Practical Approaches to Agile Development

Simple Ways to Add a Little Agile Without Going to Extremes
Original Broadcast: 20 October 2004
View This Webcast On-Demand

Agile Development principles have been gaining popularity in many development discussion circles.  Its methodologies hold great promise, but its practices may seem unattainable or too risky for traditional development environments.

The questions often asked are:
*  Where do I start?
*  How can I incorporate Agile disciplines with minimal risk to my environment?
*  What changes will make the biggest improvement in the shortest amount of time?
*  How do I sell management on the idea?

This Webcast will discuss practical ways that project teams can improve code quality, respond to change faster, and even deliver more valuable functionality by adopting some Agile practices.

Specifically, the session will focus on two areas that can result in big gains:  improving build and test processes. Peter Schuh, a well-known speaker and author on the subjects of Extreme Programming and Agile Development, will share strategies that have generated significant results in many R&D organizations.  Joe Senner, an expert with two decades of expertise in build and release management practices, will discuss specific approaches that provide the biggest and quickest bang for your development buck.

About the Speakers:

Peter Schuh has held virtually every position on a software development project, including project manager, programmer, DBA, business analyst, technical writer, and account manager. Most recently he has managed IT projects in the leasing, healthcare and e-commerce fields. Mr. Schuh has written and spoken about Extreme Programming, the adoption of agile processes, and agile development's impacts upon database administration. His current focus, and a major theme of his upcoming book, is the integration of agile processes into traditionally non-agile environments. He can be reached at agile@peterschuh.com.

Joe Senner is the CTO and co-founder of BuildForge. He has worked in the configuration management and build process disciplines for over 18 years for large organizations such as Tandem, Compaq, IBM, the US EPA, Vignette, and others.  Joe's focus has been creating stable, repeatable systems that optimize the build, test, and deployment phases of the development cycle.  Joe earned his Computer Science degree from Oklahoma State University.