Learn how to succeed with Agile engineering!

Excella Consulting is excited to present the 2012 DC Agile Engineering Conference followed by the Global Day of Coderetreat on December 7^th and 8^th in Arlington, VA.

Day 1:  DC Agile Engineering Conference presented by Excella Consulting

Join us on Friday December 7^th for a day full of insightful presentations and demonstrations on Agile engineering practices. This one day conference will be split into 3 tracks:

• 6 presentations covering the latest on Test Driven Development (TDD), continuous integration (CI), DevOps, and acceptance testing
• Open space to drill in on deep technical practices and address your toughest challenges
  
• Dojo session for hands-on TDD to warm up for the Global Day of Coderetreat
  

This conference will not have vendors nor sales pitches; it’s all about practitioners learning and sharing the latest in Agile technical practices with fellow practitioners.

Day 2:  Global Day of Coderetreat

Come back the next day, Saturday December 8^th, for hands-on coding during the Global Day of Coderetreat. This is a one day event being held simultaneously in over 200 cities around the world. The Coderetreat day builds on the topics covered in the Agile Engineering Conference and focuses on hands-on coding while applying clean code, refactoring, unit testing, pair programming, and TDD practices.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, practice, learn, share, and have fun!

Presentations:

Improving Designs through TDD By Mike McGarr and Sam Brown

If you meet any TDD zealot, they will tell you they can't write production code without writing failing tests first. Skeptics of TDD can't understand how writing a failing test could help improve the code. What TDD experts will tell you is TDD not only provides your code with tests, protecting it from bugs in the future, but it also improves the design of the code.

In this talk you will see evidence of how using Test Driven Development, with Mocks, will vastly improve the design of your application in addition to providing a suite of tests. Explore how making your code testable also improves the object-oriented design.

Continuous Integration: Blueprint, Toolbox, and Master Craft By Stephen Ritchie

The practice of CI has the ability to transform software development from a set of manual processes to a logical series of reproducible, automated processes. There are three concepts that are key to continuous integration; the blueprint, the toolbox, and the master craft. This session presents the CI lifecycle as a blueprint. You will see and understand the series of development processes that establish an effective, automated progression from source code to a packaged deliverable. You will learn about the CI server, which is the fundamental tool that initiates, performs, coordinates, and reports throughout the CI phases. The toolbox includes both the CI server and the combination of technologies that support CI. Continuous integration is a master craft of Agile engineering. To help you be effective with continuous integration, this session demonstrates both the knowledge and skills needed to achieve the desired results of CI and to maximize its value.

Lead by Example - How Coding using Executable Specifications Ensures you Build the Right Solution By Rebecca Halstead and Stephen Richie

The aim of Specification by Example is to provide a technique for documenting clearer, less ambiguous requirements and concrete scenarios that can be used by developers for exercising those requirements. Leveraging material from Gojko Adzic’s book Specification by Example and real-life experience documenting requirements using this technique, the presentation will explain how a business analyst can work with developers and use the Specification by Example technique to create executable specifications that also document and communicate requirements. Starting with a fictional list of features from a product backlog, I will show how to evolve a feature into examples; examples that can ultimately be turned into automated acceptance tests.

Continuous Delivery Applied By Mike McGarr

Writing code is fun, but deploying to production is not. Production releases are scary events that last all weekend, and you find yourself worrying about how it will go. Did we miss a configuration file? Is the database schema the same as the one in the test environment? Does the last minute hot fix we just applied break any other features? Did I forget to include an installation instruction for the system administrators?

Continuous Delivery is a collection of principles and practices aimed at addressing the problems teams typically face when releasing changes to production. By applying rigorous automation, testing, and configuration management, teams are able to confidently and consistently deploy changes from version control to production without fear.

In this talk, listeners will get an introduction into the world of Continuous Delivery. After an introduction into the concepts and principles of Continuous Delivery, dive into many of the techniques for implementing Continuous Delivery and get recommendations on tools that can be used on your development project.

Unindented code cannot possibly work By Ed Buhain

I learned how to develop software in an environment where "working software" represented only half of the expectation. The other half referred to things like readability, maintainability, usability; sometimes I find that these concepts were never taught or have since been forgotten.

In this session, we'll examine how code quality and human-centered design impact your productivity and your reputation. We'll take a look at several examples (modified for anonymity) from software development, project management, and even everyday life. We'll revisit and reaffirm the fundamentals. We aren't just programmers trying to get software to work; we're software engineers producing high quality systems.

