Western Canada Java Software Symposium - September 26 - 28, 2008 - No Fluff Just Stuff

Venkat Subramaniam

Western Canada Java Software Symposium

Calgary · September 26 - 28, 2008

You are viewing details from a past event
Venkat Subramaniam

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

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.

Practices of an Agile Developer

You have worked on software projects with varying degree of success. What were the reasons for the success of your last project? What were the reasons for those that failed? A number of issues contribute to project success - some non-technical in nature. In this presentation the speakers will share with you practices in a number of areas including coding, developer attitude, debugging, and feedback. The discussions are based on the 2007 Jolt productivity award winning book with the same title as the talk.

BDD in Java and Groovy

In this presentation we will take a look at what BDD is and look at tools
to create them in Java and Groovy.

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.

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.

Keynote: Here's your sign, Fallacies, and Responsibilities

Keynote topic on Fallacies in software development and developer responsibilities.