program selection system

Why does Agile adoption fail? Why do projects doing “textbook” Agile sometimes fail. There is of course no one right answer to these questions. But we suggest the answer can often be gleaned by considering the small things. It’s quite common for projects to follow a “textbook” Agile methodology in the large, while undermining basic Agile principles in the small. We don’t suggest that allowing small problems to flourish is willful neglect. Rather, small, easily ignored nuisances or compromises in the quality of the process and product can become debilitating in size and number.

When do you choose to do Agile software development? Why do you think you’ll be more successful using Agile than other methodologies? We believe the IT industry is in the middle of a midlife crisis and Agile is its symptom. Strangely enough, the IT community is operating on a very limited set of historic information which may lead us to solving the wrong problems. Perhaps it’s time to admit that Agile is similar to a 45 year olds’ brand new red convertible that proves he is still alive.

In the Web 2.0 age, end-to-end web testing provides tremendous feedback on the quality of your Web application. However this feedback cycle is typically quite long and comes at a high maintenance price. This talk shares our field experience in establishing web acceptance test suites with high return on investment (ROI) for Web applications.

Agile developers love — and some actually need — to be in a state of flow. For them fast feedback from unit tests and continuous integration tools is not an option. In practice, fast unit tests often lack in coverage and many valuable tests run slow. This may be due to legacy code or the nature of the tests or just the sheer size of the application. Whatever the reason, getting feedback many hours after they submitted the code and the mental model has been blurred is a major impediment to developer’s productivity. To mitigate these issues a variety of strategies and tools have emerged.

The UX Graffiti Wall, a persistent physical public display, aims to capture feedback and ideas on core issues that user experience practitioners confront in an AGILE development environment. Conference attendee contributions may be based on personal experiences or discussion surrounding session and tutorial topics.

Great software comes from getting the best ideas into the product. Jim McCarthy, who led the legendary turnaround of the Visual C++ group at Microsoft, left Microsoft in 1996 to create a team dynamics laboratory to figure out how to always create a create a high performace team. His lab has focused on this challenge, and has produced 11 protocols for making unanimous decisions, supporting quality thinking, strengthening design iterations, and incorporating feedback, emotions, nobility, and passion into products. Learn about an entirely new class of tools.

Continuous Testing (CT) is a developer practice that involves automatically running tests after every change, even so much as a single statement. It gives you instant feedback about the semantic correctness of your code, just as modern IDE’s give you instant feedback about syntax errors. CT has a profound impact on the way we use TDD. This session will cover the history, theory, practice, and daily application of CT to real-world projects.