Agile Topics at SD Best Practices 2006

This year's SD Best Practices conference will take place in Boston, September 11-14. This conference brings together the industry's top experts to present up-to-date, relevant, practical material. The conference features over 175 classes, tutorials, case studies, roundtables, panels, keynotes and Birds-of-a-Feather gatherings in seven focused conference tracks, all of which include valuable input from important teachers in the world of Agile software development:

• Build & Deploy,
  
• C++,
  
• Design & Architecture,
  
• People, Projects & Teams,
  
• Process & Methods,
  
• Requirements & Analysis,
  
• Testing & Quality

With five registration options, and discounts for students, teams and early bird registration, the organizers have made an effort to keep the conference financially accessible.

There will be a keynote by Tom DeMarco, entitled Quick or Dead: Organizational Velocity for an Impatient Age:

Tom DeMarco offers a new and chilling look at the way slow organizations work and often fail to work, as well as a practical prescription to turn them around and make them hum. He confronts major complaints of this impatient age: late projects, work forever in catch-up mode, the paradox that in an era of "Hurry Up," companies are slowing down, sometimes almost grinding to a stop. Most of all, he points toward a unique approach to achieving true organizational velocity.

This year, fully 40% of sessions will be about Agile practices or by Agile practitioners, though some of the session descriptions explicitly mention Agile methods while others do not. Of course, what really counts is the quality of the speakers, and these include some of the most experienced and respected members of the Agile community.

Build & Deploy

(113) The Psychology of Build Times: Keeping the Tests Fast Enough	Jeff Nielsen David DeWolf
Benefits of the Build	Kirk Knoernschild
Agile Java Development with Spring, Hibernate and Eclipse	b Anil Hemrajani
Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Development	Scott Ambler
Object/Relational (O/R) Mapping: Critical Skills Every Developer Needs	Scott Ambler
Collaborate, Integrate, Test, Deploy: Essential SCM Practices for Teams	Steve Berczuk

Design & Architecture

(107) Agile Model Driven Development (AMDD): Scaling Agile Methods	Scott Ambler
(114) Object Oriented Principle of Component Design	Robert C. Martin
(115) Design Patterns: From Theory to Practice	Alan Shalloway
Clean Code	Robert C. Martin
Introducing Problem Frames	Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
The Art of Telling Your Design Story	Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
Getting from Use Cases to Code, Part 1: Use Case Analysis	William Nazzaro
Emergent Design: Design Patterns and Test Driven Development	Alan Shalloway
Agile Architecture	Granville Miller

People, Projects & Teams

(116) Agile Estimating and Planning	Mike Cohn
(117) Coaching Your Peers and Your Staff to Excellence	Johanna Rothman
Extreme Hiring: A Radical New Approach to Finding the Best Programmers	Brian Robertson Alexia Bowers
What Makes Successful Organizations Tick?	Neil Harrison
Introduction to Holacracy: A Framework for Agile Leadership and Decision Making	Brian Robertson
The Compleat Agile Developer	Robert C. Martin
Organizational Patterns: Beyond Agility to Effectiveness, Part 1	Neil Harrison
Organizational Patterns: Beyond Agility to Effectiveness, Part 2	Neil Harrison
The Role of the Customer Team in Agility	Dan Rawsthorne
Building An Elite Development Team - EnvisionWare Special Forces	Robert Walsh
Creating Change one Tic-Tac at a Time	Alistair Cockburn Jeffrey Fredrick
CIO Playbook	Hubert Smits
Transitioning Very Large Companies to Agile Methods	Robert C. Martin
Project Economics: Selecting and Prioritizing High Value Projects	Mike Cohn
There’s Always Time for Pragmatic Software Project Planning	Robert Galen
Managing Small Projects	Stephane Lussier
Balancing the Best of Both Worlds: Traditional and Agile Software Project Management	Sonja Koppensteiner Cheryl Allen

Process & Methods

(109) Overview of Scrum	Dan Rawsthorne
(119) A Brief Tour of Responsibility-Driven Design	Rebecca Wirfs-Brock
Using Agile Processes and Modeling To Build Applications	Anil Hemrajani David Berman
Bringing Agility to the Rigid World of State MMIS Projects	Shailesh Patel Gary Cummings Jeff Nielsen Bob Payne
Implementing Scrum in the Real World	Michael Vizdos
Agile Project Planning in Non-Agile Environments	Peter Schuh
Managing Technical Risk With Agility and Patterns – A Developer’s Perspective	Alan Shalloway
Agile Project Execution in Non-Agile Environments	Peter Schuh
Introduction to Software Product Line Development Methods	Charles Krueger
Eclipse Process Framework -an Open Source Process Initiative	Per Kroll
Scaling Agile Beyond Teams: Flow, Pull, and Innovate	Jean Tabaka Alex Pukinskis
Selecting a Development Process: Choosing Among the Leading Alternatives	Mike Cohn
Buffer-Based Planning: Refining the Plan for Each User Story	Patrick Welsh Brian Robertson
Multi Level Planning in Agile Environments	Hubert Smits
Second Generation Agile Software Development Processes	Granville Miller
Perils and Pitfalls of Agile Adoption	Carl Erickson
Update on the Unified Process: Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, and Definitely Something Blue	Scott Ambler
The Agile/Waterfall Cooperative	Michele Sliger
Practical Process: Best Practices	Susan Burk
Open Unified Process (OpenUP) Distilled	Per Kroll Brian Lyons
Making your Methodology Crystal Clear and More	Alistair Cockburn
PANEL: Selecting a Development Process

Requirements & Analysis

(120) Agile Requirements Workshops: Essentials for Planning, Design, and Facilitation	Ellen Gottesdiener
(121) Scenario-Driven Development	Granville Miller
Requirements by Collaboration: A Workshop Approach to Defining Needs	Ellen Gottesdiener
Writing Effective User Stories for Agile Requirements	Mike Cohn
Do the Right Things: Practical Guidance for Adapting Requirements Practices	Ellen Gottesdiener
PANEL: Use Cases: Uses and Abuses
Use Cases for Non-Geeks	Huet Landry
Writing Effective Use Cases for Projects Both Agile and Otherwise	Alistair Cockburn
Self-documenting modeling workshops: tools for "virtual whiteboard" warriors	Susan Burk Sara Gladu

Testing & Quality

(123) Test-Driven Development (TDD) and Storytest-Driven Development: A Beginner's Guide	Joshua Kerievsky
A Cup of "T": Making the Test in Test-Driven-Development Work for You	Neil Harrison
Web 2.0 Acceptance Testing Tools and Techniques	Jeff Nielsen Bob Payne
PANEL: Tough Problems in Test-Driven Development
Test-First GUIs - The Model-View-Presenter Approach	Robert Walsh
Exploratory Testing	Michael Bolton
Pragmatic Usability Testing	James Hobart
Getting Started with Test-Driven Development Using C++	Robert Walsh

C++

Getting Started with Test-Driven Development Using C++

Robert Walsh

This year's Program Schedule is searchable, so you can look for subjects of particular interest - search by day, track, session format, speaker and/or keyword.