Chief Scientist Martin Fowler, Loud-mouth on Object Design

Abstract:

In the last decade or so we've seen a number of new ideas added to the mix to help us effectively design our software. Patterns help us capture the solutions and rationale for using them. Refactoring allows us to alter the design of a system after the code is written. Agile methods, in particular Extreme Programming, give us a highly iterative and evolutionary approach which is particularly well suited to changing requirements and environments. Martin Fowler has been a leading voice in these techniques and will give a suite of short talks featuring various aspects about his recent thinking about how these and other developments affect our software development.

Track: Tutorials

Abstract: Getting software released to users is often a painful, risky, and time-consuming process. This tutorial sets out the principles and technical practices that enable rapid, incremental delivery of high quality, valuable new functionality to users. Through automation of the build, deployment, and testing process, and improved collaboration between developers, testers and operations, delivery teams can get changes released in a matter of hours–sometimes even minutes–no matter what the size of a project or the complexity of its code base.

In this tutorial we take the unique approach of moving from release back through testing to development practices, analyzing at each stage how to improve collaboration and increase feedback so as to make the delivery process as fast and efficient as possible. There will be interactive exercises where the audience practices using these techniques for themselves. At the heart of the tutorial is a pattern called the deployment pipeline, which involves the creation of a living system that models your organization's value stream for delivering software. We spend the first half of the tutorial introducing this pattern, and discussing how to incrementally automate the build, test and deployment process, culminating in continuous deployment.

In the second half of the tutorial, we introduce agile infrastructure, including the use of Puppet to automate the management of testing and production environments. We'll 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.