SoftwareGR

Carl Erickson, Atomic Object

When: January 24th, 2006, 6:00 pm – 8:00 pm
Where: Atomic Object, 941 Wealthy Street SE, Grand Rapids, MI 49506

Introduction to Agile

The first half of the presentation will be a general introduction to agile software development practices in general and Extreme Programming (XP) in particular. XP has consistently proven effective in yielding software success: projects that are on time, on budget, and free of defects as well as developers, managers, and customers who actually enjoy the process and are satisfied with the results.

Story-driven Development

The second half of the presentation will concentrate on the difficulties and benefits of organizing a project around user stories. The tools Atomic Object uses to support SDD will be demonstrated. This talk draws on experience with projects from a few person-weeks to 50 person-months of effort.

Test-driven (TDD) development is revolutionizing the way software is designed, built and tested. TDD requires the automation of unit tests and applies to the daily work of software development – crafting classes, methods and blocks of source code. Applying the same approach at the project level leads to Story-driven development (SDD). SDD drives a requirements conversation between developers and customers at a scale and point in time when requirements gathering is most effective. Developers work on stories according to the customer’s priorities; developers and customers create a shared mental model of the project, one story at a time, as each story is being worked on. The concrete outcome of this conversation is a collection of acceptance tests associated with each story.

Carl Erickson

Carl Erickson is the president of Atomic Object LLC. Atomic Object provides software development services including contract programming, development training, and software process improvement consulting. Atomic has been using Extreme Programming practices for more than five years for clients in the areas of color measurement, aerospace, automated guided vehicles, health care, e-commerce, and automotive testing.

Carl received his PhD in computer engineering in 1991 from Michigan State University and taught computer science courses at Grand Valley State University, Michigan, until 2000. He maintains a part-time position as an industrial lecturer at Uppsala University in Uppsala, Sweden, where he most recently introduced a course in software craftsmanship