Venkat Subramaniam
Salt Lake Software Symposium
Salt Lake City · July 18 - 19, 2008
Founder @ Agile Developer, Inc.
Dr. Venkat Subramaniam is an award-winning author, founder of Agile Developer, Inc., creator of agilelearner.com, and an instructional professor at the University of Houston.
He has trained and mentored thousands of software developers in the US, Canada, Europe, and Asia, and is a regularly-invited speaker at several international conferences. Venkat helps his clients effectively apply and succeed with sustainable agile practices on their software projects.
Venkat is a (co)author of multiple technical books, including the 2007 Jolt Productivity award winning book Practices of an Agile Developer. You can find a list of his books at agiledeveloper.com. You can reach him by email at venkats@agiledeveloper.com or on twitter at @venkat_s.
Presentations
Know your Java?
Java has been around for well over a decade now. It started out with the goal of being simple.
Over the years, its picked up quite a bit of features and along comes complexity. In this presentation
we will take a look at some tricky features of Java, those that can trip you over, and also look at some
ways to improve your Java code.
DSL in Groovy
DSL or Domain Specific Languages focus on a domain or problem at hand. They're expressive, but their
restricted scope keeps them simple and small from the user point of view. However, designing them is not easy.
In this presentation we will explore the features of Groovy and show how they can be used to create DSLs.
Tools to facilitate Agile Development
The first item in the Agile Manifesto reads that we must prefer “people and interaction over process and tools.”
Given a choice between average people with superior tools and superior people with average tools, you are likely
to achieve greater success with the latter. However, it is important to be continuous and not be episodic?so you
want to get continuous feedback about the state, health, and quality of your code and application. Tools can
help us a great deal to realize this and make us productive.
Acceptance Testing Application Behavior
How do you ensure your applications meet the expectations of your key customers? In this session we will explore using the FIT tool and Behavior Driven Design tools to do exactly this.
Towards an Evolutionary Design
A good design is critical for success with agile development.
That does not mean a big up-front design. The design has to
be evolutionary. However, the design you evolve must be
extensible and maintainable. After all, you can't be agile
if your design sucks.
Caring about your Code Quality
We all have seen our share of bad code. We certainly have come across some good code as well.
What are the characteristics of good code? How can we identify those? What practices can promote
us to write and maintain more of those good quality code. This presentation will focus on this
topic that has a major impact on our ability to be agile and succeed.
Mocking to facilitate unit testing
Unit Testing is easy if the object you're testing has no dependencies. In reality, however, objects have dependencies,
often making it difficult, if not impossible, to automate tests. Mock objects can help deal with these dependencies
and allow you to automate your tests.