What’s the Deal with “Best Practices”—Revisiting the Idea
Dan North, Thoughtworks

We talk about “best practices” as though they exist—an ideal way to manage a team, develop software, and test applications. All we have to do is discover what best practices are. At best, this is naive, and at worst it’s an irresponsible way to approach anything, especially software development. Learning theory—specifically the Dreyfus model of skills acquisition—provides the missing context for practices in general and best practices in particular. Dan North describes how people really learn and acquire skills and helps you discover where and how to use the ideas offered by best practices. See how the arbitrary imposition of best practices is inherently risky and can have a detrimental effect on productivity and morale. Dan explains why the term “best practices” is flawed and suggests more useful ways of sharing experience and evolving what we do.

Flow, Pull, Innovate: The Secrets to Agile Adoption
Jean Tabaka, Rally Software Development

Jean Tabaka provides straightforward guidance on how teams can begin their agile journey and learn to mature and scale into more and more discipline. The five-step approach emphasizes a path based on the principles of Lean Thinking—Flow, Pull, and Innovate. Each of the five steps outlines specific practices for growth as well as pitfalls and roadblocks to navigate and avoid. Step 1: The team learns to work in a continuous flow. Step 2: The team matures by pulling ready items from the backlog. Step 3: A group of teams adopts and scales up the individual team practices. Step 4: The scaling continues to cover multiple projects. Step 5: The practices are adopted throughout the entire organization.

You can apply the disciplines discussed in this class to a single co-located team, a team of teams, or an entire organization eager to take advantage of both agile and lean approaches. Join Jean and learn to achieve the greatest innovations with a much lower risk of failure.

Agile in the Non-Agile Enterprise: Hurdling Obstacles
Michele Sliger, Sliger Consulting

Agile is entering the mainstream as a software development practice and leading wider organizational change in many companies. However, in large organizations, it’s not practical just to “flip a switch” and have your entire software department “go agile” all at once. In that situation, agile and non-agile teams must work together during the transition. Agile teams must continue to interface with their company’s business processes, while management must streamline traditional processes and activities. Agile teams face many obstacles in their quest for cooperative development—resistance to change; differing culture and value systems; changes to measurement, evaluation, and reward systems; and new contracting terms. Join Michele Sliger as she explains how to clear these and other common hurdles facing agile teams working in a traditional organization. Michele discusses the organizational issues that you must address as part of an enterprise-wide agile rollout.

More than the Process Police: CMMI® Process and Product Quality Assurance
Will McKnight, Next Level Consultants 

For organizations to succeed in process improvement efforts, they must determine whether newly introduced processes are, in fact, being adopted by managers and practitioners. The Capability Maturity Model Integrated (CMMI®) identifies this verification activity as Process and Product Quality Assurance (PPQA). If you think PPQA is simply “process police,” you’re not getting all that you should out of your CMMI® practices. Done right, PPQA can be a driving agent for change in your organization. Unfortunately, all too often PPQA ends up little more than a post-mortem review of what was done wrong. That approach, which offers little opportunity to change behavior, not only lowers the value of the process, but also hampers change management efforts. Will McKnight demonstrates the potential of an efficient PPQA process. Take back a full functional PPQA process to help transform your process police into valuable, proactive change agents.

Lessons Learned in Programmer Testing
James Newkirk, Microsoft

It has been more than six years since the first release of NUnit 2.0, an open source unit testing tool. In that time, literally millions of tests have been written using the tool. Many of these tests have become and continue to be invaluable resources for their teams. Unfortunately, many other NUnit-based tests have not been maintained and are now viewed as having been a waste of effort from the beginning. What separates tests that are used, maintained, and highly valued from tests that are quickly discarded? James Newkirk describes seven key ideas that are proven to increase the readability of NUnit tests and make them much easier to maintain. Learn about the impact of test fixture size and dependency injection on unit testing. James demonstrates how to use the attributes [ExpectedException], [Setup], and [TearDown] to make tests more readable. Incorporating these and the other lessons can make the difference between tests that become a burden to the team and tests that become practical, growing resources.

Bandages or Tombstones? Distinguishing Between Minor Setback and Impending Doom
Payson Hall, Catalysis Group, Inc.

Are the challenges confronting your project normal and treatable setbacks or signs of something more serious? Can we treat them with a Band-Aid® and a kiss? Should we call the ambulance? The undertaker? Payson Hall shares patterns he’s observed while consulting on dozens of large software development and systems integration projects—executive sponsors distancing themselves from your project, ebbing morale, aggressive schedules, and more. Although good project teams react to adversity and try to get the job done in spite of troubles, their adaptive behavior can lead to a loss of perspective. Sometimes, teams become desensitized to the warning signs of degrading project health and are slow to respond to significant issues. Learn the symptoms of project problems and regain perspective as you identify the causes and find the remedies.