It’s hard to imagine how the Empire State Building could be built in a year. But it was. How did they do it? The builders framed the problem differently than we would today. Their mental model – which dictated what was important and what was not – would not be recognized in today’s commercial world, except perhaps by those who understand lean thinking. Lean thinkers look at the world through a different set of glasses. Join Mary and Tom Poppendieck for a Lean in a Nutshell – a fast-paced tutorial aimed at senior developers, team leads, and development managers.

The art of Test Driven Development (TDD) is a skill that needs to be learnt, and takes practice to master. In this workshop, a select number of conference participants, with considerable skill and experience, will perform code katas. The aim is for them to demonstrate excellence. The code Kata problems are not supposed to be hard in themselves, the challenge is to solve them in a pair using TDD, and end up with great code. This session is for the benefit of agile developers, who can come along and witness TDD and pairing, get a chance to ask questions, and provide feedback.

This hands-on workshop on functional automated testing for testers and developers focuses on a proven approach that combines automated tests that require no programming with low maintenance effort to the testware. At its core are business oriented keywords that are defined by the testers specifically for a system, forming a very easy to use Domain Specific Test Language. It lets testers collaborate with developers but focus on testing and is very suitable for test-driven development at the system/acceptance level. It can be used with many tools, especially the free ones.

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.

Flow-based software development (FSD, aka “lean”, pull-based, or kanban) put focus on improving flow of work items (normally software features) through a software development work process. But what does it mean in practice? We show the nitty-gritty of how to set up a project to run flow-based instead of timebox-based, and when it makes sense to do so. We show a simple KPI model to better capture the state of a project using FSD, and how it can be used as a basis for conducting experiments aimed at process improvements.

Stealthholders appear at the final demo and destroy your project without warning. Shapeshifters are different people every time you talk to them. And Sergeants won’t take no for an answer. In this action-packed workshop, we’ll demonstrate and practice ways of managing these challenging, but regrettably common, types of client without sacrificing the principles that make agile projects work.

Exploratory Testing is a vital item of any release. Exploratory Testing can be taught and trained in a collaborative manner using Testing Dojos.

While Coding Dojos are in use among programmers for a while now, equally trainings for testers are exceptional. Testing Dojos provide a way to teach other team members about the dynamics of Exploratory Testing by practicing it and sharing the knowledge among the audience.

The session gives a brief introduction followed by a hands-on Testing Dojo experience for the audience.

Perhaps the most vital aspect of building great software is finding the 20% of features that represent the 80% of functionality your customers really want. The planning and prioritization of these features can truly set a team - and a company - apart from their competitors. In this session, we cover several games from Luke Hohmann’s Innovation Games ® specifically designed around feature discovery and product prioritization. We’ll then play two of the games - Buy a Feature and Prune the Product Tree - and finally discuss tips on how to implement these games in your teams and organization.

We have seen agile work best when a project team has a collaborative culture. This session aims to help you discuss with your team the culture in which they would like to work. It draws on some basic questions regarding trust and trust-worthy behaviour. We will begin by presenting some basic models of trust (including David Maister’s Trust Equation). Then brainstorm factors that can help and hinder trust. We will also explore tools and techniques that can be used to create or improve trust. Run at XPDay09 (see http://agilecoach.typepad.com/photos/xpdaylondon2009/index.html for outputs).

This session introduces “Feature Injection”, a toolkit to help Business Analysts become effective on an Agile Project.

Feature Injection structures the process of “Example” discovery for business analysts so that they can feed directly into a BDD/TDD development process.

Feature Injection consists of…

1. Find the Business Value.
2. Inject the Features.
3. Break the Model to find the Examples.

This is a toolkit based on actual experience of business analysts on Agile projects. Feature Injection is a variant in the TDD / BDD family of tools.