Abstract/Description
In this talk we’ll look at why the technical practices of test-driven development, refactoring, continuous design, clean code and automated testing can help you and your organization be great. This talk is not just for the technical people. Business people need to understand that they cannot have a great product and productive team without technical excellence.
Technical excellence is more than two week sprints, a burn-down chart and a daily stand-up meeting. The basic rules of Agile or Scrum are not an end in themselves, but rather a staring point based upon principles and practices that allow and encourage teams to adopt, adapt, and refine their craft. Unfortunately, it too often seems that agile is just another micro-management approach.
Extreme Programming, the spur under the saddle that started this wild ride, is based on sound technical practices. Why do so few employ the engineering practices that are designed to support the tight iterative cycles of Agile and Scrum? The founders of Scrum expected you to pull in the engineering practices. They figured that once the continuous improvement cycle revealed the problems of poor product quality, hard to change code, wasted time debugging, long stabilization efforts and the ever growing burden of manual test, you'd hunt for solutions. Come to this session and see why you can't be great without technical excellence.