Sessions at ÜberConf 2012 about Agile on Friday 22nd June

Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This workshop sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. This workshop focuses on the agile infrastructure required to implement a deployment pipeline and continuous delivery.

In this workshop, I introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We discuss automating data management, including migrations. Development practices that enable incremental development and delivery will be covered at length, including a discussion of why branching is inimical to continuous delivery, and how practices such as branch by abstraction and componentization provide superior alternatives that enable large and distributed teams to deliver incrementally.

Test-Driven Development has gained a strong foothold among many development teams, but as popular as it has often become, many organizations struggle to keep the testing effort sustainable over a long period of time. As test suites become large, they tend to become significantly difficult and time consuming to maintain, which is required to keep the TDD effort alive. Similarly, disciplined refactoring skills have become, for many, an essential part of a development team's toolkit, especially when confronted with large amounts of legacy code. However, the effort it can take to refactor a system can be difficult to weigh against the business value of new development; spending time on one would seem to limit the time spent on the other.

The purpose of this presentation is to create a context for TDD and refactoring focusing on those specific elements that allow them to be conducted in a sustainable way. Much of this seminar is based on the work being described at Sustainable Test-Driven Development.