Agile Software Development

I and Angela Martin are proposing a session for the Agile 2008 conference. It is the most important conference of the agile software development world.

During our Getting Shared Understanding with Cards we are going to present several extremely effective and very pragmatic ways for raising the development team productivity with the help of just paper cards.

We need your support

This year is different in that everybody on the web can (and hopefully will) vote for the sessions and add his or her comments.

Have a look at our session proposal and if you like it, vote for it (voting will require creating an account on the conference web-site).

P.S.
There are many other sessions that you might find worth reviewing or voting for. For example, there are a couple of sessions (to visit this link you'll have to register on the site) proposed by our semi-permanent author Chris Spagnuolo. There are also a lot of session proposals that contain excellent papers attached. For instance, Jeff Sutherland's proposal contains an impressive study of effectiveness of the distributed Scrum implementations.

XP2007 conference held in Como this June was an exciting discussion forum. There were many people from all corners of the industry, a lot of things to talk over, some useful connections to make or maintain. One of the noticeable differences from the previous year XP2006 was the average level of problems in the conversations. Last year in Finland it looked to me like the majority of discussions were on the agile methods themselves, what they were like in reality and how they were different from the traditional methods.

Tutorial on Discovering Patterns of Agile Practice Adoption by Amr Elssamadisy and Ahmed Elshamy

Tutorial on the User-Centered design for Agile Projects by Gabrielle Benefield and her colleagues from Yahoo!

Photos from the "Daily CI" workshop

Photos from the "How to Guide Agile Adoption Efforts" workshop

Oliver Lafontan from Exoftware on "concept to cash", strategy and principles

Predicting Software Defect Density: 
A Case Study on Automated Static Code Analysis

 Artem Marchenko¹ and Pekka Abrahamsson² 

 ¹ Nokia, Hatanpäänkatu 1, FIN-33100 Tampere, Finland 
² VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, 
P.O.Box 1100, FIN-90571 Oulu, Finland

Presented on XP2007.

Abstract. The number of defects is an important indicator of software quality. Agile software development methods put an explicit requirement on automation and permanently low defect rates. Code analysis tools are seen as a prominent way to facilitate the defect prediction. There are only few studies addressing the feasibility of predicting a defect rate with the help of static code analysis tools in the area of embedded software. This study addresses the usefulness of two selected tools in the Symbian C++ environment. Five projects and 137 KLOC of the source code have been processed and compared to the actual defect rate. As a result a strong positive correlation with one of the tools was found. It confirms the usefulness of a static code analysis tool as a way for estimating the amount of defects left in the product.

A small demo of using the speech recognition technology that actually works. On the following video I am adding Jim Miller who works for Google to my phonebook and immediately voice dial him in a very noisy conference dinner environment.

The best thing is in that the technology is not really new, the similar quality voice recognition system is built into all the Nokia smartphones for couple of years already. So if you've bought a Nokia smartphone lately, chances are you can do the same trick with your own phone. In 40+ languages.

Thank you for playing in the movie, Jim!