program selection system

Often it is suggested that Test Driven Development has moved into the mainstream and that not applying a test first approach is exceptional. Having worked with TDD for the last five years I have observed that far from being ubiquitous, effective application of TDD is uncommon. This session takes a pragmatic approach in evaluating the implementation of, impediments against and measurable benefits of TDD on a commercially successful project. Analysis of this experience will show how and why TDD is being used incorrectly and how this situation can be corrected.

Typically, scrum teams work best when team members are 100% allocated to the team. But what about team members that can’t be? What about teams that don’t have a member from a functional area like User Experience or TechPubs? This experience report examines how salesforce.com has handled: sharing resources between teams, and filling in gaps when a functional expert is missing from a team. Salesforce.com uses an “Office Hours” program for teams to utilize the expertise of functional experts (like writers and designers) when those experts aren’t on the team.

In an ideal world, everyone on an Agile team is collocated in one place, fostering cooperation and collaboration throughout the team’s growth. Unfortunately, the real world isn’t that simple. The current trend to fund teams split over multiple locations is inherently anti-Agile. Does this mean that we cannot do Agile with distributed teams? Distributed teams are a reality at Yahoo! In the past three years of coaching, we have seen creative solutions that that have allowed distributed teams to uphold the Agile Manifesto principle of people over process.

(above is for program)

A few years ago Andy Pols and Chris Matts wrote a Cutter Article called “The Five Business Value Commandments”. In the article, Andy and Chris explained what Business Value was and the principles that should be used to determine it.

This session explains business value and presents their experience to date.

This interactive session covers

What is business value? “Bad” business value statements. War Stories.

It would appear that the key to successfully implementing business value is short production releases with automated acceptance testing to ensure quality.