A ''Lingua Franca'' to Ensure You Get the Right System

Presenter: George Dinwiddie, Software Development Coach

Description:

The business tells the IT department what it wants. The developers build it. The testers expect it to do something different. And neither of these turn out to be what the business had in mind. Has this ever happened to you?

IT departments have always struggled with getting clear and unambiguous requirements. Automated acceptance tests that check the system with examples make a big impact on coordinating the work of developers and testers. Unfortunately, they’re often incomprehensible code to the business people asking for the system. What if they test the wrong thing? What if the examples are wrong?

Advances in testing frameworks make it possible to express these examples in the language of the business. The person commissioning the development can look at these examples and say, "Yes, that's what I mean." The tester can automate the examples as acceptance tests without changing the way that they're expressed. The developer can check the code as it's being written and know when it meets the stated requirements.

Additionally, the automated examples form the basis for regression tests in the future. Automated scripts alone can't ensure bug-free applications, but they can provide a big step up in correctness and reliability - freeing testers to spend time looking for more elusive problems.

In this seminar, you'll learn how you can develop a specification language to bridge the gap between the business and IT. You'll see patterns of these languages that are easily automatable as tests that can be run throughout the development process - demonstrating the progress being made. You'll discover open-source tools that can help you get the right system more reliably, and ensure that it continues to stay that way as development proceeds.

Who Should Attend?

• IT Directors, Project Managers, Tech Leads, PMPs, ScrumMasters, Business Analysts, Developers, Testers
• Everyone should bring their business partners with them. 

Presenter Bio:

George Dinwiddie fully intended to remain a developer of software, hardware, firmware, and combinations of those, but it was not to be. The harder problems were almost invariably organizational ones. And these problems did not seem to respond to engineering solutions.

Today, George helps organizations develop software more effectively. Effectiveness may be achieved by improved engineering practices, enhanced design and testing skills, reduced waste effort, clarified goals, better communication and teamwork, or a number of other ways. George helps teams address their current impediments to further excellence. He works with developers, testers, scrummasters, product owners and managers to address issues at both personal and systemic levels.

Kicked off by an early start in television repair, George's career has included electronic hardware development, embedded firmware in assembly, C, and C++, Information Technology in Java, C#, and Ruby, as well as dalliances with other languages. He has shared his expertise at such venues as the Agile Conference, XP Day North America, APLN Maryland Chapter, Agile Maryland, and the Simple Design and Testing Conference. As a consultant, he has helped companies, large and small, including Wells Fargo, Autodesk, and Nationwide Insurance. He has a BA in English, an MS in Computer Science, and has worked in software development for more than a quarter century.