Welcome to Agile Austin

March Agile Austin Meeting

Date: 3/2/2010
Time: 6:00pm – 9:00pm
Location: Microsoft Technology Center; Stonebridge Plaza One; 9606 North Mopac, Suite 200, Austin TX, 78759
Speaker: Ashley Johnson, Co-Founder and Partner at Gemba Systems LLC

Title: Dealing with Technical Debt in Legacy Software

Description: Is your codebase getting harder and harder to modify? Do you find yourself and your team making quick fixes to meet a deadline that you know you will never get back to? Is your ability to add new features that work well with the existing system decreasing every day? Have you thought that it might be easier to just start from scratch? All of these are common symptoms of increasing technical debt in your software.

By attending this session you will learn :
1) How to write tests for legacy software every day without the need to stop delivering business value to your customer.
2) How to break dependencies and incrementally make your software more amenable to change.
3) How to create an environment where developers want to write tests early and often.
4) How to start digging yourself out of technical debt.

Bio: Ashley Johnson is a co-founder and partner at Gemba Systems LLC, a firm dedicated to helping product development groups improve their throughput and quality of life through the adoption of agile development methods. In this role, his time is split between understanding the challenges that companies face, and consulting with senior IT management to facilitate organizational optimization.

Ashley has served on the APLN Board of Directors because he views agile leadership as an individual and collaborative journey rather than a corporate end. Ashley has personally coached many clients – from medium-sized private firms to fortune 500 public corporations – through the challenges of agile, iterative and lean product development. He has taught, coached, and consulted with thousands of individuals at various organizations such as Xerox, JPMorganChase, Southwest Airlines and many others.

Cost: Free
Directions: From South of Hwy 183: Travel North on Mopac (Loop 1) exiting at Capitol of Texas Hwy. Make a U-turn before the traffic light. Go one block on the access road.  Stonebridge Plaza One is to the right, with an entrance between the two towers.  Building One is on the right as you enter.
More Info: www.AgileAustin.org or info@AgileAustin.org
Agenda:
Sign-in and Networking 6:00 – 6:30 PM
Announcements, Presentation 6:30 – 8:00 PM
Q&A and Networking 8:00 – 8:15 PM
SIG Open Space 8:15 – 9:00 PM

Proof of Attendance forms will be provided for PMI (PDU), ASQ (RU) and NPDM (PDH) re-certifications

Agile Austin QA SIG Meeting

Required: Please register to attend the free event here:  http://qasig.eventbrite.com/

About the Quality Assurance Special Interest Group Meeting

The primary goal of the meeting is to facilitate informal discussion relating to agile testing. The meeting starts with a short presentation intended to provide a focus for discussion.

The group is facilitated by Stan Taylor (stan@aphids.com), Automation Lead at Polycom, and Jill Ott (jillott_qa@yahoo.com), Senior Software Tester at Dovetail Software, with special thanks to Kevin Rutkowski (rutkowk@yahoo.com), QA project manager at Catapult Systems, for arranging the location.

The focus of this meeting is testing, but people from all agile specializations are welcome.

If you have questions, email Stan or call him on his mobile at 512-826-4759.

Date
Monday, February 22 at 12:00 noon

Location

Catapult Systems

1221 South MoPac Expressway

Three Barton Skyway, Suite 350

Austin, TX 78746

Seating is limited! Seating is limited and on a first-come, first-served basis.  We want to give everyone the opportunity to attend, so please only sign-up if you are committed to attending.  (These sessions are valuable to both newbies and experienced alike).

Food and Drink

You can bring your lunch, but you can also buy lunch nearby at the TacoDeli at 1500 Spyglass. Sodas will be provided.

Presentation
Kerry Kimbrough will present on the following topic:

Test-Infected? And Coverage-Directed!

Agile testers often focus on elaborating the business-facing examples that drive the team. But they can also jump into the trenches and help with the kind of technology-facing test cases that test-driven developers create. A comprehensive, systematic, coverage-driven approach to testing “inside the box” can produce great results at reduced costs. I’ll talk about a project in which this strategy emerged in a limited fashion, as well as a current project that is beginning to apply it more thoroughly.

Kerry Kimbrough is the owner of Starting Block Technologies, a software engineering service provider specializing in quality engineering. Kerry has helped design and test a broad range of systems, including real-time systems for data acquisition and factory control, interactive tools for microprocessor designers and business modelers, and wireless mesh networks for industrial sensors.