Aren’t code, backlog-items, tests, designs & documents all just different forms of system knowledge at different levels of detail? Why can’t the same tools help refactor, browse, search, and provide build/test automation for non-code forms of knowledge without requiring a separate tool/repository for each format?

Intent

Provide the participants with a hands-on-experience of real world refactoring by taking an open source project and refactoring it.

Summary

Refactoring is a very well established practice not just in the Agile Community, but outside as well.

This session is an attempt to help the development community understand refactoring a little better. It will provide a hands-on opportunity for developers to explore these concepts in action. This session will try to amplify the participant’s learning process by pairing them with other practitioners and peers.

Bad build practices take a hidden toll on teams. It is not uncommon for a new developer to take days or even weeks to establish a functioning workspace. Good build engineers can make all the difference. By treating the build framework with the same respect as other source code they can help prevent these problems. In this clinic we will show how to refactor your build approach to end up with sustainable practices that get new people up and running quickly and set the stage for long term productivity. While the workshops are in Ant, the concepts are portable.

How can mock objects help you design your system better? Want to know how mocking saved hours of work? We focus on establishing best practices based on examples with mock objects. We cover design of classes, using mock objects to understand and test interaction between objects of the system. By the end of the session it should become clear how mocking,when applied correctly helps with system design, improves testability by reducing cost of change. An explicit part of this session is dedicated to the Mocking top offenders. We talk with examples about bad usage of Mocks, and its consequences.

You’ve started your new project and “surprise” (not really) you’re dealing with legacy code. This unique workshop will focus on a few specific techniques that help make up the majority of what to do in improving legacy code design. Our forefathers gave us “Extract Method” and “Rename”. Cleaning up code is fun and challenging at times!

This session covers a successful transition to a new business model in a limited time span. Typically, Iowa Student Loan (ISL) sells bonds to fund the creation of private student loans. As financial markets deteriorated in 2008, the potential of successful bond sales diminished to the point of nonexistence. Heretofore, our systems assumed ISL as the only lender. Collaborative bank relationships changed this assumption to one of multiple lenders. A redesign of the loan program/loan type structure of our software followed to make the funding model very configurable.

The instructors wish, when they were first learning test-driving, refactoring, and OO, that they had had a side-by-side comparison between code Heaven and code Hell. Such an object lesson would have made the value and benefits of agile programming practices so much more plain, so much sooner. Alas for us, but hurray for you! In this workshop you will be able to compare and work with two very different implementations of the same problem domain: one of them fabulously ugly, and the other of them — well — a lot better. This is a close-repeat of a successful session we gave at Agile 08.

Continuous Integration means different things to different people. This workshop will demonstrate a set of best practices that allow a software delivery team to derive the most value out of their software development dollars, by adhering to the Agile Manifesto principle that states “Working software is the primary measure of progress.” That is, we will see how software can be delivered that allows rapid change, monitors that the changes do not adversely affect quality, and delivers potentially shippable code from easy to implement open source tools available to the community at large.