Agile development originated in Smalltalk - this session will demonstrate why Smalltalk is still one of the best places to do fully interactive agile development. The presentation will be a short talk and demonstration melding test first with exploratory development.

A characterization test is a means to describe (characterize) the actual behaviour of an existing piece of software, and therefore protect existing behaviour of legacy code against unintended changes via automated testing.

In this talk I will share my experience from a project where we automatically generated fast running characterization tests based on existing slow running integration tests. The characterization tests helped us do a major redesign of a core calculation module in an insurance system without breaking existing functionality.

Automated testing is a corner stone practice for teams practising XP yet there are multiple levels of automated testing to understand. Combined with effective Continuous Integration, automated testing offers rich level of feedback, assuming you structure them in the right way. Participants will better understand the tradeoffs you need to consider when looking at different levels of automated tests and participants will then attempt to structure them in a way to maximise the speed and quality of feedback.

Agile methodology, test driven develop and beautiful code is not enough. The UX police demands mandatory usability testing in agile project to ensure better user experience.

In the last few years the web has moved away from displaying static content towards being a platform for delivering rich client applications. Extensive DOM manipulation and AJAX callbacks are now fundamental to every Web 2.0 application.

Javascript is the language that has allowed this change to happen, yet it rarely receives the level of attention that it requires. This results in a risk which can jeopardise the delivery of projects.

We understand the value of good design and testing and we want to apply the same principles to our Javascript to ensure high code quality.