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Agile 2008 Guide - Thursday Evening

July 31, 2008 by Artem

 Agile 2008 is the premier conference of the Agile world. There are going to be almost 2000 participants and about 400 different sessions to attend. It means plenty of interesting conversations and a lot of activities to choose from. However, it also means that you have to make a choice between many different options. During the main part of the conference you have to choose between 40 to 50 different sessions.

Here is the first part of the guide to the conference program. This part covers Thursday August 7, 16:00 - 17:00 time slot. In the table below you can find links to the full description, author bio and the answer to the all important question "Why would you want to go there?" All the sessions with white background take 90 minutes, all the sessions with orange background take 180 minutes (and therefore continue from the previous time slot), all the sessions with the light blue or light green background take less, than 90 minutes.

If you feel that some summaries are inaccurate, please, comment - I will correct the mistakes.

You can find more information about the conference at http://AgileSoftwareDevelopment.com/Agile2008

Topic

Speakers

Why you would want to go there

TDD Clinic: C and Legacy Code

Bas Vodde
Michael Feathers

Come to this clinic if you like the ideas of test driven development, want to apply it for your C projects, butn’t quite see how to do it well.

Automated Testing Clinic: FitNesse.NET

Mike Stockdale 

Come to this clinic if you are an experienced C# developer who wants to get acquinted with the acceptance testing on .NET.

Advanced TDD Randori and Fishbowl

Dave Nicolette
Ryan Hoegg

Come to this workshop if you can code in Java, know what TDD is and have plenty of questions about how TDD could be applied for complex areas.

Continuous Integration Clinic

Owen Rogers 

Come to this clinic if you are one of the people responsible for builds on your team and who is not satisfied with publishing just passed/failed status. You will learn how to make much more information very well visible.

Refactoring for Testable C++

Keith Ray
Alex Aizikivski

Come to this tutorial if you are a developer who happens to work with a plenty of non-testable and hardly refactorable legacy C++ code.

Patterns Poster Children

Brian Foote 

Come to this tutorial if you are a developer, you like the idea of design patters, but find it not easy to apply them, because your particular situation is often not exactly like what the pattern was invented for.

Distributed Agile Game

Desi McAdam

Come to this workshop if you are going to start or already started the distributed Agile development and would like to *feel* what it is really like, what problems there are and how to overcome them. This session is supposed to be a large scale simulation with a lot of fun.

Agile Leadership: What Is It and How Do You Do It?

Pollyanna Pixton
Johanna Rothman

Come to this tutorial if you are going to become an Agile team leader or if you are an official leader already and find it challenging to lead in the agile environment.

The User Feedback Two-Step

Hugh Beyer 

Come to this tutorial if your team finds it challenging to unite the highy dynamic iterative development with the amount of user experience design UX specialists want. You will learn a particular technique called User Feedback Two-Step.

Lightning talks

Steve Freeman

A very special session, where you can present a micro talk or ask for a micro talk. See the session description for the details.

Open jam: create your own session at the conference

A chance to discuss what interests you most.

Workshop on build/test grids and selective testing tools

David Vydra

Come to this workshop if you are a software engineer and you are looking for the fasrer build/test tools. A number of options will be presented.

Effective test-driven database development

Gojko Adzic
Marisa Seal

Come to this demo if you are a developer who utilizes TDD and especially FitNesse, but doesn’t apply TDD for the database development. A DbFit tool will be presented.

Live aid: participate in a real agile project at the conference

Come there if you want to feel the real agile team working. Note that you might participate fully or drop for 10 minutes if you have a free time slot.

Measuring the Effect of TDD

Keith Braithwaite 

Come to this workshop if you like TDD, but lack arguments for persuading the other team members.

Technical lessons learned turning the agile dials to eleven!

Craig Smith
Paul King

Come to this experience report if you want to see what happens over the course of several years with a company exploring the Agile practices much.

Automated Functional Testing on the TransCanada Alberta Gas Accounting Program of Projects

Stephen Marsh
Stelios Pantazopoulos

An experience report focusing on FIT-based testing on the enterprise level project.

