ALT.NET represents a community of thought leaders with a call to action of improving the status quo of how software is developed in the Microsoft developer ecosystem. ALT.NET encourages very strict adherence to agile practices such as BDD (Behavior Driven Development) and tools that map to those practices fairly closely. …
In a quick survey, 17 of 20 programmers said they didn’t know how to slice feature requests to the sub-day level. In contrast, top programmers easily take them to 15-30 minute programming episodes. What does it take for people to make the transition? In this workshop, analysts and programmers will …
Talk by Alan Atlas at the Rochester Institute of Technology. The talk analyzes scrum using the seven principles of Lean software development. At the end, it proposed that the root of why scrum works is contained in these things: * One-piece flow * Self-organizing teams * Tight feedback loops * …
Recent work by James Coplien (the course instructor) with Scrum inventor Jeff Sutherland came to a radical conclusion: that though Scrum sounds very simple on the surface, it is in fact painfully intricate underneath (see http://jeffsutherland.com/scrum/2008/02/scrum-and-organizational-patterns.html). There is a well-understood incremental (agile!) path to making Scrum work. Understanding this path, …
“Testing is design”; “Unit tests are documentation”; “Tests are specifications”. These are sought-after rewards of developer testing practices, but simply writing tests or even writing tests before writing production code doesn’t make these wishes come true. When we take up unit testing, we initially tend to do things a certain …
Myriad Genetics is a rapidly growing clinical diagnostic test laboratory. They provide a high complexity DNA sequencing test that is run using a high degree of automation. Results of the testing must be perfect. In September of 2006, laboratory reporting was averaging 28 days. While world class, we wished to …