Nonfunctional Testing has always been ignored and neglected because no one is sure what to do with it. Agile environments make Nonfunctional Testing more difficult as people try to invent ways to make it conform to whatever they are using. The goal of this workshop is to define methods to integrate and maneuver nonfunctional testing into agile environments. We will discuss the current concepts and determine the How, What and Why of Nonfunctional Testing.

Anyone who’s seen a user trying to get to grips with their application knows what a humbling experience it can be. No matter your design experience there’s no substitute for testing with actual users. But the whole user testing process can seem daunting & costly in terms of time, effort & materials. Seeing this Jakob Nielsen proposed a lightweight approach, ‘Guerilla User Testing’, in the mid-nineties. It emphasized what could be done on limited resources by a team committed to providing a decent user experience. Marc & Luke share over 20 years of experience applying this type of technique.

I think Pair Programming is vital to the success of a programming team, but every time I join a new team I seem to find I’m in a minority of people who feel that way, let alone have any experience of actually doing it.

End-to-end tests appear everywhere: test-driven development, story-test-driven development, acceptance testing, functional testing, and system testing. They’re also slow, brittle, and expensive. In this expert-level workshop, we will discuss why end-to-end testing is used, examine where and why it breaks down, and generate more effective solutions. We will spark ideas for participants to explore further on their own.

We will not be debating the premise (that end-to-end tests are problematic). This is an expert-level workshop and attendees will be expected to participate fully.

If you’re a practicing Agilist who has tough questions about Agile methods, how they fit together, or how they can be more widely adopted in your organization, then this session is for you. This energy-filled workshop explores the central themes of Agile Project Leadership, why they work, when they don’t and why. Delegates are expected to come with their difficult questions about Agile. Answers will be explored and shared in a fun and interactive way.

This game is designed to teach/learn/experiment how to use Kanban. In this session, everyone will play it and learn the way how Kanban works, effective use, and how to teach their colleagues “Kanban.”

I have designed this game to teach new members the Kanban. Attendees form teams and will have a set of task cards. They will build a Kanban Board from the tasks and ‘commence’ on the project. Using dice, the project might finish by the time or not, as in reality. An important part of the game is how teams must face problems happening by accident.

Being nearly agile has caused a number of new words to enter our vocabulary. They include “mini-waterfaull”, “Scrum-but”, “XP’ish”, “w-agile”, “fr-agile” and a host of others. While agility cannot be defined by a particular set of principles or practices, going down a particular agile path only part-way is almost always a recipe for an eventual disaster. This session will focus on exposing the 7 deadly sins that may apply: lack of customer voice, manual testing, never integrating, no incremental deliveries, no feedback loop, silo’d teams and unrealistic deadlines. Learn why each is deadly!

Agile fails without executive leadership. Although pockets of Agile can flourish for a while, only executives have the power to make an entire organization change.

The agile community has tried to sell executives on Agile rather than involve them. This workshop involves participants in discovering and documenting patterns for Agile executives to use. It builds on our previously-presented CTO research.

This session is appropriate for executives with Agile experience and for gurus who commonly work with executives. Others should wait for the results.

Ever heard a programmer say “I think the code’s trying to tell us something”? A joke, right? A metaphor. There’s a social world, where people tell people things, and there’s a world of objects that, at most, exert passive pressure.

But what if we deny that the two worlds are separate? What if we treat everything as a moving mashup of objects, ideas, individuals, and groups? This workshop will present some recent perspectives from sociology on that question, and will ask participants the following: if you believed in one of those perspectives, what would you do differently on your project?

An agile-tester needs to wear many different hats to be effective in their role. Sometimes they have the ‘Detective’ hat on, sometimes the ‘Scientist’ and others the ‘Police Officer’. Working in small groups we will create a taxonomy of the hats testers wear. Once a the list is produced we will then see which are the most common, enjoyable, frustrating, Agile and a number of other attributes.