Tutorial

While Test-Driven Development and Refactoring are extremely useful software development practices, they are insufficient for evolving great designs. What's missing are the thinking and coding practices that real-world evolutionary designers use to evolve top-notch designs effectively. Such practices include critical learning that results from early end-to-end system development, significant time savings obtained by determining what doesn't need to be automated, eye-opening design simplicity achieved by automating failing acceptance tests before writing code, important design progress that results, paradoxically, from undoing previous design work and more.

This tutorial takes the mystery out of Evolutionary Design by naming and explaining what its thinking and coding practices are and how to implement them. You'll be challenged to solve Evolutionary Design exercises and you'll experience how a game of blackjack evolves from a first failing UI test to a functioning version of the game. Along the way you'll learn how not to evolve blackjack, you'll study micro-snapshots of the evolution-in-progress and you'll understand what the evolution of a game teaches us about Evolutionary Design on real-world projects.

Attendee background

Prerequisites: Participants should be able to read Java™ code to get the most out of the session. No background is required in Agile Development, Refactoring, or Test-Driven Design.

Format

Interactive lecture and programming demonstration

Presenters

Joshua Kerievsky has been programming professionally since 1987, and is the founder of Industrial Logic (http://industriallogic.com), a company specializing in Extreme Programming (XP). Since 1999, Joshua has been coaching and programming on small, large and distributed XP projects and teaching XP to people throughout the world. He is the author of numerous XP and patterns-based articles, simulations and games, including the forthcoming book, Refactoring to Patterns (http://industriallogic.com/xp/refactoring/).

Russ Rufer has been building software systems for 15 years. His wide-ranging experience includes desktop applications, embedded firmware, telecommunications, networking, satellite simulation, and productivity tools. Russ leads weekly meetings of the Silicon Valley Patterns Group, which he founded in 1998 (http://pentad.com/SiliconValleyPatterns.html) and regularly organizes pre-publication review teams to provide feedback on new literature from the software patterns and agile development communities. Russ has worked with Industrial Logic for several years. He divides his time between pure development, coaching and leading workshops on Extreme Programming, Testing, Refactoring and Patterns.