Nathaniel T. Schutta is a senior software engineer focussed on making usable applications. A proponent of polyglot programming, Nate has written two books on Ajax and speaks regularly at various worldwide conferences, No Fluff Just Stuff symposia, universities, and Java user groups. In addition to his day job, Nate is an adjunct professor at the University of Minnesota where he teaches students to embrace dynamic languages. In an effort to rid the world of bad presentations, Nate coauthored the book Presentation Patterns with Neal Ford and Matthew McCullough.
Despite what some developers think, we spend a lot more of our time reading code, code that was often written by someone that isn’t around anymore. How do we deal with this common scenario without resorting to burning our predecessor in effigy? Better, how can we write code in such a way that our successors will heap effusive praise upon us at the mere mention of our name? During this talk, we’ll read actual code discussing ways it could be improved. As we work through real examples, we’ll explore the importance of patterns, principles like SOLID and SLAP and essential practices like unit testing and continuous integration.
Almost every example of an agile project involves a single team and while many successful projects are delivered that way, most enterprise software requires the interaction of several teams. But how do we scale agile beyond a single team? What practices translate and which ones don’t? In this talk we’ll discuss some of the issues you’ll encounter as you move agile beyond a single group and how you can keep multiple stakeholders happy. While it isn’t as simple as having a “scrum of scrums” it isn’t as hard as replacing every line of COBOL.
