Topic: Technical Excellence, You Need It

Presented Monday October 26, 2015 at Agile DC Conference.

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Abstract

Whether you are a manager, scrum master or engineer, you need to know why and how the technical practices of test-driven development, refactoring, continuous design, clean code and automated testing can help you and your organization be great.

Technical excellence is more than two week sprints, a burn-down chart and a daily stand-up meeting. The basic rules of Agile or Scrum are not an end in themselves, but a staring point based upon principles and practices that allow and encourage teams to adopt, adapt, and refine their craft. Unfortunately, it may seem to the technical people that agile is just another micro-management approach.

Extreme Programming with its provocative name, got people’s attention in 1999. It is based on sound technical practices. Why do so few agile teams employ engineering practices that support the tight iterative cycles of Agile and Scrum? The creators of Scrum expected the continuous improvement cycle to pull engineering practices into teams once the cycle revealed the problems of poor product quality, hard to change code, wasted time debugging, long stabilization efforts and the ever growing burden of manual test. This talk will cut through the mystery and show why we should all strive for Technical Excellence.

In the days following Agile DC James will teach TDD and Agile for Embedded in Germantown, MD with his partners at the Barr Group. For more information, please contact us.

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