Joshua Kerievsky, Industrial XP Founder

Your sales and marketing folks say that if you can quickly program that new feature by Friday, they will be able to demo it to a possible new and large client, which could lead to some big sale. What do you do? Lower the amount of quality design work you normally do and make the deadline? Or tell sales and marketing that it isn't possible, since you must keep quality code high? In most cases, we program the feature to hit the deadline.

What then? Most companies then go on to keep shoving more and more features into a system, rarely taking the time to pay down the technical debt. In this talk, I will describe how Industrial Logic adjusts its own quality knob in response to marketing and sales situations. You'll learn when we cut corners and what we do to get back to high quality code.

Test-Driven Development is perhaps the most significant technical practice in the Agile toolkit.  While intensive automated developer testing has become established as a valuable tool to increase quality and productivity it is less widely accepted as a design tool. In this hands-on tutorial we will explore the effect of using a very tight test-code-refractor loop to drive design. We will explore the problem domain, discover artefacts and consider unit tests as design documents. This will be a hands-on tutorial, working in pairs, using any mainstream language with an automated testing tool. Resulting code will be collected and analysed against several design metrics.

This tutorial is developed from one of the most popular sessions at the 2009 UK Software Craftsmanship conference.

NB: For this tutorial you need to bring your own laptop, installed with your favourite development environment with automated unit-testing tool.