Working Effectively with Legacy Code By Roberto Hernandez

Explore a set of proven strategies for testing legacy code and how to build agility into a non-flexible code base.

Global Day of Coderetreat Facilitated by Fadi Stephan

The Coderetreat day will build on the topics covered in the Agile Engineering Conference. The day consists of 5 sessions; each session's findings build upon previous sessions. The focus will be on the fundamentals of software development and modular design, primarily the DRY principle, single responsibility principle, decoupling, abstractions, polymorphism, clean code, refactoring, unit testing, pair programming, and TDD.

The morning sessions focus on becoming comfortable with the problem domain, breaking old habits, and beginning focused self-discovery. The afternoon sessions push the envelope by challenging pairs to stretch their skills and understanding of modular design and test-driven development.

Come with your laptop equipped with your favorite programming and unit testing environment. Be prepared to pair up, code, practice, learn, share, and have fun!

 
Speakers

Sam Brown

Sam Brown is a Senior Consultant at Excella Consulting with 11 years in the IT industry. He has focused primarily on emerging Java technologies and how to best integrate these tools into new and existing enterprise applications for Fortune 500 and Federal Government Clients. Over the last 6 years Sam has become an expert in Agile development and Continuous Integration while honing software craftsmanship skills in Java and other JVM-based languages including open sourcing the gradle cucumber plugin. More recently he has expanded his focus into the area of DevOps and Continuous Delivery and is a Puppet Certified Professional by puppetlabs. He can be reached at samuel.brown@excella.com or followed on twitter with the handle @SamuelBrownIV.

Ed Buhain

With 15 years of professional experience in software development and technical project management, Ed Buhain has seen and suffered through many of the pitfalls of poorly-written software. Ed graduated from the University of Virginia and has worked in the St. Louis and DC Metro areas. Ed is a Managing Consultant for Excella Consulting. He is a certified MCPD Enterprise Application Developer as well as a PMP and Certified Scrum Professional.

Mike McGarr

Mike McGarr is a software engineer and consultant for Excella Consulting. Mike has been building and deploying production systems for both federal and commercial clients for over 10 years on a variety of platforms. As the lead for Excella’s Java Center of Excellence, he identifies opportunities for applying the appropriate JVM technologies on client engagements. Mike has helped a number of clients implement Continuous Delivery solutions, helping them deliver business value consistently and frequently. Mike lives in Arlington, VA with his wife and 6 month old daughter, Maya. When he is not out on the golf course, Mike also enjoys learning as much as possible about Agile, Lean, and eXtreme Programming techniques.

Rebecca Halstead

Rebecca Halstead is a Managing Consultant with Excella Consulting, providing consulting services to commercial and Federal clients in the Washington, DC area. Rebecca leads Excella’s Business Analysis Center of Excellence, sharing proven techniques and emerging industry best practices within the company. Rebecca currently has a leadership role with the DC Chapter of the International Institute of Business Analysis (IIBA), bringing the global BA community to Excella and her clients.

Roberto Hernandez

Roberto Hernandez is currently a Managing Consultant for Excella Consulting. A Microsoft C# MVP Alumni, he has been designing and writing software solutions using Microsoft technology for the past 13 years. As a speaker, Roberto can usually be found promoting best practices up and down the US Mid-Atlantic region, as well as in local user groups in the Northern Virginia region. He is passionate about doing things right and finding the right “simple” solution for the job. Originally from the Dominican Republic, he is the proud father of two beautiful daughters that make his life special.
Stephen Ritchie

Stephen Ritchie is the author of Pro .NET Best Practices. He has been writing software professionally for over 20 years. He works as a software development consultant at Excella Consulting. His passion for following best practices has taught him to appreciate the value of experience, practical know-how, and continuous learning. Stephen is the .NET best practices steward at Excella Consulting, working with .NET project teams to facilitate and sort out the helpful practices from the unhelpful ones, the practicable from the impracticable, and the "sounds good" from the "it really is good" practices and principles.

Fadi Stephan

Fadi Stephan is an Agile coach, trainer and consultant with Excella Consulting. Fadi has more than fifteen years of professional experience as a product manager, project manager, software developer, and consultant at businesses ranging from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. Since 2006, his focus has been on agile adoption and on transitioning, coaching, and mentoring teams in agile practices. Fadi is a certified Project Management Professional (PMP), an Agile Certified Practitioner (PMI-ACP), and a Certified Scrum Professional (CSP). Fadi is also founder of the DC Software Craftsmanship user group, and organizer of the DC Scrum user group.