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Pub Night at Thinking Man Tavern in Decatur

ATL ALT.NET Pub Night at Thinking Man Tavern

The New New Product Development Game

Quick Recap

Detailed Recap

• Agile project tracking tools like Version One, Mingle : which is best for local teams, which for distributed teams?
• The upcoming Agile Project Leadership Network Leadership Summit : good for managers and team leads to learn from peers.
• Test-Driven-Development and building quality in from the start rather than inspecting for bugs later : key principle of lean thinking and XP.
• The Wastes of Software Development (Lean Thinking) : eliminate wasteful activities that don't deliver value or help assure quality.
• NHibernate and the slogan, "ALT.NET - Porting Java Libraries One by One!" : there are many tools to help us, how can we come up to speed on the best and most appropriate?
• Outsourcing and quality : how do American companies compete with offshoring or even local people who say they will charge less, but do no unit testing or automated acceptance testing?
• Agile estimation and project planning, fixed-price contracts and time & materials : Mike Cohn's user stories and agile estimation and planning books, breaking down projects into fixed delivery dates and smaller functional packages.
• How much FUN agile and scrum are for managers and developers: you get to deliver value constantly, day after day, and you get to sleep because testing is done up front and on a continuous basis. You can test without a database by using mocks and test data stubs.
• XP and Pair-programming : It makes programmers work harder and deviver value more quickly because one developer writes the unit and acceptance tests while the other one writes the implementation code sitting at one work space. This keeps them focused and helps them share domain knowledge continuously.

Goals and Tolls Exercise

1. Write down three goals you want to achieve related to software development and, for each goal, a corresponding barrier, or toll, that you face.
2. After writing those, write the name of a book, web site, or other resource you find useful that you think will help others here based on the conversation we had tonight.

Participant 1

• Goal: Quicker delivery
• Toll: Too many "one offs"

• Goal: Better quality
• Toll: Resistance to time given to building in quality

• Goal: Better user experience
• Toll: Lack of user interaction

Participant 2

Participant 3

• Goal: I want to deliver great software
• Toll: Collecting data that proves it is great

• Goal: I want to bring sanity to software
• Toll: Finding the companies to help

• Goal: I want to spread the word about agile
• Toll: Enough venues for talking

Participant 4

Participant 5

• Goal: Deliver value to customer and ROI to company faster w/ Agile
• Toll: Overcoming entrenched ideas and traditional ways of thinking to convince management to "give it a try"

• Goal: Implement Automated Unit & Regression Tests to speed development
• Toll: Learning the best way in .NET to do this (NUnit, MbUnit, TypeMock, Moq, RhinoMocks, etc)

• Goal: Expand knowledge of TDD and other XP practices
• Toll: How to do this while attending to the realities of everday tasks still on the backlog

Participant 6

• Goal: Embrace Red -> Green -> Refactor
• Toll: Discipline to writing failing test first

• Goal: Use mocking frameworks to help unit testing
• Toll: Use my mock on new project

• Goal: Community skills enhancement
• Toll: Making time to continue attending more events like this!