Even YOU can write safe concurrent code!

Dierk König Canoo Engineering AG

For much too long, concurrency has been solely occupied by the propeller-heads. It is high time that we average application programmers learn how to write concurrent code but without the fear of falling for the traps. The trick is to use the right concepts! Check out what is at every Java developer's disposal since recently.

Coaching Teams over Acceptance Testing Hurdles

Rachel Davies Agile Experience Ltd

On agile teams, testing is no longer something that happens at the end, testing is at the heart of what we do. However, teams face many hurdles when starting to integrate acceptance testing into their daily work. Some of the hurdles are technical but most are down learning a new approach where acceptance tests are pivotal our work. Pick up some practical tips, from an experience coach, on what you can do to coach your team over these hurdles.

Hands-on Agile Development

Neal Ford ThoughtWorks

BRING YOUR LAPTOP WITH YOU, BUT A LAPTOP ISN'T REQUIRED! Reading and hearing about agile practices is one thing, but actually doing it is completely different. This session puts you to work in an agile fashion, applying agile developer practices. During this session, we're going to take a problem and iteratively develop the solution, using test-driven development, pair programming, retrospectives, pair rotation, and other agile development techniques. We work through 3 iterations during the 60 minutes, giving you a hands-on feel for real agile development. If you have a laptop, bring it, but only half the class needs one, so if you don't have a laptop, don't let it discourage you. Come see what it's like to work on a real agile project, even if it's just 60 minutes.

Sustainable Test-Driven Development

Steve Freeman

This talk is about the qualities we look for in test code that keep the development "habitable". We want to make sure the tests pull their weight by making them expressive, so that we can tell what's important when we read them and when they fail, and by making sure they don't become a maintenance drag themselves. We need to apply as much care and attention to the tests as we do to the production code, although the coding styles may differ. Difficulty in testing might imply that we need to change our test code, but often it's a hint that our design ideas are wrong and that we ought to change the production code. In practice, these qualities are all related to and support each other. Test-driven development combines testing, specification, and design into one holistic activity.

Mylyn 3.4: from Stack Trace to Scrum

Mik Kersten Tasktop Technologies

The rapid adoption of Mylyn has made next big evolution of the IDE clear. Stories and tasks are more central than source code, focus is more important than features, and integration with the Agile workflow is the biggest productivity boost since code completion. This talk will review how new features in the latest Mylyn release and new integrations can make the entire Agile team more productive.

The Lean Startup

Matt Wynne Freelance Programmer

When Matt arrived at Songkick.com's offices in a tiny flat over Spitalfields Market in the summer of 2008, they had a rapidly-expanding team of very bright developers, but almost no development process at all. At a start-up, reducing waste and inefficiencies is a matter of survival, and by gradually introducing a blend of lean and agile practices, he built a team that were able to respond to new feature requests in a matter of days, deploying new features to production several times a week. The pressure and focus of the start-up environment yields many lessons that larger organisations could do well to learn. In this talk Matt will present a case study of his time at Songkick, explaining the practices that were introduced, and the underlying principles he used to choose them and make them stick. You should leave this session with some fresh ideas and inspiration on how to make your teams even more effective.