Conference Day 2

Conference Day 2 – Tuesday, October 2nd, 2012

A Decade of Done: Experiences Building an Agile Company

8:30 – 9:45
Keynote
Ian Culling and Paul Culling

What this keynote is not: We are not sales people masquerading as speakers. This is not a veiled product promotional piece. We are not professional speakers or consultants trying to sell you something.

What this keynote will be: We will share our experiences from a company that has, over the past ten years, been built using agile practices, methods, and values from the very first story card on the very first day. From the core development team to our marketing department and “business” side of the organization, we will share stories, successes, and challenges.

What we hope this keynote will deliver: We hope that, through our experiences, you will recognize challenges that you have faced or may encounter and shed some light on how we’ve successfully navigated them (or simply relate to your pain) – in particular, if sharing our mistakes/missteps helps you avoid them, we will be happy presenters. We hope to spark conversations or debate and contribute to the collective journey of continuous learning and improvement.

A warning: This keynote may inadvertently contain some foul language and/or inappropriate content. The speakers are individually and collectively not known to be in total control of their filters.

Printchomp: Adventures in Startup Land

10:00 - 11:00
Focus Track - Room 1
Declan Whelan

Building successful businesses is tough - especially for software startups. The principles and practices from lean startup and agile/lean development can certainly help. But what do you do if these approaches are new to the team? How do you strike the balance between learning, team improvements and delivering value?

In this session we will explore three key areas:

Lean Startup and Agile Applied
You will learn how lean startup and agile was introduced to the team at Printchomp. Some practices were very successful and others did not catch on. You will learn why this was so and practical insights to bring about change on your teams.

Building Trust
Trust is crucial to prevent costly handoffs and bloated processes. At Printchomp we are a new team and we need to rapidly build trust while building processes that work for us. You will learn how we used visibility and the principle of ‘trust but verify’ to build trust.

Building a Learning Environment
At Printchomp we selected a technology stack and market vertical that were relatively new to most of the team. It was crucial that we build mechanisms for rapid learning. You will learn about the tools we used to promote learning and how we balanced learning against other outcomes under a strong pressure to deliver.

You should come away from this session with insights and practical ideas you can apply to improve life with your team - whether it is a startup or a traditional team.

Quality Assurance - A Team Sport

10:00 - 11:00
Perform Track - Room 2
Jeff Morgan

Who is responsible for QA on an Agile team? The answer is “Everybody”. And yet this is rarely the case. Often the Testers write their test cases and automation in isolation and execute them after development is finished. Developers write their code without talking to the testers except to understand how to reproduce the latest discovered defect. Product Owners elaborate requirements in isolation and then hand them off to the team only to check back at the end of the sprint. Business Analysts spend their time in meetings away from the team working on documents that have questionable usefulness. Join Cheezy as he paints a different picture. This picture includes techniques and practices that foster collaboration between all team members that have the side effects of dramatically improving quality and achieving better flow resulting in a more streamlined development effort. This new picture is a picture of teamwork and quality assurance.

Your startup is successful. Now what? (Refactoring a Legacy System, a Case Study)

10:00 - 11:00
Accelerate Track - Room 3
Eugene Nizker, Igor Dykman, and Marc Munro

To re-write or to refactor? That is the question we often ask looking at a legacy system. Keeping in mind that a piece of code becomes “legacy” from the moment it’s promoted to production and considering the psychological debt of a vast legacy system, we can see that answering this question is vitally important for the health of IT organization. The situation is even graver when the system is successful.

This presentation will cover one example of successful refactoring of a 5-year old system that managed to grab significant market share.

Testing is waste? Why LEAN won't put testers out of business

1:30 - 2:30
Focus Track - Room 1
Pankaj Agarwal

In a perfectly scripted Agile World, where developers are the most disciplined group, the role of testers will probably diminish. We are living in an economic conundrum where budget cuts and cost savings are directly correlated with the ‘Agile way of working’. This means, testing which was once the saviour during the good old dot com boom, is now the first one shown the door!

So what does it means to us? In this session, we’ll amalgamate different concepts, explore current situations and present our views on how it all ties in together, from a QA perspective. Key discussion points will include:

Agile – What does it mean to our QA Organization?
Distributed Agile – How will it affect QA?
CI, CD, DevOps – What does it mean to QA?
Future – Cloud Testing in an Agile World

We’ll also touch upon some tactical topics such as how Performance Testing and Requirements work in an Agile team.

From Continuous Integration to Continuous Delivery

1:30 - 2:30
Perform Track - Room 2
Brandon Byars

Has your Software Development Department achieved the pinnacle of Continuous Integration, but the rest of the organization is still wondering how they can benefit? Does it take you three minutes from a bug fix to integration tests results, but three months from an idea to production code? In this case, you're ready for the next evolutionary step.

Continuous Delivery is about enabling product innovation through frequent low-risk releases. It encompasses an umbrella of practices including configuration management, automation, engineering practices, and process and organizational change. In this presentation we aim to showcase the benefits and expose the mechanics of Continuous Delivery.

Guided By Tests: O-O Design and Test-Driven Development

1:30 - 2:30
Accelerate Track - Room 3
Mike Stockdale

You've read about all the 'best practices', you've installed all the latest tools and frameworks, but somehow it doesn't quite feel like you're getting the benefits of agile development. Test-Driven Development is a simple concept that completely changes the way we design software. Instead of trying to remember and apply a long list of rules, we can use feedback from the TDD process to guide us in making our own informed design decisions. The act of writing a test becomes a design activity that clarifies our requirements and shows where our design is rigid or unfocused. This talk highlights a few of the basic principles of object-oriented design and test-driven development that will help us build flexible, maintainable and robust software. We'll dispel a few myths, look at some code and discuss some common problems that developers encounter.

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