Leading Manual Test Efforts with Agile Methods

Adam Geras

Come to this experience report if your system includes many components that have to be tested manually. You will see how the manual test management could be improved with the Scrum-like methods.

Estimating Considered Wasteful: Introducing Micro-Releases

Joshua Kerievsky

Come to this talk if your team members find estimating and calculating velocity too boring and taking a lot of time. Or just if you wonder how work could look like if you had a release every couple of days.

The Agile Haiku Workshop

Elizabeth Keogh

A workshop from the fun department. Come if you want to have fun. You will learn how to write haiku and of course will dive into what haiku writing can teach to.

Successful Open Source, with little or no Agile

Dennis Byrne
Naresh Jain

Come to this panel if you wonder how comes most successful open source teams use little to no Agile.

La technique d'interview des "Neuf Cases" pour mieux comprendre votre client

Pascal Van Cauwenberghe
Portia Tung

Come to this tutorial if you speak French and understand the description.

Enterprise Agile - panel discussion

Nicola Dourambeis 

A typical panel on the enterprise adoption with a particularly impressive set of experts from Google, Yahoo, etc.

Touchy-feely Impediments to Agile Adoption

Amr Elssamadisy

Come to this talk if you are an organization leader or an Agile coach who wants to have a deeper understanding of why exactly Agile adoption fails or succeeds.

Whose Project is it Anyway?

Bonnie Aumann

Come to this workshop if you work on the team where it is not clear who is *actually* driving the project. You will collectively explore the patterns, problems and solutions.

Creating Shared Understanding with Cards

Angela Martin
Artem Marchenko

Come to this tutorial if often you find it difficult to exchange ideas with the stakeholders, colleague or whoever else, because it is just difficult to create a really shared understanding. Session is supposed to be especially useful for those new to Agile. Warning: this review is written by one of the copresenters and might be biased.

Energize your Strategy through Agility and Innovation

Joe Krebs 

Come to this tutorial if you are in position to sponsor the organizational change and are interested in supporting the entrepreneurship culture among your teams.

Exploring user stories through mind mapping

Kenji Hiranabe
Takeshi Kakeda

Come to this workshop if you are the one helping to gather requirements from the users and you find it difficult to explore the user’s mind. A particular technique for exploring the “user wish” before writing any user stories will be introduced. Mind maps are just a technical element of the technique.

Colossal, Scattered, and Chaotic (Planning with a Large Distributed Team)

Wes Williams
Mike Stout

Come to this experience report if you have to plan iterations and releases for a huge team distributed on several continents and even more cities. Especially if you are a product owner of such a team.

The Good and Bad of Offshore Agile Development

Mike Cottmeyer 

An experience report on a successful Agile development in the offshore environment.

Overcoming the Challenges of a Distributed Organization

Elaine Therrien
Michele Sliger

An experience report on a successful Scrum adoption in the distributed environment.

What Are They Doing? What A CIO Wants To Know From An Agile Development Team

Niel Nickolaisen 

Come to this talk if you work in an IT department of the enterprise and have issues understanding the reasons behind the CIO requests.

For Agile Leaders Only -- Exploring the "Hard Bits"

Bob Galen

Come to this workshop if you are an Agile coach or a leader who has some really tough challenges with facilitating your team. A Force Field Analysis technique will be introduced as a tool for helping the teams drive toward a challenge facing strategy.

Product Design 101 – Why design matters

Thad Scheer

A vendor talk on.. why product design matters and without a sales pitch. I guess it is labeled as vendor talk, only because they got a right to speak due to the conference sponsorship.

Better, stronger, faster continuous integration – Jump-starting the agile heartbeat

Usman Muzaffar

Come to this vendor talk if you are thinking about building a continuous integration system on top of the Electric Cloud solutions.

Agility by Industrial Logic

Joshua Kerievsky

Come to this vendor talk if you are thinking about hiring a consulting company that specializes on Agile/XP.

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