A lot of IT people are talking about “Agile” these days.  But do they really know what it means to be agile?  And more importantly, do you know what it could mean for your job, your career, your company?  As software developers, agile practices are having a great impact on how we build software and promise to greatly improve the quality of our work. 

This talk begins with the agile mindset, demonstrates pragmatic agile software development practices, and explores the impact that agile methods can have on any software project.  If you’ve never heard of “agile” before, you’ll learn from the ground up.  If you’ve always wondered what it really means, you’ll come away with a crystalized understanding.  And if you’re familiar with the concepts, you’ll see techniques in action, from customer conversation to product delivery, and understand with renewed clarity where our industry is headed with process improvement.

Here’s the outline for his presentation:

• Intro to agile methods
  • Brief history of methodologies
  • Intro to agile values
• Demo of end-to-end software delivery using TFS/Scrum
• Scrum overview
• Requirements and prioritization
• UX design
• BDD
• Gated check-in with continuous integration
• Agile QA
• Delivery of value

Most of his talk will be presented in the context of a demo.

Todd Girvin co-founded Improving Enterprises in August, 2004 and now heads the company’s Microsoft Technology Practice.    He is a long-time entrepreneur and consultant, architecting and building software systems, coaching and training scores of companies in agile methods and developer best practices.