI, but just doesn’t work for large scale systems architecture”? In this experience report, I will review a real world project to redesign a successful large scale ecommerce system that became plagued with growing pains. After the team initially ran to the comfort of a long term waterfall project, cost overruns and escalating problems necessitated a new approach. Enter in Scrum and a focus on iterations and frequent customer feedback, and a once failed project turned into a blazing success.

User experience (UX) is a relatively young field that involves a diverse set of skills and activities. UX tasks have grown in importance as the focus of product design moves away from technical possibilities and towards the usefulness, usability, suitability, and overall product experience that can help attract and retain customers. Come check out the poster near the UX stage to get an overview of what is involved in this increasingly essential discipline.